Legalizing hard drugs is shortsighted
Reading the articles about legalizing hard drugs and chemical drugs, I couldn’t help but recall that this was discussed when marijuana was being legalized.
A few years ago I read a very interesting article on the legalization of all drugs in Portugal. The Portuguese experts made it very clear to not legalize drugs unless you go all the way, creating very strict laws around the amount of possession, strict laws about trafficking and descriptions of addiction so if you become an addict or mentally handicapped from drugs police can make charges and a judge can act on them.
Most importantly, they took the viewpoint that no one in their right mind wanted to be an addict. Therefore, if someone wasn’t in their right mind, they must have help. The government built hospitals and institutions for rehabilitation and mental help that a judge can send addicted and challenged people to.
Portugal made it very clear that legalizing drugs did not work without all the infrastructure and laws in place to back it up.
Our government is going to legalize drugs with no thought on how to deal with the consequences. Our federal and provincial governments seem to like running off of a cliff and thinking about how to deal with the hard landing on the way down.
John Money
Duncan