To the editor,
Suppose that a war was started then fought all-out for 45 years; surely by now it would be obvious if it were being won, or lost. That is the length of time since Ronald Reagan began the War on Drugs.
If the measure were the increasing volume of our dead and wounded, the huge number of broken homes, or the rising prison population fuelled by this war, it could reasonably be argued that it is lost.
Someone is arrested for cannabis possession approximately every nine minutes in Canada. While this fracas rages, opioid overdose deaths are set to outdo traffic fatalities for 2016: 1550-plus overdose deaths across Canada between January 1 and November 10, 2016; nine dead in Vancouver on one night – December 9, 2016.
It should be obvious that not only is the battle lost, the enemy is in the gates. What went wrong? The whole basis for drug interdiction was made on race. In early Canada, opium use was equated with Asian immigrants. Since these people were not highly regarded in the early 1900’s, they were the target for Canada’s first opium law. It is uncertain why cannabis was added to that list; no arrests were made for nearly ten years after the law went into effect.
One has to wonder if the whole exercise has been a disaster, and if prohibition turned a virtually non-existent problem into a nightmare. For certain the law stopped most opium smoking, but gave birth to whole new types of opioids, thousands of times more addictive and deadly.
Meanwhile, cannabis is still simply cannabis and since becoming illegal has not killed one soul by overdose, nor had it killed anyone before that date as noted in the British India Hemp Drug Commission report of 1894. Yet it is legally in the same basket as heroin and cocaine.
Gerald Le Dain, author of the Le Dain Commission Report, 1973, warned of the danger of placing cannabis on the same level as hard drugs. He said that making false statements about the toxicity of cannabis would lead to cynicism about truly dangerous compounds; as we are seeing now. His recommendations were all rejected, but hindsight shows his analysis correct.
Education works when honesty is taught. False information mixed with State sponsored hypocrisy does a great disservice. Government promotes the sale of alcohol, essentially an addictive poison responsible for as much as three percent of all deaths, while arresting citizens for possession of a non-addictive, non-poisonous plant. Other than the state-imposed penalties of jail, fines and criminal records, what damage has cannabis done over all its years of use? Hypocrisy kills.
The war is lost. What began as a perceived racial problem has become very real across the board. The battle was fought by circling the wagons and shooting inwards, using all heavy weapons available, the outcome being what is seen today: death on the streets of almost every community.
This is now a humanity problem, and will only be solved by humanitarian means. This could start with being able to openly say, “Merry Christmas to all.”
Gordon Fraser
Grenville sur la Rouge, QC.
