Editor:

Re: Odd Squad (Cocaine new drug of choice for Coast youth, Coast Reporter, April 27).

It is easy to see that health and evidenced-based drug education will not be able to deliver nearly as much benefit as it could unless law enforcement gets out of the way. This necessary change depends not on law enforcers but on lawmakers.

Law enforcers take a binding oath to enforce the laws that are laid down by legislators, and so it is those legislators who must change the drug laws so that the duties of law enforcers no longer conflict with effective public health and evidenced based drug education.

Generally, such programs are not designed to educate at all; they are designed to ‘send a message.’ Students we have interviewed over the past 10 years see from their own observations that ‘messages about drugs’ often bring extreme exaggeration, it is prohibition, not drugs that cause most of the destruction and so students tend to ignore the ‘message’ entirely. 

Judith Renaud

Gibsons