If I am a tar sands producer and I want to avoid the “Green Shift” confiscation I could pay people to make lime from limestone and dump it into the ocean. I then get a credit for CO2 sequestration - which may be bogus but is the required indulgence these days. If the cost of making the lime can be brought low enough this chap will have a market.
Dawg took the obvious and correct shot at Margaret Wente on drug policy and Dan Gardner posted a comment to correct a minor error. I went to his website and found this dead smart article:
Seen from this perspective, needle exchanges and safe injection sites are relatively minor attempts to reduce a harm created by prohibition.
But people don’t see it from that perspective because all they hear about is harm reduction. The news stories. The research. The politics. The debates. The noise about harm reduction is deafening. It dominates public discussion of drug policy.
As a result, perception is totally out of line with reality. Most Canadians, I suspect, would assume Margaret Wente is right in calling harm reduction “the philosophy that has come to dominate drug policy.” But to say that harm reduction dominates drug policy is to focus on the housefly while ignoring the elephant on whose rump it sits. Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen
The headline on the Wente piece is “Legalization in disguise”. Some chance. As Gardner points out the safe injection sites are the fly on the elephant of drug prohibition. Do they work? Do they reduce harm? Perhaps. But compared to the harm inflicted needlessly by the current drug laws in Canada the entire concept of safe injection sites is trivial.
I had business in downtown Victoria today and it took me down Pandora Street. There are handy receptacles for “used sharps” which is a good thing as I sure as Hell don’t want one sticking in my foot or my children’s. There were a lot of people who were clearly “on something”. And there were street workers out checking to see how the people they know were doing.
Gardner advocates an end to the drug prohibition, so do I; but that end has to be managed very carefully lest it turn out like the influx of Residential Schools settlements or resource money on Indian Reserves.
Part of that management may well be the creation of a quasi-criminal space where, for their own benefit, substance addicts can be taken off the street for a period of time. And, yes, this is exactly opposite to my libertarian views and to my skepticism about the State’s ability to do good; but the tragic fact is that there are concentrations of two or three thousand people in various cities in Canada for whom full legalization of drugs with the attendant 95% (or 70% or whatever) drop in price would be fatal.
Drug prohibition must end and end soon; but we will have to deal with the consequences of 50 years of this misguided policy. They are people and they are citizens - and they might just be your brother or your child.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.