Tough on Drug Pushers, Soft on Users

The polarization of political issues into the two neat categories of right and left has always struck me as problematic. There are only two sides to every issue - right and wrong. The Tories are trying to cast themselves as the white-hat cowboys by promoting a tough-on-drugs campaign. The Conservatives want to crack down on pushers while going soft on the users. What this means is more money spent fighting grow-ops and also an increase in spending to save the addicts from themselves. Meanwhile the Tories are casting the NDP as black-hats while they gush on about the Insite safe injection site. But nobody is promoting the most important harm-reduction idea of all: repealing prohibition.

Why does the NDP spend so much time focusing on the safe injection site while Harper is promising to spend $22 million on busting grow-ops? I have yet to hear an NDP member publicly support legalizing marijuana, a measure that would eliminate grow-ops and do something about the underground black market economy that is crippling our society. All the drug-related violence that the police claim to care so much about is related directly to the drug war, not the use of drugs. Yet none of these cowards has the courage to say it.

The political left is not doing a good job of opposing the war on drugs. They focus on harm-reduction while completely ignoring the war on marijuana users. Meanwhile, there is $10 million promised for "prevention initiatives", meaning worthless reefer madness propaganda about how bad pot is for your health. Tony Collavano, the president of the Canadian Police Association recently stated that marijuana is more harmful than tobacco. I guess he didn't know that marijuana does not cause lung cancer and is far less harmful than tobacco or alcohol. Pot has never caused a single death in the thousands of years it has been used for both recreation and medicinal use. I am fearful for this world when the head of the police state Canadian police is promoting such blatant lies. We may have to ship them off to Jamaica for some education.

The NDP says they don't want no "US war on drugs" but they don't define what that means or why that is a bad idea. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Black people are jailed at disproportionately high rates compared to whites. Since their war on drugs began when Nancy Reagan started her "Just Say No" campaign, drugs have gotten more potent and cheaper in price over the years. Since that time the American government has devastated Columbia with narco-aerial spraying raids that has had a tremendous and negative impact on the environment and the economy. Herbicides are poison and they ruin food and drug crops alike. American money has funded the Columbian army in war on their own people. The American government is not a role model for Canada to follow.

The war on drugs does not reduce the number of drug users. The black market encourages drug use in a million ways that you can only understand if you have spent some time connected to the drug culture in some way. Selling drugs is profitable and recruiting new customers makes money. Only a small percentage of users and growers get caught.

All you have to do to end the black market economy is legalize . Growing and selling the wrong plants shouldn't be a crime.