War on drugs doomed without legalization
If my stepson could somehow speak, the first name he’d mention, in what could become a lengthy listing of those responsible for his death, would likely be his own.
Whatever his other foibles, being thought a victim would never have crossed his mind. He was a proud young man and no one forced him to take that pill, that night: the one he never awoke from.
Any subsequent listing would become almost endless. Certainly, I would be high upon it, having eventually become exhausted trying to solve someone’s drug dependency with all that entails. ( Those blithely suggesting tough love as the obvious answer have never stood at such crossroads. I hope they never will.)
But there would be other culprits if determined on laying blame: from a healthcare system that refused him at his darkest hour, to whoever sold that particular pill, all the way to those who assembled the fentanyl shipment, likely on another side of the world.
It soon becomes pointless. Anyway, maybe it was simply bad luck: there’s comfort, believing that. Perhaps a different pill in a non- deadly dosage and he’d have moved past the opioid addiction — he seemed on that track — and become the remarkable person once destined to be.
This is personal stuff: death usually is. But sometimes we need to be honest and, when it involves addiction, we rarely are. Probably because many have tasted some sort of illicit fruit and find it easier to moralize about a different curse, affecting different folk, so not to look too closely in the mirror.
About a century ago cocaine and heroin were legal and alcohol was banned across much of North America. (Did you think Coca- Cola was originally so- named only because it sounded catchy?)
So, for example, on New Year’s Day in 1927, 41 people died in one New York hospital alone from drinking homemade hooch. They couldn’t get the real stuff so they compromised.
Meanwhile, crime flourished. When supplying a product many want but the government bans the markup is steep and the desire to protect such an illicit windfall is great. Enter Al Capone and others.
Big, illegal profits, people dying in droves from poisonings, whilst criminals gun each other down in the streets: no, not 1929 Chicago, but 2020 Calgary. Hey, what do you think is behind the recent shootings in the city?
Yes, nowadays booze is legal, as are cigarettes that take thousands of Canadians each year. Government is itself addicted, with taxes levied on such deadly products while, in Alberta, the province launches an online gaming site to profit from yet another vice.
Not long ago marijuana was illegal. Now we promote pot tours to sample the wares, the same way Porto advertises boutique vineyards in the Douro Valley. Yet are our streets any more filled with doped-up citizens than before legalization? Doesn’t seem so.
Meanwhile, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who at least discusses the horrendous toll illegal opioids are taking, unlike his predecessor who rarely opened her lips to the slaughter, falls back upon that old, tired answer: tougher enforcement.
Give us a break. This War on Drugs has been going on since Richard Nixon declared it back in 1971 and the results are blindingly futile as imaginable.
The money to be made is so huge some increased risk is an easy trade- off for suppliers and dealers. More enforcement might catch a few smaller fish but allows the bigger fry to enjoy higher sales and fatter profits. So what to do? Legalize it all: heroin, cocaine, fentanyl and everything in between. Make sure those state- regulated, for- sale dosages get folk buzzed but don’t kill. ( Yes, just like those tasty measures of scotch.) Then work on why we’re so drawn to such things, and spend the money currently wasted on policing and jailing to wage a real, effective anti- drug campaign, as we’re doing with smoking.
It won’t happen, of course. Perhaps another half- century of guaranteed failure might eventually do the trick. Meanwhile, we’ll continue waging this unwinnable war.
THIS IS PERSONAL STUFF: DEATH USUALLY IS.