QUESTIONS FOR THOSE WHO HOSTED DRUG FORUM

Editor, The News:

Re: The forum on drugs, hosted by the Odd Squad and Langley-Abbotsford MP
Randy White, that took place in Abbotsford this past Tuesday night: Here
are a few questions the audience should have asked the cops at the forum:

1. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms implies that citizens have the right
to pursue their own form of happiness so long as they hurt no one else.
Thus, it seems Canadians have the right to ingest any drug, however
harmful. Why do you feel the government has the right to punish individuals
for what they choose to ingest into their own bodies and jail those who
supply them?

2. Would you feel hard done by if you were sentenced to a few years in jail
for your part in enforcing drug prohibition, a strategy many have
characterized as nothing less than a Hitler-like government pogrom
designed, first to ostracize, and then to annihilate an identifiable
minority of innocent people?

3. Is it your position that the police are duty bound to enforce any law,
no matter how unjust?

Would you, for example, help to enforce a law requiring the imprisonment of
all Jews?

Perhaps I should remind you that Adolph Eichmann protested he was simply
following orders when he assisted in implementing Hitler's Final Solution,
but the Israelis hanged him anyway.

Did Eichmann get a raw deal in your estimation?

4. If drugs are banned because they are harmful to users, why, then, are
tobacco and alcohol not banned?

Doesn't this seem unfair to those who prefer illegal drugs?

If we ban one harmful drug, shouldn't we ban all harmful drugs?

5. Is it not true that banning a drug cuts the users off from access to
drugs of known potency and purity and thereby harms them far more than
would otherwise be the case?

Weren't thousands of Americans poisoned or blinded during prohibition?
Didn't the problems vanish when alcohol was legalized again?

6. The 1973 Le Dain Commission concluded: "There appears to be little
permanent physiological damage from chronic use of pure opiate narcotics."
Why, then, ban heroin?

7. If prohibition is so great, why did America give up on prohibition?

8. Is it not true that if drugs and prostitution were legalized, the power
of the Hells Angels would be severely curtailed?

After all, prohibition created Al Capone, not the other way around.

9. Is it not true that if marijuana were legalized, marijuana grow
operations would be no more dangerous, do no more damage and steal no more
hydro than the average tomato grow operation?

10. I've been told that police officers support laws like our drug laws
because they increase crime and hence police budgets and police power.

In fact, I'm told they would be in seventh heaven if tobacco and/or alcohol
were banned.

Is that true?

For me, there is no more reason to punish drug users and dealers today than
there was in the past to hang witches, lynch blacks, incarcerate Japanese
Canadians or gas Jews.

Alan Randell

Victoria