Re: George Getty letter, entitled "Tough on drugs."
While your emotionless concern over these fentanyl related deaths was noted, you offered no real solution besides chastising the users and their parenting.
You said, "Further, the penalty for dealing drugs should be more severe and immediate. If you're caught with drugs you should be summarily punished..."
Our current policies show how prohibition and creating a "war on drugs" are all counter productive. So your solution is to double down on an already failed concept?
I understand you have an emotional bias on the matter (going so far as to say "it should be guilty until proven innocent," a very frightening piece of advice and behaviour that would be reserved for war lords and dictators) but I would like to point you to Portugal for an example.
In 2001 Portugal decriminalized most drugs. The many millions of dollars saved on incarcerating people was able to be shifted to public health and better welfare programs for people. In the many years since, there has been a steady decline of use, of drug related deaths, of HIV transmission and of course, drug related incarceration.
Increasing the punishment and making things even more illegal and restricted will do nothing but increase gang activity, increase the possibility of tainted and impure drugs, increase drug related deaths, increase drug usage, increase incarceration population and increase all the money wasted on a policy that has been proven time and time again to be ineffective.
Our government is taking steps in the right direction. Offering overdose kits and drug prevention/education, are all solid ideas based around concepts of solid and proven policies.
Your "off the wall" thinking is, in fact, nothing new and is exactly the type of thinking that has brought us to this fentanyl problem in the first place.
It's time for something that works.
It's time to approach drug use and policy without emotional bias and with an open mind.
Nick Fremmerlid
Prince George
