I saw Mark McCardell on Vancouver’s Global noon hour news on Wednesday February 21, 2007. All I can say about it is that this is precisely this type of media treatment of important issues that dooms Canada and its citizens to poor and misinformed decision making. At a time the country faces important decisions on a wide variety of complex issues, making the need for balanced, thoughtful and intelligent information a must, the media is serving up this kind of misleading, pointless nonsense.
Mr. McCardell demonstrates his total disconnection from reality and lack of familiarity with thought in his assertions that rounding up all the current drug dealers and jailing them would, in some manner impossible for anyone with more intelligence than a amoeba to fathom, ensure that illegal drugs are no longer available. At its roots the illegal drug industry is unfettered capitalism at its most avaricious, where the laws of supply and demand ensure a continuous supply of dealers and drugs. Any one who falls for Mr. McCardell’s glib assurances that the arrest of current suppliers would prevent their loved ones from the path of addiction, in reality would face an increased likelihood of the heartbreak of addiction so many now deal with. Given the immense potential for wasted lives and damage in Mr McCardell’s statement I would say his behaviour on this matter is criminal.
His solution for current addicts is to abandon them to their addiction in hopes they will solve the problem by dying off. Although, in further proof of his lack of an ability to reason, he fails to explain how this die off would occur once his magical plan for removing drug supplies from our streets denies them the drugs to kill themselves with. Perhaps Mr. McCardell favours some form of euthanasia for those who have not, for the convenience of Mr McCardell and those who wish to live in the type of society he advocates, killed themselves off before their drug supply miraculously disappeared.
Mr. McCardell is apparently to be numbered among those who wring their hands and decry a society where people step over those in need of help and walk away. As long as the person in need of help is suffering from something the Mr. McCardell deems worthy of help. I have no desire to live in the type of society that would grow out of adopting Mr. McCardell’s spiritually bankrupt ideology.
No. if you want to have a positive affect on these complex social problems, indeed a positive effect on Canada and Canadian society as a whole, you will not find it in the mindless demagogy of Mr. McCardell and his ilk. You will not find it in throwing drug dealers and addicts in jail; not in arbitrarily longer jail sentences; nor in ignoring the realities of addiction and the drug trade; assuredly you will not find it in wishing for the death of those suffering addiction for down that path lies corruption and darkness.
No, if we wish to find solutions we need to heed the wisdom of the great minds of the human race such as Albert Einstein. We must amend the criminal code, with draconically punishing sentence lengths, to make stupidity of the proportions and criminality demonstrated by Mr. McCardell as much against the law as it is against the public interest and intelligent thought. This would mean that at least minimal levels of intelligence will become a requirement for employment in the news media resulting in significant increases of useful information transfer to the public while cutting off the current deluge of misinformation. While an informed public does not guarantee wise decisions it at least affords a fighting chance for common sense and thoughtfulness to win out.
For as Albert noted: “The two most abundant elements in the Universe are hydrogen and human stupidity, and of the two I am not sure about hydrogen.” With the challenges facing our society, our country and our world today, we can no longer afford the luxury of human stupidity of the magnitude demonstrated by Mr. McCardell and those who foist him upon us.