Pubdate: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 Source: Hamilton Spectator (CN ON) Copyright: 2006 The Hamilton Spectator Contact: http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/181 Author: Jeff Mahoney REALLY WANT TO GET 'EM? LEGALIZE IT Why not let the government profit from drug trafficking, instead of thugs? We make such a big deal about what's legal and what's illegal in our culture. You can go into a casino, lose a bunch of money, go to a store and buy a gun and then into a liquor outlet and buy a 40-ouncer, drink the 40-ouncer and then go into another store with the gun, ask for cigarettes, then use the gun to leverage access to the cash register for money to buy marijuana because you lost your marijuana money in the casino. Now here's the question. How many laws did you break? Two -- robbing the store and buying the marijuana. Unless you're underage. Then it's more. If you hung around outside smoking cigarettes after scoring the grass, soon a law officer would nail you. Not for robbery, drug trafficking or weapons possession. For smoking less than nine metres from a public building. You could add that to your broken-law total. But it would be cancelled out if you were entitled to use pot for medicinal reasons, such as the treatment of glaucoma. (These days everyone's asking their physicians: "Doc, are you sure I don't have glaucoma?") If you bought crack cocaine or crystal meth, you couldn't plead a medicinal-purposes exemption. As far as I know, crack isn't good for anything except ruining your life and bringing people together in those charming crack houses with the bailiff's-notice decor and not a lot of stencilling on the walls, and guests you have to walk over, with signs around their necks that say, "Do not resuscitate." The criminality of crack cocaine, crystal meth, heroin and other narcotics is all part of the war on drugs. The war on drugs is kind of like that other war, in Iraq, insofar as there's rarely good news coming out of it. There'll be a big arrest, raids, busts, takedowns. But the trade goes on. I haven't read any reports lately that it's harder to acquire illegal drugs now than when the war on drugs started, which was, I don't know, right after the caterpillar smoked his hookah in Alice in Wonderland. It seems that the drug traffickers in the movies and popular songs of today are richer, meaner and better armed with a bigger customer base than they were 30 years ago. I was turning the dial on the car radio the other day and heard a caller say that we should just be done with it and decriminalize drugs. The way the Puritans decriminalized rich French sauces back in the 1700s. All drugs, the caller said. Not just marijuana. I'm not sure what story the caller was responding to -- something about shots being fired in a Toronto shopping area after some drug deal went down badly. (Funny how when you're talking about drugs you can use hip phrases like "went down." I would never say my kids' afternoon play dates "went down.") The caller mentioned Prohibition, what a folly it now seems in hindsight. Imagine. If alcohol were still illegal, then most of our professional sports franchises would not exist because they're owned by beer companies. And the players would have to take a cut in pay from $48 million over four years to do funny dances in an end zone to $40 a night working as bouncers at a bar. No, wait. There would be no bars. The main thing that Prohibition accomplished was to make a lot of criminal types very rich from bootlegging. It seems to me that's what the criminalization of drugs is doing. It is giving some very nasty people a chance to become glorified as outlaws and to become very, very rich. And what may even be worse is it gives Al Pacino a chance to portray those people in movies like Scarface and really, really overact. It's just not worth it. If nasty people are going to become rich and powerful, they should have to do so by going through all the rigorous legal channels that the rest of us abide by and get elected to public office. I'm not sure anymore what criminalizing drugs really accomplishes. It doesn't seem to deter anyone. I will never try crack cocaine or crystal meth, not because it's illegal, but because, well, because I'm high on life. OK, also because it has zero appeal for me. I wouldn't do well on the crack streets or in the crack houses. I don't know the etiquette. What? Do you defer to the one with the most body piercings? I think many of the people who end up getting horribly addicted to hard drugs like heroin, crack and crystal meth would be struggling, even without the addiction, with issues of compulsion, abuse and low self-esteem. And I think they would be best served not by prison time but by counselling and therapy. If the government controlled drug consumption and taxed it, as the government does with cigarettes, booze and gambling, they could put some of that tax money, albeit hypocritically, back into prevention and therapy, the way they do with cigarettes, booze and gambling. It has sure worked with cigarettes. Smoking is way down. I'm not making light of drugs. They kill. So do cigarettes, booze, gambling -- all legal and controlled. So why let criminals sell them, profit from them? They're certainly not going to put warnings or helpline phone numbers on the dime bags they sell. The police do good, noble work to fight the drug pushers. But half the time the justice system just throws the pushers back out on the street again, where they can maybe get Fox TV to pay them to write books and do TV shows about how they would have sold the drugs, if indeed they had done the crime -- wink, wink. It makes you wonder -- who respects the law anymore? Certainly not drug pushers and users. Maybe it's time to take drug traffic out of the hands of the worst scum in our society and give it to the somewhat better scum in government. It's a thought. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek