Consumer prices remain stable and in many cases are dropping as
production of goods increases in the socialist countries, swelling the
real income of the people. Photo shows shoppers in East Berlin.

about drug problem?

By ALD. HARRY RANKIN

Vancouver has become one of
the main centres of drug addiction
in Canada, if not in all of North
America. I'm referring to the worst
type of drugs — hard drugs such as
heroin.

It is a source of concern to all
thinking citizens, the police and
courts, city council, social workers,
and especially the parents of
teenaged children. Seizure of drug
caches, undercover work by the
RCMP, widespread arrests — none
of these have failed to halt the
growing use of drugs.

Is there anything that can be
done about it?

One group of people have come
up with a solution that makes
sense. It is not original, but it has
not been tried in Canada. What is
unique about the proposal is that it
comes from a group of drug ad-
dicts, hard core addicts who know
that they will never be able to

Big U.S. oil companies behind
crisis, charges Oregon paper

In an editorial entitled, ‘the
Truth About the Oil Shortage,” the
Sunday Oregonian of December 23,
makes the charge that ‘‘the federal
(U.S.) government and the' major
oil corporations are responsible for
this country’s energy crisis.”’

The editorial says that ‘anyone
who doubts that statement should
read the 40,000-word report on the
subject, “Staff Study of the Over-
sight and Efficiency of Executive
Agencies With Respect, to the
Petroleum Industry, Especially as
It Relates to Recent Fuel Shor-
tages.”

The report costs $1.00 and is
available from the U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, Washington,
D.C

The editorial also draws atten-
tion to a recent three-part synopsis
of the report by John S. Knight,
chairman of the Knight
Newspapers, which is available for
a self-addressed, stamped envelope
from the Promotion Department,
Detroit Free Press, 321 W.
Lafayette, Detroit, Mich.

with Ralph Nadar who declared
some weeks ago that the oil shor-
tages in the United States were
“orchestrated for political and
economic benefit by the oil in-
dustry and that it chose to place
the country in a short-term energy
scare to gain dividends.”’

Some facts brought out in the
Oregonian editorial are as follows:

(1) During the third quarter of
1973 oil industry profits soared.
The worlds largest oil corporation,
Exxon, increased its profits by 80
percent. Standard Oil of Indiana in-
creased its profits by 37 percent;
Gulf, 91 percent; Mobil, 64; Getty,
71; Shell, 23; Phillips, 43; Cities
Service, 61; Standard, Ohio, 14 per-
cent.

(2) While the nation undergoes
a fuel shortage, the oil industry in
the first nine months of 1973 ex-

ported 1.5 million barrels of dis-:

tillate fuel to foreign countries,
enough oil to heat 42,000 American
homes for the entire winter. Accor-
ding to Barlett and Steel (Don
Barlett and James Steel, of the
iladelphia Inquirer, two ace

reporters who wrote a series called
“Oil — The Created Crisis), the
five largest oil corporations in the
U.S. have sold twice as many
barrels of petroleum products
overseas as they have at home.

(3) Southern California, par-
ticularly the Los Angeles area, is
the richest gasoline market in the
world. Each time the price of gas-
oline goes up one cent the pre-tax
profits zoom $85 million a year for
Shell, Richfield, Union, Mobil,
Gulf, Standard of California and
Exxon.

““(4) The shortage of gasoline in
the U.S. this past summer was the
responsibility of the government
and the oil industry and not the

result of demands by the en-

vironmental protectionists or the
U.S. driving public.

(5) Last winter, after previously
refusing to lift restrictions on oil
imports, especially from Canada,
our most reliable neighbor, the
Nixon Administration assured the

See OIL CRISIS, pg. 12

shake the habit and will have to
live with it till they die.

They are a group of 14 drug ad-
dicts in the B.C. Penitentiary at
New Westminster. They frankly
admit to being ‘‘long time
‘criminal’ addicts with extensive
criminal records.’’ Their ages
range from 30 to 43 years. They are
serving sentences from:three years
to life. Either by choice or coercion
all of them have participated in
various
and in every case the results have
been zero. Their contention is that
they are criminals only because
they are addicts and not the other
way round, as is commonly believ-
ed.

They have arrived at the conclu-
sion, based on their own tragic ex-
periences, that the only way to halt
the drug traffic is to take the profit
out of it. They call it ‘“enormous”
profit.

And the way they propose it
should be done is along the lines of
the British system, where hardcore
incurable drug addicts can secure
drugs legally and cheaply under
government supervision. The
benefits, they assert, borne out by
the British approach, include a
decrease in the number of drug ad-
dicts, a drop in the crime rate
because it is not necessary for ad-
dicts to commit crimes to get the
money to buy drugs, and an oppor-
tunity for addicts to live a relative-
ly normal and useful life.

To prove that this could also be

rehabilitation programs.

possible in Canada, this group?
prison addicts is offering. itsell?
guinea pigs for an experimel
They are not asking for any speck
favors. What they propose is
they should be provided with drill
while in prison under the stil
control of a prison hospital settill
and that if and when they #
released on the expiry of th®
terms, that their rehabilitation!
clude continued supply of dri
under government and_ hed
authority supervision. yy
They readily admit that serid
flaws in the new system of the @
tribution of ‘drugs which thé
propose may develop, but point
that “the new-system could
possibly be worse than the existil
heroin Black Market.”
Since it is a fact that drug tre
ficking is increasing, and since il!
a fact that only the victims al
smaller pushers are being arreslé
but never the Mr. Bigs behind tf
well-organized system of illeg!
drug distribution, what have ©
got to lose by carrying out the ®
periment proposed by these pris?
addicts?
I think we should give it a ty)
Their basic contention that dil
trafficking flourishes and grol
because it is highly profitable @
hardly be refuted. Logic woul
support their position that th
basic way to get at the problem!
to take out the profit. Then-with!!
main incentive gone, drug tl?
ficking should diminish.

Photo shows one of the Canadian forest machines, the “Tim berjatt
grapple skidder, which was exhibited at the recent Lesdremash 7
exhibit in Moscow of forest equipment. The Canadian exhibit W!
impressive, but Canadian experts were also impressed by !

sophisticated equipment used in Soviet forestry.

Tom

Ss" years ago, and not so many at that, workers in

the ‘‘sweated industries” such as the needle
trades, restaurants, textile, boot and shoe, etc. were the
most militant sector on the Canadian labor scene. Especial-
ly in eastern Canada, in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton and
down in the Niagara areas. Today this most militant section
is now probably the most docile. For them the
“sweatshop” has become the rule, rather than the excep-
tion.

First let us pose the key question, who strangled this
militancy? The bosses? Not on your life. The bosses have
taken advantage of the strangulation process and the times,
but the real job of choking off the militancy and assuring
that sweatshop conditions will prevail, lies at the door of a
high-priced non-elective trade union bureaucracy;
“‘organizers’’ who go through the motions of “organizing,”
but organize nothing, except that of drawing their own fat
paychecks, and making anti-communism their main stock-
in-trade!

In the old days of the Workers Unity League (WUL) .

when organizing meant storming every unorganized in-
dustry, and especially those in the category of veritable
slave pens, the average weekly wage of WUL organizers

SSESISSSSSASSSRSSSESSESE SESE SSSR SSS aSSatatecacenteeet eee

was roughly five or ten dollars a week (when it was

available, which wasn’t often, but they brought organiza-
tion and improved wage and working conditions in the
sweatshop. This the workers knew and-understood, and the
militant upsurge gave protective coverage to the gains won.

The bosses naturally screamed blue ruin. A few closed
shop while others took flight to where they thought the
possibilities of cheap labor still remained untouched by
WUL interference, but the industry in general largely
remained and faced up to the reality that the dignity of
labor meant something more than empty rhetoric.

Nowadays many of these so-called ‘‘organizers” draw
down a weekly wage of approximately $250 or
more, well over twice the amount of the “‘sweatshop”’
workers they are presumed to represent and service. On
wage demands (not their own,) they are most conservative,
and while spirals go into orbit in terms of dollars, they still
talk in terms of cents and—or what this or that employer
can afford. \

Happily of course, not all workers in most industries
are saddled with such “organizers”, The tempo of strike
struggles in B.C. and throughout Canada is the best proof of
that. The current profit balance sheets of most of B.C. big
monopoly concerns, including a lot of the lessr ones, are
still eloquent proof that the bosses, by and large, can ‘“‘af-
ford.’’ Even substantial wage demands, won or being
fought for, are eaten up by the prices gouge, even before
the worker has had an opportunity to check over the in-
crease in his or her pay-envelope. The wage increase of the

bottom sweatshop worker, computed in terms of cents,

he or she wins such “affluence.” :
In B.C. with a “socialist” government in power in VE
toria, it would seem logical that substantial wage increa f
covering all workers, and especially those in the lower alt
lowest wage brackets, would be the order of the day. N
that a government should have the power to order, or co!
trol any wage levels, (apart from legislating a dece!
minimum wage into being), but the very existence of such!
government should serve to create the political atmosph¢
conducive to substantial living standard increases for 2%
After all what does socialism mean, if not the assuf
economic and social well being of the greatest numbe!:
If, as and when the Barrett NDP government g@
around to upping the minimum wage to its proposed lev
of $2.50-per hour, it should specify for the enlightenment f
all trade union organizers, elective or appointed, that suC
legislation does not require to be ‘‘negotiated wi!
employers, since it exists by government decree. TI
would have a salutory effect in many of the low-wage iff
dustries, and compel both bosses and so-called ‘uni0!
organizers” to realize the facts of life, and the bosses "
compile their profit balance sheets in keeping with
changes and needs of the times. ’
The march of labor like the struggle for genull
socialism cannot stand still, nor fiddle while the heritage
the people is being absorbed by alien and greedy monop?!
hands. “What We Want For Ourselves,” reads a BY
Federation of Labor slogan, ‘‘We Want For All". And th
means all . . . “‘sweatshops’’ included. }

seseatt

eteteretete! Poren