If this is our opposition, then we’ve already won

Wallace Gilby Craig writes in the North Shore News (Vancouver): Drug Legalization Lobby Lacks Business Plan
I don’t know who this guy is, but the depth of his stupidity is truly astonishing.

But according to our local drug-legalization crowd, led by marijuana’s false prophets, those feds just don’t understand the way we choose to live in la-la-land. This clutch of deceitful addicts and their myopic supporters propose legalization of cannabis and other illicit drugs, and the introduction of a bureaucratic system of drug regulation and distribution.
Their dream-world fantasy is based on a misty notion that illicit drugs could be produced and distributed like alcohol; that by the stroke of a pen the multi-billion dollar gangland drug manufacturing/importing/exporting business would be transformed into a legal, manageable and taxable government monopoly. Yet to be explained by marijuana’s false prophets: How a pussycat government monopoly hopes to persuade gangsters to trade in their guns for bongs, become choir boys, and refrain from continuing to sell drugs in an inevitable black market.
Fat chance, I say.
Marijuana’s false prophets send a steady stream of misinformation about a supposed similarity between the brief period when alcohol was prohibited and our hundred years of criminalization of illicit drugs, always ending with the same catchphrase: Let’s take control of marijuana — tax it, standardize and regulate it. […]
It is a false message. Gang violence and murder will not end with fairy-tale legalization. International crime syndicates, coupled with source countries around the world profiting in the production of narcotics, will continue to target Canada and the United States. Legalization would cause them to increase their activity to accommodate an increase in the numbers of addicts in Canada.

Forget all the other stupidity in those paragraphs. How does a sentient being come up with a thought process wherein criminal syndicates continue to sell illegal drugs at high profit when they’re available legally? Is Wallace unable to imagine a human who buys drugs? Does he think that the average drug purchaser would say “Well, I could purchase this legally at the corner and it would be safe and inexpensive. No, I think I’ll go get it from a criminal instead.” ? Does he not know that the black market cannot exist unless goods are illegal or over-regulated?
It gets worse. Wallace Gilby found the writings of Anthony Daniels, writing under the pseudnym of Theodore Dalrymple (probably because he had an inkling that he was writing complete crap). He shares some quotes with us, including:

“Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last 30 years without looking for more such slopes to slide down.”

What nonsense. Prohibition of substances is prohibition of substances. Period. And regardless of historical use, the laws of economics control. If there is demand, there will be supply, and prohibition won’t work.
Wallace Gilby Craig is a wanker, no doubt. But I’ve got to admit he can turn a colorful phrase, even if it is meaningless:

Dalrymple’s observations are apropos to today’s campaign of drug legalizers, including marijuana’s false prophets, to destroy the moral and ethical integrity of our precious individual liberty by including in it an absolute and unfettered right to dally with marijuana, chemical drugs and narcotics.
Wake up Canada! Dedicated narcissistic marijuana users and psychosocial hard drug abusers are parasitical citizens, engaged solely in their own interests and pleasures.
Their creed: I care for nothing but myself.

I particularly love that our push for legalization will destroy our precious individual liberty.