October 6th, 2024

Stronger laws needed in fight against drug crime


By Lethbridge Herald on July 30, 2021.

Editor:

One youth lost two bikes from his backyard in 12 months. Another youth lost a locked bike from a food outlet. 

A nine-year-old child saw a male exiting their backyard on a clear afternoon and later found his wagon with items from their shed abandoned down the lane. 

Why do these thieves need the money? Hungry, lack of shelter or to feed a drug addition? This is our other crime wave-the drug trade. How do youth and adults get to this deadly addiction stage?  

Maybe they start out on tobacco or alcohol, readily available to all youth, then on to the deadly, life wrecking hard drugs. 

Of course, marijuana was used along this deadly path, now readily available to all. 

Let’s fund our great Lethbridge Police force so they can have the resources to investigate, charge and convict all participating in this criminal activity. What did our (soon past, we hope) city council and mayor do? 

They followed the fad to defund the police instead. And, how are these stolen items sold to the public without detection?

A free and democratic society requires law and order. 

This means suitable laws need to be established to discourage such criminal activity, which means investigation, charging and conviction of crimes. Also required is sufficient pain resulting on conviction to discourage further criminal activity. 

Ken Oler

Lethbridge

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Sharkmeister

My kids shed has been broken into 3 times in 8 months and there cars 2 times. They live in what would be considered a good area of Lethbridge. The system is broke!

Sharkmeister

*their*

This Red Neck Has No Neck

Since you are interested in proper spelling, “kids” should read “kid’s” — the possessive form — and “broke” should read “broken”, as broke is the past tense of “break”.

creator42

Some people with substance use disorders resort to theft and prostitution because illicit drugs are exceptionally expensive, because they are prohibited. This systemic crime, along with our overdose crisis, are the inevitable consequences of the counter-productive war on drugs.

h2ofield

Of course, let’s demonize cannabis like it’s the 50’s again ::rolleyes:::

biff

oh my. so very many people i know use cannabis…now for over 45 years myself, and others for over 50 years. ken, are you telling us that we are soon going to be heroin addicts? how do we turn this ship around? oh my god…we are doomed. seriously, try some common sense on this: the number of cannabis users (quite high) v. the number of heroin addicts (quite low) is a most robust indicator of the utter bs farce that has been the “gateway” lie.
‘As she opened the panel discussion, moderator Eugenia South, MD, MSHP, LDI Senior Fellow, and Faculty Director of the Penn Urban Health Lab, explained: “When we think about what fueled mass incarceration, what laws and policies were created that led to both the ballooning of the prison population and the racial disproportionality of who is there, the War on Drugs is really front and center.”South then read the controversial Ehrlichman quote that appeared in the April 2016 issue of Harper’s Magazine in an article about the failure of the “War on Drugs” originally launched by President Nixon in 1971:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” Ehrlichman said. “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” ‘
https://ldi.upenn.edu/news/war-drugs-as-structural-racism

Fedup Conservative

So are you admitting that for years you were breaking the law and didn’t care? Where were you getting your drugs? How much money have you wasted buying them ?

You have no problem breaking the law with drugs , but aren’t smart enough to get yourself vaccinated putting others at risk of catching covid. It might explain why your mind is so clouded, don’t you think?

biff

i broke an unjust law, but i cared deeply that people simply accepted an unjust law because they did not themselves wish to use any drugs other than alcohol or nicotine. i broke a law that in reality is a crime against humanity, as it seeks to determine ownership over one’s right to be the sole arbiter of their body. how do you and so many others not find it disturbing that, in a supposedly free society, a govt or a third party of any stature invokes the right to determine what a person does with their body?
there is nothing that is more inalienable than the right of a person to be the sole arbiter of their body. that also goes for our thick, socially conditioned acceptance that subjective laws and doctors have the final say as to how a person is “allowed” to manage their pain, their health (mental or physical), or their sense of happiness and recreation. is it not ironic, if not entirely insidious, that those laws, and our esteemed medical practitioners, have in fact combined to create a lot of pain and misery where none should ever have existed: can we say “opioids?” it is a big word; i knew you could.
the only reason societies anywhere became ravaged by those synthetic poisons is because big pharm could not patent plants that have existed usefully and exquisitely for thousands of years; they could only make a bundle through synthetic versions that they could patent. and, they kept feeding the poisons out there, even whilst knowing that their wares were inordinately addictive, and ruinous. and who helped that process along?: govt and their illegal laws vilifying natural drugs, and doctors pushing the synthetics.
which now brings me to your thoughts about the covid vaxes. “clouded,” you say? well, here is an irrefutable reality for your consideration. drugs like cannabis, the coca leaf, and the poppy have been around likely longer than humans. they have a history of use – let us call them trials – dating back thousands and thousand of years, through multibillions of doses. never has a society been ruined by any of these plants…the only time any significant issues have occurred is when there has been an underhanded effort to “control” these plants by some “higher” power that is entirely without the right to do so.
“clouded”, you say. meanwhile, covid vaxes have a limited use history. i am not saying they do not work: i am stating that they are novel, and worse, they were rushed to market. they should have been tested far longer than they had been. as such, they never should have been mass distributed to everyone – especially not to kids! if rolled out as quickly at all, the target audience should only have been those deemed most at risk. this is reckless what has taken place, especially considering that the vast, vast, vast majority of people will have little to no consequence from covid. no one: not doctors, not govt, not the purveyors and makers of the vaxes, really has much of an accurate idea as to what are the long term effects of the vaxes. they cannot know, because the use window is short (as noted, it is a good bit longer with the poppy, coca leaf, and cannabis).
it is now getting close to two years since the likely man-made covid came out of a chinese lab. 4 million deaths…out of world pop of about 8 billion. my off the cuff guess is that you could go a lifetime and never win the jackpot in a lottery with those type of odds. consider that most of the planet has poor health to begin with – due to severe poverty, lack of clean water and nutritious foods, and lack of hygiene and underdeveloped health care, and, overcrowding. oh, the humanity.
but if that is not curious enough, what is of utmost curiosity is how so many people so easily fall into a line based on the words of govts and big pharm. each has a long and lingering history of corruption, lies, coverups, agendas, propaganda. each is about self foremost, not selflessness and others. how is there so much blind trust? and perhaps therein lies the answer: blindness.
and, if that nor any of the above provides sane, lucid, unclouded thought, how about this: why do you think it is that each of the vax makers immediately sought, and were granted by our pure and godly govts, absolute immunity from any culpability should the vaxes cause issues now or down the road?

biff

the letter reads like a genuine antique. seems for some, still, the only thing wrong with the war on drugs was that it did not summarily execute users. maybe move to the phillipines, where freedom is based on the subjective whims of tyrant presidents.
c42 is correct: anti-drug laws/the war on drugs is the primary culprit, just as were anti-liquor laws before they were finally scrapped. such laws artificially inflate the prices of otherwise very cheap stuff, due to risk and an ultimate monopoly effect, which further enriches not only organised crime, but also crooked police and drug control agencies.
drugs are cheap to produce and bring to market. every society on the planet has harvested and used various drugs. never in history have drugs caused the ruination of a society, or much in the way of pervasive, significant, issues…except where there has been a heavy handed effort to “control” them.
legal drugs means drugs are: quality control ensured; reasonably safe to use (like alcohol, only less of an issue); cheap enough so as to not create crime where none would otherwise exist; would likely undermine the scourge that are synthetic drugs, which are far, far more addictive due the body’s inability to interact with them…ever consider that hardly anyone is ever addicted mercilessly to fruit, but so many are addicted to “sugar”? also, ever see anyone mercilessly addicted to caffeine, but who resorts to crime to pay for their “fixes”? coffee is more expensive to bring to market than the likes of the coca leaf and opium. the difference: one is legal, two are not.