TWO ARTICLES in different editions of the Press on Thursday, July 29 – Rum Makes A Strong Start To The Year and $25 000 Ganja Lesson For Teacher, serve to highlight the paucity of logic at the heart of most governments today.
Alcohol, the drug that causes the greatest harm, is legal. This hypocrisy makes me question the concept of putting an individual in jail, or even recording a conviction for using marijuana.
The ubiquitous requirement for a police certificate of character makes it legal to discriminate in hiring, housing and education, and constitutes nothing less than the perpetuation of a “lower class” subset among the population.
One envisions children being born to mothers or fathers unable to secure a job to support them, a decent apartment or home for them to live in or an education by which they can better themselves, all because they were caught with marijuana at one time.
If this makes me a “liberal lefty”, then I am guilty.
If it means using reason and science to justify one’s thoughts and actions, then I am guilty. Alcohol, on the other hand, is the gateway drug – just ask a cocaine addict – that is marketed to our youth as sexy and sophisticated.
An editorial on July 29 The Tobacco Wars called for a ban on all such advertising related to tobacco products without a whisper devoted to banning such advertising for alcohol products. Alcohol-related deaths far outnumber those related to marijuana, if there are any at all.
Marijuana is just a gateway to the refrigerator and a Pink Floyd album.
One final and certainly related thought.
All educational programmes aimed at young people either to prompt them to do something they are not to or refrain from doing something they want to do are focused on the wrong segment of the population, as children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
CHARLES KNIGHTON