Legal pot can’t be worse than the status quo

Most British Columbians, I’m sure, won’t weep over the murder in Mexico of drug kingpin Tom Gisby and other B.C. gangbangers.

They’ll figure that, if you play with fire, you deserve to get burned — and that assassins in the Land of the Hot Sun are simply taking care of a problem our criminal-friendly justice system has failed to address.

However, I’m more inclined to agree with jailed pot activist Marc Emery that no good can come from pumped-up Canuck drug dealers mixing directly with Mexican cartels for whom survival is everything and life is cheap.

“As a Canadian, I am very concerned about the apparent integration between Canadian actors in the [drug]-prohibition wars and Mexican and Latin American players,” Emery told me via prison email. “That is a very ominous development. Mexican gangs do not hesitate to use violence or murder.”

In fact, it seems as if the only recent progress in the “war on drugs” is that the extreme violence of the infamous Colombian drug cartels has moved north to Mexico . . . closer to B.C.

Emery, currently serving a fiveyear U.S. term for cross-border selling of marijuana seeds, outlined the futility of trying to police it. He pointed out that any sharing of intelligence between Canadian and Mexican cops is immediately accessed by the Mexican cartels.

“All levels of Mexican law enforcement and the judiciary are completely compromised,” he said from his jail in Yazoo City, Miss. And veteran Vancouver gang expert Doug Spencer confirmed Tuesday that corruption is rampant because of infiltration by the cartels: “It certainly is an issue.”

Emery, meanwhile, noted that drug gangs already control prisons in Mexico and most of Latin America. “And some Canadian and U.S. prisons are under the thumb of ethnic gangs and organized-crime cartels,” he said. “It puts ordinary prisoners at much higher risk.”

The solution? Well, Emery insists we need to end drug prohibition simultaneously in Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

I have a hard time disagreeing with him, if only because I can’t imagine that legalizing and regulating drugs would create more misery than banning them causes now.

Besides, spending as much as $120,000 annually to keep one educationally challenged crack dealer locked up in either Mississippi or Matsqui is surely not the best expenditure of taxpayer cash.

As for marijuana, I don’t view it as harmless as do crusaders like Emery. But it’s certainly no more harmful than booze or cigarettes. Moreover, once the thrill of its illegality has gone up in smoke, Canadian teens will undoubtedly view it as less appealing.

The worry is, as Spencer notes, that the drug gangs will simply switch to other illicit substances: “If you take away their marijuana crop or profit, they will sell more cocaine.”

Well maybe, as Emery suggests, we should legalize and regulate cocaine, too.

We should also ask why it is that so many North Americans are so stressed by, or bored with, their lives that they need to get high in the first place.

That, after all, is the real sickness that needs to be addressed here.