Why can’t we have this debate here? (Because Canadians are a bunch of kooks!)

Canadian politicians are now considering a rational approach to the war on drugs:

With months left before Canada becomes the first country in the G7 to fully legalise marijuana, members of the country’s Liberal party, led federally by Justin Trudeau, are calling on their government to go one step further and decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit drugs.

The internal push to embrace the idea is one of more than two dozen resolutions set to be debated this week as the political party gathers for their national convention in the east coast city of Halifax. The resolution is one of three put forward by the national caucus, suggesting widespread support among Liberal MPs.

“It’s one of the few issues where we’re taught from a young age, that drugs are bad and that it’s normal to throw people in jail for using drugs,” said Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a Liberal MP who has championed decriminalisation since he was elected in 2015.

“Yet when you actually start looking underneath those claims and at the actual evidence and hear from people who have study or lived this issue, this isn’t the right approach.”

Framing drug use as a criminal justice issue rather than one of health has simply served to fuel a lucrative black market, divert resources from law enforcement and marginalise those who are often already on the margins of society, he argued.

What never ceases to amaze me is that such a rational approach to drugs is considered fringe here. It wasn’t fringe before 1914, though, and the country did not fall apart. The problem was that there were drug addicts, so the People Who Think Something Must Be Done decided that the only thing to do was to criminalize a medical problem. This irrational approach is so deeply entrenched that those who question it are considered kooks.

Well, I consider imprisoning people for what they put into their own bodies to be kooky.

This makes me a kook.

Because as history shows, when kooky ideas spread, those who question them become kooky!