VIOLENT VALENTINE'S DAYS -- THERE AND HERE, THEN AND NOW

Submachineguns, armoured cars, killings on city streets, in
alleyways, on suburban cul-de-sacs (aptly, French for "dead ends");
the citizenry petrified of getting caught in the crossfire.

At least seven deaths, unprecedented carnage in the beautiful city by
the water. The names of gangsters in the news: WASP, Irish, Slavic, a
cross-section of society. One miraculously surviving shooting victim
when asked by police to name his assailant insisted: "I wasn't shot!"
Then died.

All part of the turf war in the struggle for control of an illicit
trade of immense profitability. I am speaking of Vancouver? Actually,
no, merely celebrating the 80th anniversary of the St. Valentine's
Day Massacre in Chicago.

Despite the U.S. Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency's
bald-faced denial of the facts, the prohibition on legal sales of
alcoholic beverages led to an unprecedented era of gang activity,
arrests and incarcerations, killings of federal agents, corruption of
police and vendetta homicides perhaps most famously exemplified on
that fateful day when Al Capone's gang decided to rid themselves of
Bugsy Moran and his gang who had been hijacking liquor shipments.

It was part of a bloody era of violence and killings that started to
decline only when the Volstead Act was finally repealed.

Why was it ever enacted? Because the first feminist movement in the
United States, the Women's Temperance Union, bolstered by church and
other social engineering movements argued that alcohol was extremely
addictive and led to family distress, unemployment and violence
against women and children. That despite the fact that there is not
an iota of behavioral or physiological evidence that alcohol causes
violent or aggressive behaviour.

What it does do is make imbibers think they are more attractive,
better singers, joke tellers, lovers or even dancers than they would
otherwise judge themselves to be.

So on a typical day in Vancouver, a metro area of near three million
people, perhaps one million will have a drink or more. Many acts will
be facilitated, some social, some anti-social, but perhaps only a few
hundred will engage in aggressive violence.

Why? Because alcohol is a powerful drug, but it is merely a
disinhibitor, hence a social lubricant so that those few harbouring
anger and hatred who are not properly socialized or mentally
prepared, are more likely to manifest it. In fact since prohibition
was repealed, there have been problems with alcohol addiction and
health issues, but the vast majority of people's drinking has not led
to the downfall of society.

More poignantly almost no one has engaged in violent liquor wars
because there are no high stakes -- booze is legal.

It should be noted that president Woodrow Wilson, in his wisdom,
vetoed the original Volstead Act but was overruled by Congress, and
that modern feminists have moved on to wrongheadedly focus on
pornography and men as the causes of violence against women and
children, once again with legislative and policy decisions that are
tragically devastating for society, but those are other stories.

The repeal of the act led to a dramatic reduction in homicide that
lasted until the 1960s hailed an escalation of gang violent crime and
homicide that brings us up to the present day.

What coincided with that trend is the frightening escalation in the
trafficking of illicit drugs, in spite of the massive response by law
enforcement agencies in Canada and internationally, reaching societal
crisis proportions in Mexico but catching our attentions and
reigniting our fears even in Canada, and especially in the
traditionally bucolic environs of Vancouver.

Perhaps most chillingly -- not only as a criminologist but as a
social psychologist who studies societal contagion effects -- it came
home to me when I realized I personally knew two women who had lost
beautiful and innocent young sons to random violence in our
entertainment districts.

They were not victims of gang violence but of a secondary phenomenon,
machismo-mimicry, that is manifested in gun-wielding and low
thresholds for threats to one's ego.

Despite the endless and empty prattling of countless learned
commentators regarding the need for increased police resources and
other banal, media time fillers -- something we should have learned
in the 1930s -- the only panacea for this increasingly anxiety
provoking state of affairs confronting, not only our young men but
threatening to permeate the community, is the legalization and
government regulation of illegal drugs.

The myths regarding their alleged harms are nothing compared to the
myths perpetuated by social crusaders to terrible effect, regarding
those other evils I have referred to besetting our society.

The jury is in and if we can handle alcohol, the most powerful,
addictive and dangerous of drugs, we can handle just about anything.

And everything is readily available right now out there to all of us
anyway, but at terrible cost to society. Future St. Valentine's Days
deserve kinder, more loving memories.