The Bitch

Way back in the dark ages,when addiction was considered a plague and the police and the courts thought they could arrest their way out of the drug problem.There was a law introduced that was intended to deal with people who made their living solely off of the proceeds of crime.Now I'm not a lawyer or a politician and I have no psychic ability but I'm pretty sure the law was intended to strike at career criminals and gang lords that were the purveyors of misery and the top of the criminal network.Of course that wasn't who felt the heat.Drug addicts were usually the ones that got caught all the time and racked up the longest rap sheets so they were who wound up being classed as habitual criminals.Habitual,hence "The Bitch".Now ,this wasn't just a bitch because it sounded good.It meant that the convict was to be held at:"The Warden's Discretion".Until the prison warden said the con was rehabilitated,he stayed in jail.I can't remember if it was for 14 years or life.I'm pretty sure the bitch meant life.There was a case where a guy got 14 years for stealing a can opener a few days after his release but that was another horror story.There were many and they varied in their bizzare nature.Why am I dredging up this little history lesson?Because today,the attorney general of the province of British Columbia stated that he thought chronic offenders deserved just such treatment.Chronic offenders are also drug addicts and not any criminal masterminds.Our attorney general isn't even pretending to be trying to deal a death blow to organized crime.He is,once again,and this has happened before,trying to make addiction itself a crime.There is the carrot(treatment)and the stick(prison for"a very long time").This scares me to death.This Is like the chemotherapy of drug addiction.You either cure the patient or you kill him.This is the most inhuman and evil statement an attorney general has made in a very long time.It's my fear that people have forgotten the horror stories and injustices of the past and will allow this kind of penal approach to rear it's ugly head 40 years after it was put down as cruel and unusual punishment.There is so much evidence that forced treatment does not work that to even suggest such a thing should be a crime in itself.Mr Oppal knows this.Like all the current crop of politicians,he is pandering to the uninformed people that don't remember the past and don't care what he does with drug addicts.They just want the problem to go away.