To the Editor,
Re: Prohibitionists losing legal debate, Letters, Jan. 10.
I read Whelm King and other recent letters in support of the legalization of marijuana with great interest and agree with their primary position, which is that the present illegal status of marijuana inflicts greater harm on society than if it were fully legalized.
In the course of my work, I have visited Mexico at least a dozen times over the past few years and it is my fervent wish that those who support the continued illegal status of marijuana should have the opportunity to visit that embattled nation and witness a horror of almost biblical proportion for themselves.
We in Canada are disgusted at reading about three or four murders in the Vancouver area over the past couple of weeks.
Perhaps we should consider Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas, where the number of murders has soared into the thousands; or Torreon further south where seventeen people were murdered in a restaurant because they were at a birthday party hosted by a drug lord.
Perhaps they should visit the area just south of Brownsville, Texas where unmarked graves containing dozens of people have been discovered.
Fear stalks that proud nation, poverty is on the increase and businesses located in rural areas are shutting down because they cannot provide adequate security for their workers or management.
The tens of billions of illegal funds pouring into Mexico have allowed inhuman thugs to bribe and control both police and government and those daring to travel by highways in rural areas are open to the possibility of attack from either illegal thugs or police and soldiers brandishing weapons.
It is a frightening spectre and it is due solely to the fact that drugs are illegal and therefore out of the realm of normal civil control.
If they became legal, the drug lords could find themselves out of business in the same way that bootleggers are gone and for the same reason that there are no illegal tobacco cartels to prey on the vulnerable public.
It is well overdue for this status of illegality to be abolished and for the sanity of open, legal and safe manufacturing and distribution to take its place.
Leonard Melman
Nanoose Bay
