Pubdate: Tue, 14 Dec 2004
Source: Langley Advance (CN BC)
Copyright: 2004 Lower Mainland Publishing Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.langleyadvance.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1248
Author: Chris Buors

PROJECT APTLY NAMED

Dear Editor,

Project Resiliency is an apt name, considering the moral connotations
of the crusading language [Groups target drug issue, Nov. 12, Langley
Advance News].

Langley School Trustee Alison McVeigh's assertion that "we need to
start earlier" imparts the fact that moral indoctrinations of the past
have failed. The reason is that even children understand hypocrisy and
self-deception, not to mention state deception inherent in
"community-based drug education."

The problem Tr. McVeigh seeks to solve is that some people use certain
drugs of which the government disapproves. That ceremonial and ritual
drug use is as old as humanity is never imparted in the education of
school children.

Drugs have been medicalized through a social construct shaped by
patents, prescription rights, and prohibition. Addiction is a
medicalized moral.

Yielding to temptation is not a medical disease. Politically speaking,
using any drug your government forbids is no more of a disease than
reading a banned book.

The plants of planet Earth are bestowed by the Creator in Genesis not
to the state and certainly not to medicine, but to you, the
individual. As soon as children are made aware of that, whatever
education Tr. McVeigh wants to give them will rub them the wrong way
and make them distrustful of authority.

The Nazis would be proud. After all, the Gestapo only wanted to
instill the "right" morals in the Hitler Youth, too.

I challenge Tr. McVeigh to have a pharmacologist and an anthropologist
discuss drugs and cultures that believe in addiction with the children.

Chris Buors,

Winnipeg, Manitoba
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MAP posted-by: Derek