Kathy Bauder's piece in Friday'sWhig ("It's time we stopped allowing pushers and drugs to destroy families") was one of the most enlightening and moving newspaper columns I have read in the past decade. Of course, the use of drugs is a familiar issue, because drug pushers and drug addicts occupy a kind of hidden ghetto in almost every Canadian community. The well-publicized Vancouver East Side centre of addiction exist, in varying degrees, in almost every community in Canada. But Kathy's column offers something different -- almost Shakespearian in its capacity to generate, at the same time, both an intellectual and an emotional response.

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