Drug legalization lobby lacks business plan

By Wallace G. Craig
North Shore News
Dec 04, 2014

Public outrage over recent gang murders by feuding traffickers in BC Bud and other illicit drugs has forced the federal government to target gangsters in upcoming changes to our criminal law. But according to our local drug-legalization crowd, led by marijuana’s false prophets, those feds just don’t understand the way we choose to live in la-la-land. This clutch of deceitful addicts and their myopic supporters propose legalization of cannabis and other illicit drugs, and the introduction of a bureaucratic system of drug regulation and distribution. Their dream-world fantasy is based on a misty notion that illicit drugs could be produced and distributed like alcohol; that by the stroke of a pen the multi-billion dollar gangland drug manufacturing/importing/exporting business would be transformed into a legal, manageable and taxable government monopoly. Yet to be explained by marijuana’s false prophets: How a pussycat government monopoly hopes to persuade gangsters to trade in their guns for bongs, become choir boys, and refrain from continuing to sell drugs in an inevitable black market.

Fat chance, I say. Marijuana’s false prophets send a steady stream of misinformation about a supposed similarity between the brief period when alcohol was prohibited and our hundred years of  criminalization of illicit drugs, always ending with the same catchphrase: Let’s take control of marijuana – tax it, standardize and regulate it. On Feb. 27, marijuana’s false prophets were on the street outside the Vancouver police station in front of television cameras with signs proclaiming “GANG VIOLENCE is caused by DRUG PROHIBITION … End Drug Prohibition to END GANG VIOLENCE.”

It is a false message. Gang violence and murder will not end with fairy-tale legalization. International crime syndicates, coupled with source countries around the world profiting in the production of narcotics, will continue to target Canada and the United States. Legalization would cause them to increase their activity to accommodate an increase in the numbers of addicts in Canada. On Mar.1, criminologist Neil Boyd, perched in the surreal world of academia atop Burnaby Mountain, was interviewed by the Province. Boyd apparently said that the new anti-drug law fails to address the reality that prohibiting cannabis doesn’t work, and is out of step with the threat the substance poses. “It makes sense to focus on the issue of violence, but we’ve had so many reports at the same time that the criminal law is not an appropriate response to cannabis use and production,” said Boyd.

Boyd is a thoughtful and knowledgeable person who understands all aspects of the criminal justice system. It is not clear from his remarks whether Boyd supports legalizing only possession of marijuana or whether he proposes decriminalization of possession of all drugs. A thornier question is whether Boyd advocates that Canada decriminalize trafficking in all illicit drugs. The question remains: Of all the “many reports” Boyd refers to, is one of them a detailed and comprehensive business plan for the federal and provincial governments to take over the production and distribution of all illicit drugs sourced in Canada or exported into Canada by source countries around the world? I am convinced that there is no such comprehensive business plan in existence laying out, in detail, a viable transition from the chaotic sprawl of criminal production and trafficking to a staid agency of government. In 2005, England’s Anthony Daniels, physician, prison doctor and essayist, writing under the pseudonym of Theodore Dalrymple, published Our Culture, What’s Left of It; a collection of essays on a wide range of subjects including the legalization of drugs. Two brief quotations bear directly on any debate in British Columbia:“In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem … many … even (some) policemen have said the ‘the war on drugs is lost.” But to demand a yes or no answer to the question ‘Is the war against drugs being won?’ is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question ‘Have your stopped beating your wife yet?’ Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.” “Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last thirty years without looking for more such slopes to slide down.” Dalrymple’s observations are apropos to today’s campaign of drug legalizers, including marijuana’s false prophets, to destroy the moral and ethical integrity of our precious individual liberty by including in it an absolute and unfettered right to dally with marijuana, chemical drugs and narcotics. Wake up Canada! Dedicated narcissistic marijuana users and psychosocial harddrug abusers are parasitical citizens, engaged solely in their own interests and pleasures. Their creed: I care for nothing but myself.