Jack Webster Broadcast On Drug Addicts And Traffickers

Wallace Craig – September 20, 2007

WEBSTER! An autobiography by Jack Webster published in 1990, chronicled many flashpoint happenings in Vancouver since the 1950s’; and provided an insight into various zany “only-in-Canada” politicians and other aspirant stuffed shirts.

In his preface Webster said “I consider myself a broadcast journalist, not a performer. My professional life has been devoted to making people talk, often about a personal tragedy, sometimes about an achievement, ideally about a controversy. Not for me the longwinded quote or the abstract debate.”

Born and raised in the industrial slums of Glasgow, a teen-age Webster gravitated to reporting and worked “round the clock at three (local) newspapers before moving to Fleet Street”; followed by emigration to Canada after the Second World War and a place among Vancouver's finest journalists.

Webster said that “Crime was long the mainstay of my reporting. The courts and police dockets provided endless grist for the mill. I knew dozens of junkies, pimps, burglars, small-time hoods and other rounders. Their picaresque exploits made marvellously entertaining material for television and radio. The stories of their lives provide a clearer picture of what is happening in a city than the boosterish twaddle usually provided by local politicians or the chamber of commerce.”

In the 1970s Webster worked out of 12 Water Street doing a talk show for CJOR/60. He was right in the middle of Skid-Road Vancouver.

Here is an extract from a Webster broadcast; 8:30 AM, Monday, November 11, 1974, concerning the rising tide of drug addiction and trafficking in British Columbia.

“The facts are:

“We have a minimum of 10,000 heroin and cocaine users in British Columbia this very day, and if we continue as we are, in five or ten years we will be supporting an addict population of anything from 50,000 to 200,000.

“We must make a moral decision against the use of alcohol, tobacco and hard and soft drugs. If we don’t, we are faced with the social disposal of human garbage. I suggest that there are no magic wands, but we must have a three-pronged attack: Enforcement, Treatment and Education.

“Enforcement

• The strictest law enforcement against importation and distribution of all forms of drugs; hard or soft.

• Amend the Bail Reform Act NOW and deny bail to all charged with trafficking in drug cases, but provide the speediest of trials.

• Proceed by direct indictment to the high court in all drug trafficking cases.

• Special year-round drug courts with no long summer vacations.

• Mandatory life sentences with no parole for all couriers and traffickers who are themselves non-users.

“Treatment

• Voluntary registration of heroin and cocaine addicts. After a period of 90 days, authorities to have the power to apprehend and detain suspected hard drug users for testing and treatment.

• Compulsory treatment of the two definable groups: new addicts, and confirmed addicts.

• Treatment of the new addicts shall be as in-patients in a hospital-educational setting. This treatment shall be compulsory and cold-turkey, no criminal stigma of any kind to be attached to this isolation and treatment.

• Maintenance of confirmed addicts as out-patients on methadone, only as an interim measure.

• If after release either category of addict commits a drug offence, this will call for return for compulsory treatment for an indefinite period, subject only to a yearly review.       

“Education

“We surely can come to the moral decision that we are against the destruction of human beings by alcohol, tobacco or drugs. Our school programme should be shaped accordingly, but most important of all there must be education by adult example. A moral restructuring of our educational system from elementary to university level must remove all drug permissive influences.

“If you agree with any part of my proposition:

“Sit down now and write your views in a personal letter to the Prime Minister of ‘Canada, he Minister of Justice, he Minister of National Health and Welfare, all in Ottawa; and to Premier Barrett and Health Minister Dennis Cocke in Victoria.

“Get on the back, by phone and letter, of your local MP and MLA and insist on an answer to two questions: What is your personal philosophy concerning the non-medical use of drugs? And second, what are you currently doing about this disastrous situation?

“Contact the Minister of Education or your local school Board and your children’s school staff and insist that they implement a preventative drug education programme, not as a special sensational programme, but as part and parcel of a whole life programme. 

“Give the police information that might prove helpful.

“Teach your children by personal example. Don’t have a double standard in your home.

“Keep a continuous pressure on authority at all levels of government. Never, ever stop trying!

“Fight against the legalization of heroin as you would fight against the free supply of liquor to alcoholics. (end of extract)

In his 1990 autobiography Webster recounted some of the many jousts he had with Pierre Trudeau including Trudeau’s evasive stance on marijuana. “Trudeau could not have been aware then what a hard line I had come to take on drugs. If a drug trafficker was jailed for seven years in prison, I’d be on the air saying the court was soft – he should have got seventy! I did a program on the toll it was taking in Vancouver by interviewing forty families who had lost sons and daughters to heroin addiction.”

“I always took a hard line on drugs.

“In the beginning, as far as I was concerned, junkies should be quarantined until they died or kicked the habit. Later, I came to see addiction as a more complex problem that was deeply rooted in prevailing social conditions.”

 Jack Webster – Master of Talk Radio and Talk TV – died March 2, 1999.