tt - Sunday, Murch 20,

TYRR - North Shore News

LAST SUNDAY Channel 10 T.V."s Towa Meeting featured
the indestructible Art Linkletter, telling his Seattle audience
about his 20-year crusade against drugs which began when
his daughter overdosed on them.

This has been a lonely crusade
on Linkletter’s part. It was too
corny, too old-fashioned, too
melodramatic to suit most people’s
tastes.

Drugs have been too much in
fashion, too much the sign of
sophistication, too much the badge
of being progressive and with it;
ever since the days of that widely-
extolled, heavily-publicized aca-
demic idiot Dr. Timothy Leary out
of Harvard and the over-praised
glories of Haight-Ashbury.

Nancy Reagan has carried on
her own ‘Say No to Drugs** cam-
paign for some years, without
much visible success.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, con-
tender for the Democratic party
nomination for the presidency, has
carricd on a high-powered fight
against the increasing use and in-
volvement of Negro youths with il-
legal drugs, without much visible
success.

Most every thinking concerned
parent and many others whole-
heartedly agree with Art, Nancy
and Jesse; but the war against the
consumption of drugs is not being
won, it is being lost, in youthful
and adult areas alike.

Slowly, but surely, the media are
awakening to the incredible, terri-
fying spread and influence of drug
trafficking around the world and
its enormous effect upon North
America.

South America’s state of Col-
ombia, the source of most cocaine,
is now virtually the captive of the
kingpins of the drug trade.

Prosecutors and judges in that
country have been assassinated for
daring to try these immensely
wealthy thugs in courts of law.

Many judges — nearly all — are
now too terrified to try, let alone
convict the drug lords or their
aides.

Can you imagine living in a state
where the judges and law en-
forcement authorities have sur-
rendered to criminals prepared to
murder anyone who stands in their
way?

You had better start considering
it; it could, unless a general alarm
and much more governmental,
judicial and correctional action is
taken, happen here.

The spectacle of General
Noriega, of Panama, now indicted
in the U.S.A. for taking millions,
to facilitate the smuggling of drugs
into North America, but hanging
on to power, is still another exam-
ple of the terrible influence of
drugs and vast sums of money.

The State of Florida has seen
many banks taken over by drug
lords, in order to conceal, wash or
ship overseas their illegal profits.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, of all
the candidates for nomination as
president, is the only one to ad-
dress the issue openly and honest-
ly.

His message goes: ‘‘Drug traf-
ficking is either the most corrupt

dimension of our forcign policy, or
the most inept dimension of our
foreign policy.”

He asks students: ‘Stand if you
know somcone who has died
because of drugs.’* About [50 stu-
dents do.

“If you know someone in your
age group who is in jail because of
drugs, please stand."’ About 150
students do.

“TF you know someone in your
schoo] who has tried drugs,
stand.’’ Every student stands.

Canadian schools are supposedly
not that bad, yet. In time, unless
we address the whole drug pro-
blem, they could be.

It is not that bad yet because our
law enforcement authoritics have
not yet been subjected to the
enormous attraction and persua-
sion of huge amounts of money,
though a few now have.

The American authoritics now
admit they simply cannot compete,
in terms of manpower and moncy,
against drug smugglers.

We Canadians will simply have
to face and admit we are in the
same dangerous position.
Municipal police forces and
RCMP both admit they no longer
have the men and money to pursue
the users of prohibited drugs; the
best they can do is to go after the
big traffickers.

The police forces of Canada are
so overwhelmed by th tse of
drugs by Canadian citizens, that
they cannot lay charges against all
of our citizens who are found in
possession of illegal or prohibited
drugs.

Even where they do, the courts
now make a mockery of their ef-
forts by imposing sentences of un-
conditional discharge, or condi-
tional discharge (meaning no re-
cord of conviction at all) or
suspended sentences.

It is no wonder that most police
officers, invelved in this futility,
say: ‘‘What in hell is the use?"

You get enough members of that
thin blue or red-coated line
justifiably saying that, and you
have a community, a nation, in
very deep trouble, indeed.

The extremely wealthy drug
smugglers, traffickers and dealers
could never present these threats to
civilized communities if there were
no consumers of their drugs.

Over the last 30 years, illegal
and prohibited drugs have been
promoted as a sign of sophistica-
tion and self-realization, and have
thus gained the absurd cachet of
respectability.

Their coke sniffing, their inhala-
tion of marijuana joints and all the
rest, simply guarantee the destruc-
tion of civilized society; without a
market, the traffickers and thugs
will be stopped in their tracks.
These idiots should be dealt with
harshly, if they haven’t the sense
to know what they are doing to
themselves, and society. @

IMPAIRED DRIVING

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