Pubdate: Wed, 25 Apr 2007
Source: Surrey Leader (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 Surrey Leader
Contact:  http://www.surreyleader.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1236
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n515/a05.html
Author: Russell Barth

HELPING ADDICTS SAVES MONEY

Re: "Drug addicts get free help while others don't," by letter writer
Ryan Green (The Leader, April 20).

What vitriolic fools like Ryan Green are unable or unwilling to
understand is that when we help the addicts with a dollar today, we
save $10 or $15 down the road. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but
obese, diabetic suburbanites are costing the taxpayers many times more
dollars each year than all the addicts getting free needles or drugs.

So by Green's logic, we should all forget that "a stitch in time saves
nine," stop helping the junkies and instead, help one more North
American couple produce an offspring.

Terrific! Just what the world needs. Yet another suburban family
driving their SUVs to Tim Hortons and Wal-Mart so they can waddle
around and buy their yuppie-larvae some more plastic toys that they
can throw into a landfill three months later.

My only consolation is that all of these microwave-fed, sugar-charged,
iPod-wearing brats will have to work extra hard to pay for the
environmental and drug war calamity left by their parents. Pausing
only briefly, of course, to wipe the bottoms of their aging,
insatiable, invalid parents who refused to fix things back in 2007
when they had the chance.

We are all reaping as we have sown, and will continue to do so. Ryan
Green included.

RUSSELL BARTH

Ottawa
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MAP posted-by: Steve Heath