A Plea

I interrupt my regularly scheduled music-school-related programming to detour, for a moment, to Politics.

Harper is currently pushing a crime bill which will penalize growing pot more harshly than pedophilia.

As someone who has done volunteer work at a sexual assault centre, I've had fair exposure to what childhood rape can do to its survivors. How it can tear lives apart. How it can destroy families. How it can destroy children, and the adults they become (I've also seen tremendous strength, resiliency, and courage from survivors, but they've all worked through a period of intense pain).

Can pot that is grown ruin lives? Undoubtedly. Has pot addiction torn apart families? Of course. But, ultimately, before drug use reaches an addictive level, it is an individual's choice to do drugs. It's also worth noting that not everyone who smokes pot is a drug addict; drugs do not cause life-altering consequences to all users. Someone who grows pot is not forcing pot upon the people who will eventually use it.  

Children do not make a choice to be raped or assaulted. And children who are assaulted suffer consequences and trauma from that decision they didn't make.

Who deserves a harsher punishment: someone who makes a decision that enables someone else to make a decision that may potentially destroy his/her life, or someone who makes a decision that could potentially destroy a child's life?

I plead with all of you: sign a petition, write to your MP, do something -- anything.

Punishing someone who grows marijuana more harshly than someone who rapes a child is not only crazy, it's inhumane.

Kudos to Quebec and Ontario for saying no.
I'd simply remind the rest of the country, once again, that children who are raped don't have that option.