By Beryl Wajsman
Tuesday, May 16, 2006a young Montrealer named Christopher Statham was spot-checked, without any probable cause, crossing the Vermont border. He had no criminal record and was a regular visitor to Vermont ski resorts. Customs agents found that he had a small amount of marijuana in a cigarette pack and called the state police.
as part of Vermont's "zero tolerance" policy he was ordered to write a public "mea culpa" for his "crime" of possession. This demand by Vermont police authorities smacks of the worst excesses of public self-abnegation practiced during the vilest periods of Soviet Stalinism and repeated in the re-education camps during Mao's cultural revolution and throughout Cambodia's Khmer Rouge régime. We should not countenance having young people stigmatized by revanchiste law. Particularly foreign law. We have enough trouble with our own nanny-state tyrants.
What makes this incident even sadder is that a Canadian media outlet, The Montreal Gazette , was used as the vehicle for this "Scarlet Lettering" by american authorities and published Statham's apology today. Our Canadian Fourth Estate became complicit in the perpetuation of statocratic interference in what should be a private affair of a citizen. and from where I sit, compromised the independence of the press. If we believe in separation of church and state we should have just as much fidelity to the independence of press from state.
"Zero tolerance" is a policy that has no substantive statistical support and is nothing more than cheap sloganeering pandering to the most retrograde elements within society and bolstering the return of ineffective recidivist blue laws.
Recent history, from the time of Prohibition in 1920s america, has demonstrated that attempts by the state to engage in social engineering are doomed to failure. People will get what they want. They will engage in their pleasures. and if these pleasures are made illegal it will only strengthen the so-called criminal elements among us. The only proper role for state security is to protect citizens from violence and from threats of, or incitement to, violence. To protect us from each other, not from ourselves
Victimless crimes such as drug possession have no place in our criminal codes. On practical grounds these laws sap police resources better used against violent offences. On moral grounds they abridge the liberties each individual is endowed with in natural law as a birthright and these cannot be ceded to the state.
The new prohibitionists seek to enforce anti-liberal sentiments curtailing the basic patrimony of every human being to be let alone in the conduct of their private lives. Government's role must be one of persuasion and education, not compulsion and coercion, no matter how odious a citizen's personal habit may be. The dark-side of our governors is that they engage in unbridled intervention in matters of private domain to punish the governed into virtuous conduct. But legislators don't know what's right for us. They barely know what's right for themselves.
as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter put it, " The security of one's person against arbitrary intrusion by the state is basic to a free society. any intrusion based solely on the authority of law-enforcement officials is inconsistent with the conception of human rights enshrined in history and in the basic constitutional documents of free nations."
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