Pubdate: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 Source: North Shore News (CN BC) Copyright: 1999 by the North Shore News Contact: http://www.nsnews.com/ Author: Illana Mercer ANOTHER DRUG WAR VICTIM IN his introduction to his classic Les Miserables, Victor Hugo said this: "... so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." Ignorance and misery are in no short supply in the tale of the latter day Jean Valjean, Allen Richardson. I mean the ignorance, by turns, of an American justice system and its war on drugs, and the capitulating Canadian authorities. And, of course, the misery caused to a member of the North Shore community and his gravely ill wife. Almost 30 years ago, when only a boy of 19, Richardson, an ex-American, became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Drugs, rock 'n' roll and political posturing were rites of passage and certainly not unusual for scores of students. He was then arrested for selling $20 worth of LSD to an undercover cop, who, to my mind, was guilty of entrapment. The middle-class youngster was sentenced to four years in jail. Not quite the purgatory to which Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean was doomed, Attica was still an extremely brutal place for a fresh-faced youth with no prior convictions. Christopher Perlstein, for that was his birth name, spent six weeks in Attica. After being removed temporarily from the place he described as "a medieval house of horrors," Perlstein was told he would be returning to Attica, where 43 people had just been killed in the course of an uprising. Perlstein bolted. The broad and short of it is he found a home in Canada, assumed a new identity, and has worked for almost 20 years for a UBC-affiliated research facility where he was arrested the other day by the RCMP. It seems Mr. Richardson's very own Javert (the dogged policeman who makes it his life's mission to capture Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread), in the guise of the New York State Department of Corrections, has finally caught up with him. Mr. Richardson is expected to furnish the optics of victory for the American "justice and the correctional services departments," by surrendering and serving the remainder of his sentence in the U.S. Immigration Canada ordered him to leave the country, stating Canada "can't be perceived as a safe haven for criminals." This order is now pending Richardson's refugee claim. It is offensive, I know, to mention Christie Lamont and David Spencer in the same breath as a law-abiding Canadian. But one would hope that a foreign minister that saw fit to intervene on behalf of those bona fide Canadian criminals, kidnappers of a Brazilian businessman, would, if extradition became a threat, deploy the same diplomacy in the service of Richardson. It is a sorry country that doesn't fight to keep Richardson within her borders, yet welcomes onerous refugees like Fariba Mahmoodi, to name one. Mahmoodi, who can sure work the system, not only swayed refugee boards, but had the Human Rights Tribunal in raptures. This ignoble kangaroo court failed to throw out the woman's allegations of sexual harassment against UBC professor Don Dutton, in spite of her lengthy rap sheet: Mahmoodi allegedly committed welfare fraud, defrauded the university, forged academic and reference documents, and attempted to ensnare three other male faculty members. Due process, real rules of evidence, and witness credibility issues were tossed to the wind, and Mahmoodi was awarded restorative payment for having endured a sexualized environment of Dr. Dutton's making. She may be welcome in Canada, but how does a person, who pens a threatening letter so full of fractured phrases and tortured syntax, linger in any institute of higher learning? If it accepts the likes of Mahmoodi, then UBC and she are perfect bedmates. Dr. Dutton, for his part, was not entirely averse to consorting with her, and thus stands accused of taking delight in a seemingly malevolent and vapid woman. With that off my chest, let me conclude my defence of Mr. Richardson. It should come as no surprise that Richardson has led an upright life, for he is not and was never a criminal. It is the state that is criminal in its attempt to regulate individual use of certain toxic substances to the arbitrary exclusion of others like cigarettes, or alcohol, for instance. The right to use a noxious substance if one so chooses, or to transact peacefully with other consenting adults who wish to procure these substances, should be a civil liberty devoid of the threat of violent search and seizure activity. Practically unaltered since the 1960s, this wicked war on drugs, whose warriors are now trolling for Richardson, saw the arrest of 682,885 Americans for marijuana in 1998 -- 88% of them for possession alone. The law may be an ass in Richardson's case, but its interpretation needn't continue to be so asinine. This case should invoke the values of compassion, as well as the tenet of rehabilitation. The former was woefully lacking over the airwaves. I hope the sample of mean spirits, which inundated talk shows, was unrepresentative of the population at large. The same callers who howled for Richardson's blood, heaped praise on a Washington state teen, nay viper, who ratted on her parents for growing some weed in their basement. These parents were prosperous professionals whose downfall was to raise a child -- no doubt progressively -- with no concept of loyalty and a sense of proportion. As for rehabilitation, I recoil from having to speak of it in the case of Mr. Richardson, who isn't the least a criminal, but has been cast as one; just as I recoil at the sight of Mr. Richardson and his wife made to grovel before the state and its machinery. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart