Pubdate: Tue, 20 Nov 2012
Source: Business In Vancouver (CN BC)
Copyright: 2012 BIV Publications Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.biv.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2458
Author: Trevor Lautens

BUSINESS COMMON SENSE UP IN SMOKE WITH THE NEW TOKING ELITES

Have no doubt: The War on Drugs, if its defenders capitulate, will
segue into a War on Boring, Un-newsworthy, Conscientious Taxpayers.
The usual victims.

They'll be paying big for the fresh mess that would be created by
sea-to-sea legalization of the mind-fuzzying weed - just what the
economically beaten-down United States needs as it teeters on the
brink of the so-called fiscal cliff, and vulnerable Canada, too. And a
pottage it would be, of slick Next Big Thing businesses and swollen
new bureaucracies.

The drug lords won't vanish. As North Cowichan Coun. Al Siebring
bluntly told B.C.'s pro-legalizing municipal leaders last month,
people making between $700,000 and $1 million from the vicious trade
aren't going to be deterred by a mere new law: "If you think for one
minute these people are going to legitimize and start filling out tax
forms, you're out of your mind."

Throw in the obvious problems of easily grown household pot (avoiding
any tax and regulation) competing with the shelf brands, and police
patrolling the age boundaries - the younger kids will be more eager
and more numerous than ever to light up just like the big kids and
adults.

Medical marijuana is the stalking-horse, saddled up to win this race.
With all the painkillers known to science, some persons insist that
only smoking a joint gives them relief. Amazing. Here's a clue to the
Colorado vote: 60 Minutes on CBS reported there are 204 medical
marijuana outlets in Denver, three times as many as Starbucks and
McDonald's combined.

How long before Canada Post issues a stamp honouring the Great
Emancipator, the glib and quotable cannabis businessman Marc Emery,
whom the complicit media catchily dub "the prince of pot"?

A self-styled martyr to the cause, in a Mississippi penitentiary for
his illegal deeds and sale of seeds, Emery self-satirizingly (he's
good at that) even specifically evoked the language of martyrdom: The
Washington and Colorado votes "will make my remaining 609 days in this
U.S. federal prison a gentler cross to bear." I vomit.

The Vancouver Sun grotesquely brought out the huge black boxcar type
used for declarations of war for the two states' embrace of legalizing
pot.

Ian Mulgrew and this paper's Peter Ladner, both former colleagues whom
I usually admire as opinion-mongers and personally like (Peter should
be Vancouver mayor, not Gearloose Gregor Robertson), belong to the
generation shaped by the 1960s and 1970s. This is not necessarily a
compliment. Head-wise, this was the apogee of flakes, moral morons and
Timothy Leary - but I repeat myself.

Mulgrew barely contained himself. "History has been made," he
exulted.

Oh, so? In the same Sun issue I found no mention that Oregon turned down 
its marijuana initiative, Massachusetts only approved legalizing 
medicinal marijuana, Arkansas didn't and Montana approved restrictions 
on its current medicinal marijuana law. The term for 
misleading-by-omission is managed news. Roll out the imperishable dictum 
of C.P. Scott of the (then) Manchester Guardian: "Comment is free, but 
facts are sacred."

Credit Time's health newsletter. It carefully allowed: "Cannabis
intoxication does impair memory and cognition, and marijuana
addiction, as with any drug, can lead to serious impairments in
judgment and result in harm."

No news for real authorities like UBC neurologist Dr. Patrick McGeer,
or Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose personal experiments with hallucinogenic
drugs made a stunning must-read in last Tuesday's National Post.

The squares will pay for the fallout from this phony liberation. The
underclass who don't wear the social-economic armour of the toking
elites will pay in worse ways. Already are. *
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MAP posted-by: Matt