WARMING TREND

It's pretty pathetic when 22 degrees sounds like a heat wave but after these last couple days of bruising wind chills, anything above zero will feel balmy. The town has been empty, just breathing that frozen air was exhausting. They closed the schools but the office was not. It was a long day and I have 103 unread emails sitting in the inbox that I can't even look at right now.

We're going to try to catch up this weekend but for tonight I leave you with this editorial from the Barrie Examiner. Musing on the recent bust at the Molson factory, the Examiner concludes, Prohibition didn’t work the first time against alcohol consumption, and it won't work with cannabis either.

There are no easy answers on decriminalizing pot. Yet we’re beginning to wonder if police and governments aren’t just playing out the same old prohibitionist scenario.

After having spent billions of taxpayers’ dollars in ineffective enforcement and inadvertently providing a business base for organized crime that rivals that of the rum-running barons of the early 20th century, will we eventually arrive at the same place when it comes to pot: controlled sources, age limitations and strict laws governing behaviour?

As a society, we need to look at the lessons of prohibition, weigh the disadvantages of decriminalization and legalization against organized crime, examine the health and social implications of the various avenues open to us and abandon the hypocritical view of alcohol as the only “acceptable” drug.

And that's the last word.