Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > News Items

Legalize NOW

<< < (2/3) > >>

Anonymous:
Or maybe his livelihood and freedom was threatened so he freaked as a last resort.

Anonymous:

--- Quote ---On 2005-03-05 23:21:00, Anonymous wrote:

"Or maybe his livelihood and freedom was threatened so he freaked as a last resort. "

--- End quote ---

Er.... No, I don't think so.  He'd freak as a first resort.  I'd guess he was a paranoid schizophrenic.  Despite what his dad says, people like that are made, not born.

Anonymous:

--- Quote ---On 2005-03-05 21:07:00, Anonymous wrote:

"14% of Canada's RCMP is infiltrated by the HA's. Without drug money the HA's would have less power and have to rely more on their legal businesses. If the HA's had less power, I doubt that a serial killer running an HA bar would have been allowed off of the hook for a good 20 years. Canada has clearly lost the "war on drugs" and reached a point of no return. Time to start taking the power back.



"

--- End quote ---

What's an HA?

Antigen:
Hell's Angels.

Organized crime has grown immesurably since the onset of prohibition. Before alcohol prohibition in the US, Al Capone was a chiseller; literally. He'd been in trouble w/ the law for stealing gravestones, chiseling off the names and dates and reselling them. Now that's a downright mean and rotten thing to do. But is it comperable to, say, recruiting children to run product or using violence and threats of violence to keep affairs in order?

See, that's the real issue here with the "drug" problem. With rare exeption, we're not having a lot of problems w/ people doing evil things to each other because of the effects of the drugs. It's because of the money. If the money were legal, then the holders of it could protect it the usual way w/ insurance and force of law. Since it's illegal money, they can't do that.

That's what makes prohibition so damaging to society. It creates a market demand for law breaking, violent, tough thugs to carry out the grunt work of the trade. And so the labour market responds to meet that demand.

It's no different from the way the mass productin of automobiles has created a market demand for auto mechanics. Mechanics aren't born, they're made. If there were no cars, no one would bother learning to fix them. But there are, so they do. Same w/ illegal drugs. If there were no illegal drugs, pharmacies and other legal distributors would see a slight increase in trade w/ normal profit margins. But the entire aparatus of the illegal trade would collapse just as Al Capone's empire did when we stopped his gravy train by passing the VVIst Amendment.

Stiffening penalties north of the 49th will only bring about similar conditions to those south of the 49th. Here it's not really Earth shaking news when a cop or two gets shot over some drug money. In fact it's quite common, as is retalliation made to look like suicide or like a drug deal gone bad (which, in the end, it essentially is)

If that's what Canada wants, then by all means, take all of our drug policy and implement it just as we've been doing for years. But, of course, if that's what you want having had the opportunity to watch it play out down here, then they must all be friggin crazy!


I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
--Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father and inventor
--- End quote ---

Antigen:
Folks, according to this latest, we've all been HAD by the manic drug warriors!

This does chap my ass! It also demonstrates just how deteched from reality these people are. To our neighbors to the north I say take the oportunity NOW to route these sadistic lunatics from your government. They are more dangerous than you can imagine. But you need not imagine. Just spend a little time in any major US city.


--- Quote ---Newshawk: CMAP http://www.mapinc.org/cmap
Pubdate: Mon, 07 Mar 2005
Source: National Post (Canada)
Webpage:
http://www.canada.com/national/national ... 59f1a72e21
Copyright: 2005 Southam Inc.
Contact: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Colby Cosh, National Post
Note: From MAP: As reported in many newspapers by the wire service CanWest
News Service Alberta Premier Ralph Klein told reporters Friday that "the
officers were slain at a 'significant' grow-op with 300 plants worth
$300,000." See the National Post story at
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v05/n370/a02.htm But it turns out, as the
CBC reported Sunday, "When the Mounties arrived at the farm, they found
what they say was stolen truck parts and about 20 marijuana plants." and
"that officers had gone to the farm to repossess a pickup truck." See the
CBC report at
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national ... 50305.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Rochfort+Bridge (Rochfort Bridge)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
 
 WHAT THEY DIED FOR

Like many other Albertans, I followed the news of Thursday's shootout near Mayerthorpe with increasing horror and disbelief. That day, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli was among the first to advance the now widely accepted view that the four Mounties killed in Alberta gave their lives as part of the toll of the war on drugs -- though most didn't go quite as far as he did.

"Today," he said, "the RCMP continued its vigilant effort to detect and dismantle illegal drug manufacturing and to respond to the calls for a drug-free Canada. We know that these are most serious issues and challenges, made complicated by the involvement of organized crime, the availability of weapons and risks posed by individuals who choose the path of violence and destruction over peace and good. And today we recognize with gratitude and respect that four of our own paid the highest price to fight this fight, to make Canada a safer place for all of us."

I reread this paragraph several times over as details of the murders emerged over the weekend. Every time I reviewed it, Commissioner Zaccardelli grew a little more fatuous in retrospect.

It was obvious, even on Thursday, that the young policemen hadn't been killed by anything resembling an "organized criminal." Then we learned that the discovery of the marijuana in the fatal quonset was purely accidental, and had little to do with anyone's "vigilant effort" to suppress illegal substances.

But there was still one thing saving the commissioner from the appearance of total dissociation from the truth: Whatever events had brought the martyred policemen to the Roszko farm, they did find a "grow-op" there, and they did, by their deaths, inadvertently bring Canada a little closer to being "drug-free."

And on Saturday we learned exactly how much closer they brought us: 20 plants. That's how many were found on the killer's property -- 20 marijuana plants. Enough to generate about a half-ounce per day, given a three-month harvest and the RCMP's own standard yield figures. Some grow-op.

I doubt we have enough Mounties to make Moose Jaw drug-free, let alone the whole country. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something more fundamentally disturbing about Commissioner Zaccardelli's message than its mere factual status. He seemed to be saying, after all, that the sacrifice of four young men's lives on these terms was regrettable, but justifiable and noble. With respect to the demands that that moment placed upon him, I think the whole idea is offensive.

The truth is that those cops were at the Roszko farm to carry out the most mundane police duty imaginable: to help a bailiff repossess a truck. The texture of every police officer's life is woven from crummy little tasks like this -- which, attended to day by day, painful increment by painful increment, sustain the decrees of justice and preserve us all in our property, our personal liberty, and the network of capitalist linkages that keep us fed and clothed and fat and happy.

That debts will be honoured is the sort of reciprocal expectation we rely on, unthinkingly, every minute of our lives. On mercifully rare occasions, we resort to the law to make it work. And in enforcing the notion of honouring freely assumed obligations, policemen do something truly honourable. How crass is Mr. Zaccardelli's dream of a "drug-free Canada" compared with the simple vision of a civil society where people pay what they owe. Those four constables deserved better from their commander.

Still, the commissioner, the Liberal Party of Canada and dozens of individuals in authority are paying tribute by advocating harsher measures against "grow-ops" run by "organized crime." Funny sort of tribute. We now know it has nothing to do with the circumstances of those officers' deaths, and we already knew it wouldn't have saved their lives anyway.

The northern Alberta airwaves were filled on Thursday night with the voices of ordinary people from Mayerthorpe who knew James Roszko. The community is unanimous in its lack of surprise at what he did. Roszko was hostile, creepy and violent. He had a long history of confrontations with cops and other officials, had been convicted of threatening behaviour and property crimes, and had wounded a teenager with a rifle in 1999. His various criminal acts, from the age of 18 to the day he died, almost defy enumeration. Yet for all his legal trouble, the courts were mostly powerless to imprison him for any significant length of time. He was, it seems, a fanatical amateur student of the law who retained excellent counsel. He was able to wriggle out of at least 17 criminal charges at one time or another.

The magistrates' best chance to protect Mayerthorpe and its cops came in April, 2000, when Roszko was convicted of having repeatedly molested a child over a seven-year period in the 1980s. From the ages of 10 to 17, the victim was forced into sodomy and degradation by a grown man under the constant threat of a fatal beating. For this, Roszko served about 21 months in prison. If Canadian justice had penalized him according to popular notions of right and wrong, he would still have been in jail on Thursday -- and would have stayed until he was much too old to engage in a firefight.

The law failed the public here, not to speak of the four constables. And the politicians who have been hyperventilating about a rapist's horticultural pastimes -- Ralph Klein, Anne McLellan, Randy White, and the like -- are failing the public now. They are engaging in a calculated distraction that presents them as part of a thin line standing between us and an enormous, inchoate, "organized" evil. And they've been trampling the graves of the real heroes to do it.

--- End quote ---

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.
-- John Muir

--- End quote ---

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page