STRAIGHWRY COLUMN Dec.

Drug War too Important for Generals

John Walters, the Field Marshal of the army of policemen conducting the United States’ War Upon Drugs, came to Vancouver recently to tell us that drugs are not part of a healthy diet. Thank you, Mr. Walters, but that knowledge was pretty widespread in these parts before you came here.

We started trying to prohibit narcotic drugs in 1911 and we brought in alcohol prohibition during the first world war. There has been plenty of time for a lot of to observe the tragedy of addiction at first hand and most of us have. .

I remember Al, as I shall call him.

A good fairy attended Al’s birth and she gave him everything a man could want. She gave him intelligence, charm, good looks and wit, also, perhaps most important of all, she give him a profound sense of decency. He was a first class man.

Unfortunately a bad fairy also attended when Al was born and she gave him a thirst. He was an alcoholic before he was out of his teens.

I knew him when he came back from the big war against Hitler and watched as he drank away one job after another, his home, his wife and family and his health.

Once I undertook to mention, gently, that he was ruining his life. He pointed to the rye bottle on the table. “In all this world, “ he said, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single thing, that I want more than I want what is in that bottle.”

Recent research indicates why he said that. Alcohol reduces what psychologists sometimes call noise in the highly active brains of alcoholics. It makes it possible for them to dismiss the clutter of too many vivid impressions which crowd in upon them and allows them to function the way other people do, for a little while. Unfortunately it is a curative of which the dosage has to be continuously increased and eventually the side effects of the medicine destroy the patient.

It took Al twenty years to get to the bottom of his last bottle. When he died on Skid Road all his worldly goods fitted into a cigar box. There were only half a dozen people, who remembered what a splendid man he was, to attend his funeral.

So do not talk to us, Mr Webster, about addiction being undesirable. We know. We have seen it. We don’t need people like you lecturing us about the horror of it all, any more than we needed Carrie Nation running around with an axe smashing mirrors in bar rooms during the campaign which ended in our disastrous Grand Experiment with alcohol prohibition.

Your government’s solution, like the Canadian government’s, is the same as Carrie Nation’s. Arrest everybody in the trade. Fill the courts. Stuff the jails to bursting. Hire more judges. Build more prisons. Announce every seizure of illicit drugs as another victory in the glorious war against drugs and hope that that the poor bloody taxpayer doesn’t notice that the trade continues as if nothing had happened. Nothing has happened with your little local triumphs. The volume of the trade is so great and the profits so high that losing a ten or twenty million dollar shipment is merely annoying to the criminals who run the business.

You urge Canadians to look south of the border and see what problems America has with narcotics.

Why don’t you instead ask yourself what you have accomplished by arresting 730,000 Americans a year for marijuana which is, in terms of narcotics, what foam is to a glass of beer? Come back to us when you have an answer.

After almost a century of trying to prohibit opium and its derivatives in Vancouver the stuff today is cheaper, relatively, than when we started. It is widely reported that you can have cocaine, heroin or angel dust brought to your door in Vancouver’s West End in about the same length of time it takes to get a pizza delivered.

Attempting the prohibition of the alcohol that killed poor Al did nothing but create criminal empires on this continent. The attempt to prohibit the other drugs, which we have not yet abandoned, has created far bigger and more powerful crime syndicates which are corrupting police, courts and society generally.

G’issimo, if this was 1914 you would be Robert Haig announcing victory after the 40,000 of his soldiers died for six yards of mud on the Somme. If it were Sebastapol in the Crimean War you would be Raglan shouting “Charge for the guns.”

You seem to have learned nothing from history. We have learned nothing from you.