It’s two o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep. I have some work to get done tomorrow, but in the meantime, the only thing on my mind right now is the fact that in the middle of the day today—or rather, yesterday—someone was nearly shot to death outside my apartment. These things happen, and they’re usually not random. I’m not fearful and I don’t think I should find a new place to live. But it was something that was said on the 11 o’clock news that has me up thinking.

Calgary’s drug scene was brought up as one of the potential motivations behind the shooting, and understandably so given the location. Not too far from my apartment is a park that people around here know not to go into after dark. Crackheads supposedly hang out there late at night, and it seems better to err on the side of caution when choosing a route to walk home at night. Meanwhile, Mac’s, the 24-hour convenience store near 8th street train station, dubbed “Crack Mac’s” by the people who live here has been under such surveillance these days that the word is the drug bazaar moved 6 or so blocks south to a different Mac’s also on 8th. That’s about two blocks from the shooting, which was about a block from the park you don’t go into at night.

Why does any of this matter at all? The fallout from this shooting will likely be seen in the weeks that follow. Calgary has had a number of gang-related murders in the past few months, and the result has been an increased focus on gang violence. If this particular attack was drug motivated, I expect we’ll be hearing rhetoric from the police chief before long about the dangers of drug use. In Calgary we’ve seen how the police commonly react to these sorts of things. The same police chief wanted to increase the the legal drinking age in Alberta because he figured it’d reduce the mess of brawls that have been pouring out of them in the past few months. Instead, we’ve seen provincial laws stipulating new regulations on minimum drink prices at bars in an attempt to curb binge drinking, which supposedly ultimately lead to barroom brawls.

This is all part of an infinitely continuing trend of treating the symptom of a problem instead of the actual cause. I suspect the motivation behind police chief Rick Hanson’s support for an increased drinking age in Alberta stems from some study—or at least one would certainly hope that there exists some rational basis for this claim—that shows that it is the younger crowd that starts these brawls, and by this logic, if you stop those who start the brawls from coming into the bars, you’ll solve the problem, right? Wrong.

The question shouldn’t just be who is starting these fights but why. If bar fights are a result of young kids going to bars and getting drunk and not knowing how to handle themselves, raising the drinking age is unlikely to solve that problem. Instead, you’ll have 19 year olds getting into fights instead of 18 year olds. If that’s the case, the real solution to the problem seems to be quite the opposite to that of what Mr. Hanson suggests. Raising legal drinking ages won’t solve the problem. It’ll just lead to more crime as he makes criminals out of 18 year olds sneaking into bars.

Cannabis prohibition in Calgary, like many parts of Canada seems to be a law that’s largely unenforced. Technically, they’d be well within their legal right to start charging honest hard-working cannabis users with possession, once again making criminals out of people who have chosen to not follow unjust laws. We’ve seen in the past that when something goes wrong that is remotely related to cannabis users—even if the only relation is crack and cannabis are illicit drugs—public officials who can’t appear soft on crime crack down on drug use across the board. I believe it was former U.S. president Jimmy Carter who, up until a member of his staff was publicly discovered to have a cocaine problem, was interested in looking into easing the penalties for pot possession in the States.

Does this mean the Calgary Police Service is going to go off on a crusade against pot smokers? Probably not. I mean, I don’t always agree with the guy, but I suspect it’ll take two or three more incidents such as this before police chief Hanson looks to expand the budget for the drug unit. He’s not totally irrational. I can’t speak for the mainstream media’s reaction to the whole thing on the other hand, but surely they are capable of holding back from sensationalism, right?