Have no doubt: The War on Drugs, if its defenders capitulate, will segue into a War on Boring, Un-newsworthy, Conscientious Taxpayers. The usual victims.
They’ll be paying big for the fresh mess that would be created by sea-to-sea legalization of the mind-fuzzying weed – just what the economically beaten-down United States needs as it teeters on the brink of the so-called fiscal cliff, and vulnerable Canada, too. And a pottage it would be, of slick Next Big Thing businesses and swollen new bureaucracies.
The drug lords won’t vanish. As North Cowichan Coun. Al Siebring bluntly told B.C.’s pro-legalizing municipal leaders last month, people making between $700,000 and $1 million from the vicious trade aren’t going to be deterred by a mere new law: “If you think for one minute these people are going to legitimize and start filling out tax forms, you’re out of your mind.”
Throw in the obvious problems of easily grown household pot (avoiding any tax and regulation) competing with the shelf brands, and police patrolling the age boundaries – the younger kids will be more eager and more numerous than ever to light up just like the big kids and adults.
Medical marijuana is the stalking-horse, saddled up to win this race. With all the painkillers known to science, some persons insist that only smoking a joint gives them relief. Amazing. Here’s a clue to the Colorado vote: 60 Minutes on CBS reported there are 204 medical marijuana outlets in Denver, three times as many as Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.
How long before Canada Post issues a stamp honouring the Great Emancipator, the glib and quotable cannabis businessman Marc Emery, whom the complicit media catchily dub “the prince of pot”?
A self-styled martyr to the cause, in a Mississippi penitentiary for his illegal deeds and sale of seeds, Emery self- satirizingly (he’s good at that) even specifically evoked the language of martyrdom: The Washington and Colorado votes “will make my remaining 609 days in this U.S. federal prison a gentler cross to bear.” I vomit.
The Vancouver Sun grotesquely brought out the huge black boxcar type used for declarations of war for the two states’ embrace of legalizing pot.
Ian Mulgrew and this paper’s Peter Ladner, both former colleagues whom I usually admire as opinion-mongers and personally like (Peter should be Vancouver mayor, not Gearloose Gregor Robertson), belong to the generation shaped by the 1960s and 1970s. This is not necessarily a compliment. Head-wise, this was the apogee of flakes, moral morons and Timothy Leary – but I repeat myself.
Mulgrew barely contained himself. “History has been made,” he exulted.
Oh, so? In the same Sun issue I found no mention that Oregon turned down its marijuana initiative, Massachusetts only approved legalizing medicinal marijuana, Arkansas didn’t and Montana approved restrictions on its current medicinal marijuana law. The term for misleading-by-omission is managed news. Roll out the imperishable dictum of C.P. Scott of the (then) Manchester Guardian: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
Credit Time’s health newsletter. It carefully allowed: “Cannabis intoxication does impair memory and cognition, and marijuana addiction, as with any drug, can lead to serious impairments in judgment and result in harm.”
No news for real authorities like UBC neurologist Dr. Patrick McGeer, or Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose personal experiments with hallucinogenic drugs made a stunning must-read in last Tuesday’s National Post.
The squares will pay for the fallout from this phony liberation. The underclass who don’t wear the social-economic armour of the toking elites will pay in worse ways. Already are. •
