Pubdate: Wed, 04 Mar 2009
Source: North Shore News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 North Shore News
Contact:  http://www.nsnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311
Author: Wallace Gilby Craig

DRUG LEGALIZATION LOBBY LACKS BUSINESS PLAN

Public outrage over recent gang murders by feuding traffickers in B.C.
Bud and other illicit drugs has forced the federal government to
target gangsters in upcoming changes to our criminal law.

But according to our local drug-legalization crowd, led by marijuana's
false prophets, those feds just don't understand the way we choose to
live in la-la-land. This clutch of deceitful addicts and their myopic
supporters propose legalization of cannabis and other illicit drugs,
and the introduction of a bureaucratic system of drug regulation and
distribution.

Their dream-world fantasy is based on a misty notion that illicit
drugs could be produced and distributed like alcohol; that by the
stroke of a pen the multi-billion dollar gangland drug
manufacturing/importing/exporting business would be transformed into a
legal, manageable and taxable government monopoly. Yet to be explained
by marijuana's false prophets: How a pussycat government monopoly
hopes to persuade gangsters to trade in their guns for bongs, become
choir boys, and refrain from continuing to sell drugs in an inevitable
black market.

Fat chance, I say.

Marijuana's false prophets send a steady stream of misinformation
about a supposed similarity between the brief period when alcohol was
prohibited and our hundred years of criminalization of illicit drugs,
always ending with the same catchphrase: Let's take control of
marijuana -- tax it, standardize and regulate it.

On Feb. 27, marijuana's false prophets were on the street outside the
Vancouver police station in front of television cameras with signs
proclaiming Gang Violence Is Caused by Drug Prohibition . . . End Drug
Prohibition to End Gang Violence.

It is a false message. Gang violence and murder will not end with
fairy-tale legalization. International crime syndicates, coupled with
source countries around the world profiting in the production of
narcotics, will continue to target Canada and the United States.
Legalization would cause them to increase their activity to
accommodate an increase in the numbers of addicts in Canada.

On March 1, criminologist Neil Boyd, perched in the surreal world of
academia atop Burnaby Mountain, was interviewed by the Province. Boyd
apparently said that the new anti-drug law fails to address the
reality that prohibiting cannabis doesn't work, and is out of step
with the threat the substance poses.

"It makes sense to focus on the issue of violence, but we've had so
many reports at the same time that the criminal law is not an
appropriate response to cannabis use and production," said Boyd.

Boyd is a thoughtful and knowledgeable person who understands all
aspects of the criminal justice system. It is not clear from his
remarks whether Boyd supports legalizing only possession of marijuana
or whether he proposes decriminalization of possession of all drugs. A
thornier question is whether Boyd advocates that Canada decriminalize
trafficking in all illicit drugs.

The question remains: Of all the "many reports" Boyd refers to, is one
of them a detailed and comprehensive business plan for the federal and
provincial governments to take over the production and distribution of
all illicit drugs sourced in Canada or exported into Canada by source
countries around the world?

I am convinced that there is no such comprehensive business plan in
existence laying out, in detail, a viable transition from the chaotic
sprawl of criminal production and trafficking to a staid agency of
government.

In 2005, England's Anthony Daniels, physician, prison doctor and
essayist, writing under the pseudonym of Theodore Dalrymple, published
Our Culture, What's Left of It, a collection of essays on a wide range
of subjects including the legalization of drugs.

Two brief quotations bear directly on any debate in British Columbia:

"In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the
problem . . . many . . . even (some) policemen have said 'the war on
drugs is lost.' But to demand a yes or no answer to the question 'Is
the war against drugs being won?' is like demanding a yes or no answer
to the question 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' Never can an
unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more
baleful effect upon proper thought.

"Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would
legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to
ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at
least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain
a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt
to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already
slid down enough slippery slopes in the last 30 years without looking
for more such slopes to slide down."

Dalrymple's observations are apropos to today's campaign of drug
legalizers, including marijuana's false prophets, to destroy the moral
and ethical integrity of our precious individual liberty by including
in it an absolute and unfettered right to dally with marijuana,
chemical drugs and narcotics.

Wake up Canada! Dedicated narcissistic marijuana users and
psychosocial hard drug abusers are parasitical citizens, engaged
solely in their own interests and pleasures.

Their creed: I care for nothing but myself.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin