A Couple Of Canada's Finest

[ralph]

Sandeep Hans, 29, of Mississauga, and Lachhman Chahal, 37, of Brantford, have been charged with the importation of a controlled substance and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking, in what has been called the largest seizure of cocaine at a land border crossing in Canada.

http://www.trucknews.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=65819&issue=02232007

[Accremonious]

Canada's finest? I object to this caption. Do we even know that they have citizenship? .....yet?
I, for one would like to see the criminal code amended and the constitution: anyone caught and convicted of possession for the purpose of distribution of a controlled substance for the illegal recreational pharmaceutical business should lose their citizenship and be banished to an Arctic Island .........Permanently!
Prison is not a deterrent, and banishing removes the perps from circulation!

[Drifter]

Even if they had citizenship strip it and kick them out!!! Am I a hardliner?? Damn straight I am. How about send them back to the U.S. prison system and tag them Al-Quida??

[Accremonious]

This problem of narcotics has been around a long time. I recall reading articles in The Saturday Evening Post Mag. as a teenager in the mid/early 50's. A solution proposed back then and never fully tried was a multiple approach:
1. Legalize but restrict use to registered addicts who would have to surrender all licenses to operate vehicles and machinery, etc.
2. Restrict supply to government controlled/run agencies with licensed medical practicioner oversight.
3. Restrict users to employment that is easily monitored and supervised ie. protect the public from any possible performance consequences.

The whole idea is to remove the profit motive from organized and disorganized criminals. The daily maintainence dose of cocain or heroin is a very small dollar and cents amount when the risk of being caught and jailed is removed. I know that the Methodone supply clinics try to do this, but it is a failure from the over all point of view of reduction in the crime scene.
Just on the horizon is a new testing machine being developed in Alberta that analyzes body metabolites in just minutes using a portable hand held device. It is a nuculear magnetic resonance chromatograph which is a mouthful to say, but it can identify what diseases you have or are prone to, what you just had for lunch, and what state your body functioning is in. Everything almost to when you last passed wind. It will be primarily used for identification of cancers as an early detection method but it is projected to drastically revolutionize medical diagnostics by virtue of its portability and computer identification of your bodies ability to convert food to wastes and what these wastes contain (over 2500 organic chemicals at last reported count). It will be a urinalysis or blood serum tester. This was an article I read online in the Edmonton Journal via www.Canada.com earlier this month. So expect that where the breathalyzer left off in the detection of alcohol consumption this NMRC will take over. The developer scientists involved might just be future Nobel prize winners.