ROCK WASHING MACHINE

Outrageous news comes to us from a Montreal courtroom: Not only does the
Rock Machine motorcycle gang have no female members, but neither does its
bitter rival, the Hells Angels. Worse, Rock Machine founding member Andre
Sauvageau was caught on tape making a disparaging reference to women and
saying they belong "in the kitchen making chicken-noodle soup." Opportunity
knocks.

For as this newspaper has reported on a number of occasions, victimless
crimes create enormous problems for the legal system. They invite
corruption, and moreover they are very hard to prosecute because the
"victims" of drug deals are not as likely to complain to the police as,
say, the victims of muggings.

Various alarming suggestions for dealing with this matter have been made,
most of them openly contemptuous of civil liberties. And, indeed, the
current proceedings against the Rock Machine may well be vulnerable to a
challenge on the grounds that the law in question violates the right to
free association.

But there is an alternative approach, ingeniously employed during
Prohibition against Al Capone. The bootleg king, you may recall, was
eventually jailed not for selling liquor or for killing people, but for
income tax evasion. In prison he just faded ignominiously away.

So if they aren't willing to adopt the obvious solution of drug
legalization, governments can tackle the organized crime arising from
modern Prohibition through gender discrimination suits. On top of all the
other benefits, imagine a hardened biker criminal having to admit to other
inmates that he's in for pay equity offences.

What a way to make him an object of ridicule rather than fear.