Editor:
Thank you for printing Ms. Rantanen’s painful and tragic piece about her son’s death by overdose and your accompanying editorial (“And the emergency goes on”). Imagine her grief and tragedy multiplied by 30,000 i.e. the number of deaths since the health crisis was declared in 2016. If 30,000 people had died in aircraft accidents, do you not think governments would have decisively intervened? Simply put: the wrong people are doing the dying.
Tobacco and alcohol addict, yet their sale is legal – perhaps because governments reap huge taxes thereby? Gambling addicts, yet casinos and online gambling are legal…taxes, remember? Is decriminalization and safe supply so hard a concept to understand? In the end you can’t control something by outlawing it. You can control it by legalizing, regulating, and taxing it.
Doug Baker
Hopkins Landing
