PROHIBITION VERSUS FREE WILL

Local advocates for the decriminalization of marijuana are hoping to have
their voices heard, when a federal Senate committee looking into
non-medicinal drug use in Canada makes it way to the West Coast.

Ted Smith is the coordinator of the Vancouver Island Cannabis Buyers Club,
which provides marijuana to people for medicinal purposes. Smith will be
speaking to the Senate committee when it holds hearings in Vancouver today
(Nov. 7).

Smith says he plans to talk about how the so-called "war on drugs" has been
a failure and about the necessity of making it easier for people to have
access to medical marijuana.

Smith says he will also argue that Canada should withdraw from the 1961
United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics. The convention, says Smith,
resulted in a series of international agreements which essentially saw a
number of countries, Canada included, agree to join the U.S. in its "war on
drugs".

We hope the committee, and then the federal government, listens to the
voices calling for a sane drug policy, one which recognizes the very fact
of prohibition creates an environment conducive to accidental drug overdoses.

When you read stories in the press that tell of heroin overdoses resulting
from a particularly strong batch of the drug hitting the street, almost no
one in official circles recognizes those overdoses for what they are:
prohibition overdoses caused by people taking something of which they have
no way to judge its potency.

It is time to treat adults as adults and stop making moralistic policies
which treat everyone as if they were 12-years-old. Prohibition itself is
the cause of many a drug overdose, we just don't say so, although a
provincial government-commissioned inquiry on overdoses in the early 1990s
said as much.

Local police say the well-publicized ecstasy overdose in Victoria last week
had a lot to do with the person taking the drug not knowing exactly what
they ingested. The police made the statement to point out the dangers of
taking street drugs, rather than to argue against prohibition, yet the
argument against prohibition is contained within their very words.

One result of prohibition policies is that they force those who want to
take these illicit substances to spin the roulette wheel of chance. That
said, the key to any sane policy is being able to recognize that adults can
make adult decisions on what they do to their own bodies.

It's a principle we recognize already in this country, an example of which
is the access to legal abortions. We, as a society, have generally given
ourselves over to the notion that a woman's body is hers to do with as she
pleases, thus it is wrong for the state to impose carrying a child to term
on someone who doesn't wish to do so. The same principle is at stake when
it comes to illicit drug laws.

Many proponents of the medical marijuana argument would admit, if being
perfectly honest, they are looking for an excuse to legalize a weed which
most people who smoke it use for purely recreational purposes. It is not a
healthy lifestyle choice to take heroin, speed, cocaine or a long list of
other drugs, or even down a six-pack of beer before heading out to party on
a weekend. But neither is it necessarily a healthy lifestyle choice for
some to eat fatty bacon or creamy butter.

We can mother everybody in society to death, or we can see that moralistic
laws that are hypocritical - this drug legal and the government can bottle
it, sell it and get its cut through liquor stores versus that drug bad -
create rules that are rightly sneered at by those who take any time to
actually consider the implications.