Pubdate: Fri, 20 Apr 2012
Source: North Shore News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2012 North Shore News
Contact:  http://www.nsnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311

REEFER MADNESS

MARIJUANA activists celebrate today as 4-20. The origin stories
abound, but today has become moment for activists to defy the law and
spark a joint in public.

A week that ends with a protest began with our Conservative prime
minister publicly admitting the war on drugs "is not working."

Thanks for catching up, Stephen Harper. How does anyone call
themselves a conservative and still get behind a massively expensive
government program that intrudes on people's lives and totally fails
to achieve its stated objective, year after year, decade after decade?
It's good that Harper has grasped the obvious, but we have to wonder
why he presses ahead with a crime bill he knows won't work. Scrap the
census, scrap the long gun registry, but throw away taxpayers' money
on a drug policy you publicly admit has failed? It's time for new policy.

It's time for a grown-up discussion about substance use. Lumping
marijuana in with crystal meth as a "drug" while ignoring the effects
of alcohol or tobacco is totally wrong-headed. We need to drop the
1930s attitude that "reefer madness" will destroy society and remember
the real lesson of the 1930s: prohibition doesn't work, and it hands
huge amounts of money to organized crime. Ask John McKay, the man who
put Marc Emery in jail. Ask the Economist magazine. Ask the Fraser
Institute. Ask the folks at Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition.

We call on our MPs, John Weston and Andrew Saxton, to help figure out
a new substance policy that doesn't subsidize gangs and doesn't wreck
peoples' lives.