Legalize! Legalize! At a minimum, decriminalize.

Let's stop making criminals out of people for victimless crimes [STOP: don't tell about the ills of drugs and drug addiction -- I don't and won't do drugs, and I understand what devastation drugs can create in families].

The "war on drugs" has long been lost; bring the troops home!

Bring the sale of drugs out of the back alleys and implement quality controls to protect the consumers. Put drug sales into the legitimate market where the government can tax it [to fund the creation of treatment centers that can deal with the concomitant addiction].

Do something other than what's currently being done, because that clearly is not working.

What is more harmful? Starting up your car in the morning or smoking a joint?

This case is closed except to those, like Stepen Harper, I hopefully hyperbolize, who think that maybe if we start cutting off the appendages of drug users we might be able to turn the war around.

A CMAJ study of mortality in Canada in 1998
counted 47,581 deaths in Canada attributed to tobacco use. It concluded "Cigarette smoking remains the number one preventable cause of death in Canada".
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/abstract/162/12/1669

From another study: "In 1995, 6,507 deaths and 82,014 admissions to hospital were attributed to alcohol, 34,728 deaths and 194,072 admissions to hospital were attributed to tobacco, and 805 deaths and 6940 admissions to hospital were due to illicit drugs.
http://www.cqct.qc.ca/Documents_docs/DOCU_2004/ARTI_04_01_00_ArticleCJPH_MortaliteCanadaQuebec.pdf

So the stats say the most damaging, most lethal drugs, by far, are the tolerated legal ones, NOT the "real bad illegal hard drugs", as urban myth might have it.

The number of deaths due to all illicit drugs combined is a tiny fraction of the deaths due to the worst drugs of all, the legal ones.

And the above stats don't even touch on the other category of deaths due to legal drugs: deaths due to prescription medications, wrongly prescribed, or with toxic side effects, as another poster mentioned earlier.
I couldn't locate a figure immediately via Google, but previously, I'd seen an estimated figure in the tens of thousands of deaths per year in Canada due to prescribed prescription drugs.

I would argue that the number of deaths from illicit drugs would drop significantly if they were legalized. Standardized doses would make overdoses much less likely. Addicts would not have to live in squalor and poor health. Hygienic drug use (therefore less disease) would be more likely. Harm reduction studies are proving this. Crime rates would decline too if drugs were legalized.

Contrary to conventional uninformed wisdom,
heroin and cocaine, if properly dosed, in and of themselves do little or no damage at all to the body, beyond physical addiction.

Dirty needles cause liver disease, not heroin.
But alcohol itself causes liver disease.
Tobacco smoke, in and of itself,is damaging to the body. Smoking crack causes less physical damage than cigarettes.

We must wake up as a society to our current hypocricy towards drugs, where we tolerate one set of legal drugs (the most damaging and deadly ones of all), while we demonize and criminalize another set of drugs and users, drugs that are typically less damaging and deadly. By historical happenstance (rather than by reason) one group of substances ended up staying legal, another group illegal.

Drug abuse should be treated as a health issue,
not a criminal justice issue.

There was a former US policeman who was in Toronto the past week for a conference. He has written a book and started an organization of police and former police officers. His position is the war on drugs is a failure. It is kept going,he says, largely because there are vested interests in law enforcement and the justice system, including privatized US jails, which benefit directly monetarily from
prosecuting this unwinnable war.
Many people are employed in this drug enforcement "industry", a make work project based on persecuting drug users/sellers, and wasting taxpayers money. Such money would be much better spent on drug treatment and harm reduction.

Quite right, the war on drugs apparatus is a sick, bloated witch trial that smells like a long dead seal. In my town police dope sniffin' dogs haunt hallways in search of teenage witches' pot stashes. It is sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.

I wonder if Harpo and his cronies will try an remove the medical exemption clause from the books for marijuana .
Obviously Harpo is having an effect on the delusional drug warriors.
In Langly BC the mayor and coucil just introduced a law that requires 'Head shops' to take the name address and phone number of anyone buying paraphenalia(Bongs, rolling papers etc) and provide a list to police .
Human rights has told them it is a no go but they insist on bringing this law into effect .
Insisitng they will defend it to the highest court .
What fools !

Bobb999:

Guns don't kill people; people kill people.............so "naturally" we ban guns.

Rick W: Whaa? Is your point about drugs or guns... and what is your point?

This case is closed except to those, like Stepen Harper, I hopefully hyperbolize, who think that maybe if we start cutting off the appendages of drug users we might be able to turn the war around.

Actually the combination is what worries me.

I am willing to accept decimalization of pot in exchange for tougher laws against hard drugs, especially crystal meth and other similar drugs.
Try it for a 10 year period and have a referendum on the issue at that point.

No, that won't work Colin .In countries where the Gov has handed out free heroin the Netherlands and Switzerland the amount of addicts has remained static .
Answer for crystal meth is to prescribe amphetamines to the user and gradually reduce the dose after ninety days of sustenance .
Some will return to the crystal but most won't as it is too hard on the body and mind .
At least amphetamines are made in laboratory conditions and not in someones bathtub .
The effects are identical and a lot healthier for the addict to consume .
By allowing them a daily dose they can work or go to school and be productive.
It removes the criminal element as well .
A lot cheaper than the alternative .

Project Empty Bowl full of love
Symbolic sale of empty bowls expected to fund 8,000 meals for

people living with AIDS in the Lower Mainland

How is it possible that by creating an empty bowl, one can actually help reduce the number of empty bowls that exist?

Being held June 1, Project Empty Bowl is a biannual charity event and auction of handmade bowls by B.C.s premier artisans that supports A Loving Spoonful. Guests will receive a dinner bowl hand-made by an artisan – in wood, clay, or glass – which they can use to sample an array of international delicacies created by local dining establishments. June Katz will add her jazz stylings to the evening, the highlight of which is a silent and live auction of bowls created by the artisans – one worth an estimated $8,000.

“Vancouver’s artistic and culinary communities really get behind us for this one,” says A Loving Spoonful Executive Director Sue Moen. “It’s symbolic – eating some of our city’s most marvelous food out of a simple bowl, representing hunger.”

Moen adds the event will likely raise enough to pay for an entire month’s operations – enough for almost 8,000 meals.

“Our clientele’s nutritional requirements are higher than an average person’s, and the disease creates a lot of barriers to eating like nausea, depression, and fatigue,” Moen says. “Poverty is a huge issue as well. They are scrambling just to find adequate shelter. Many of them live in substandard housing with poor cooking facilities.”

One of the restaurants featured at the event is the Cook Studio Café, a Downtown Eastside restaurant that is also a cook training facility for the Youth Internship Program. In addition to running a full-service restaurant and bakery, the Studio puts on wellness, nutrition and cooking workshops for community groups and local residents.

The artists and restaurants are donating their work, so all money raised will go to feeding some of the city’s most vulnerable souls. One of the bowls donated by Vancouver’s own Paul Mathieu is worth $8,000. Jack Olive, Joanne Copp, Louise Duthie, Brian Baxter, the glass artists of Starfish Glassworks, Tam Irving and Jeannette Lee are just a few of the returning and new artists participating.

Project Empty Bowl is being held at UBC Robson Square downtown on June 1 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.. Tickets are available for $45, and web site preview of live auction items start May 12th. Contact A Loving Spoonful (604-682-6325) or log on to alovingspoonful.org to buy tickets.

A Loving Spoonful serves more than 100,000 free, nutritious meals a year to adults and children living with AIDS in the Greater Vancouver area. The volunteer-driven charity operates under the mission statement that no one living with AIDS should live with hunger.

Media Enquiries:

Sue Moen, Executive Director

A Loving Spoonful

Phone: 604-682-6325

Email:

Interesting, Tax Cutter99. How many people are living with Aids in the Lower Mainland?

How many of those living with Aids in the Lower Mainland are children. I myself, have never known anyone who had a child with Aids in the lower Mainland, so I'd be very interested in getting these statistics.

I support libertarian idea expressed very eloquently by David Friedman in his book THE MACHINERY OF FRIEDOM GUIDE TO A RADICAL CAPITALISM "If addict is going to trade his health or his life for a few years. or months, or minutes of drug induced ecstasy, that is his affair. Part of the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion. Those who have stumbled into psychological addiction and wish to be cuewd, deserve our sympathy and our charity. Those addicts who do not wish to be cured should be left alone." Keeping drugs illegal only helps their producers and mafia like prohibition which enriched some of the most respectable now, families in Canada.

Sure about that?

1999 - Mendocino County California - Measure G - 58%
2002 - Washington DC - Measure 62 - 78%
2004 - Columbia Missouri - Proposition 2 - 60%

Plus many, many others. Care to make that statement a little more focused?