Border Blues

It looks as though I will never again go to the United States, unless I become a famous celebrity. The United States and Canada are denying admitted drug users the ability to cross the border. If you have ever admitted publicly on the internet or the radio that you have used an illegal drug, you can not cross the border:

While such policies have been in place for years, they have been little known -- except for people who have found out the hard way. One of those people is Dr. Andrew Feldmar, a Vancouver, BC, psychiatrist, who had crossed the border on numerous occasions, only to be turned back last summer by a US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent who googled his name and turned up an academic article in which he discussed taking LSD on two occasions nearly forty years ago.

While I am not all that anxious to cross the border and am unlikely to want to do so in the near future, this is a very bad situation for drug policy reformers. This will silence a lot of people. Didn't I just say that what the drug policy reform movement needs to see is a lot more people talking about this issue, especially at election time?

I didn't want to go to America anyway.