This opinion piece has been submitted by a person who was a petty drug dealer for some 20 years. He has submitted his views provided that his identity remains anonymous.

Bermuda has been rocked with yet another round of lethal holiday violence, and we must look to history to prevent it from recurring.

There are parallels between the recent bloodshed and the US' 1929 Valentine's Day Massacre, in which Al Capone's South Side Chicago Gang ruined a peaceful holiday with carnage against his North Side rivals.

In 1929, well-meaning churches and other civic leaders had managed to ban alcohol across America. Church leaders thought that banning that drug would lead people to stop drinking, the same way local church leaders mistakenly believe that human laws can prevent people from gambling, using drugs, or having extramarital relationships. Decades of history have proven that good morals cannot be legislated. While church morals should certainly be preached, taught, applauded and practised, government cannot be expected to enforce the wishes of those churches, especially where one church's belief system may be at odds with others. For example, some churches preach temperance while other churches use alcohol for religious rites.

At a certain point we must ask ourselves if the consequences of vice prohibition have become more harmful to society than the vices themselves. Local gang funding comes almost entirely from drug trade, and therefore gang violence can also be attributed to drug trade. In Prohibition-era America, the artificially high price of illegal alcohol caused US gangs to become incredibly wealthy and violent, culminating in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and ultimately leading to the end of Prohibition.

In the case of drug abuse, whether illegal drugs like heroin and cannabis, or regulated semi-legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, the most successful prevention efforts have occurred with legal drugs which are regulated and tracked. These drugs are abstained from by church-goers, even without legal bans, and when someone becomes addicted or otherwise abuses a legal drug, they may easily attain treatment, maintain employment, and lead a semi-functional life throughout their addiction, which is not the case for abusers of illegal drugs.

For the sake of morality's message, we are sentencing our nation's youth to bloody, brutal deaths far worse than mere drug addiction – and we haven't made so much as a dent in the actual drug problem.

No one is suggesting legalising drugs outright in a free-for-all market, with unregulated drug dealers running around the streets – we already have that.

Policy reform advocates instead propose regulating drugs, so that actual restrictions can be enforced. Right now, for example, in the US, children can more easily obtain crack cocaine than they can obtain tobacco, because tobacco sale is regulated and has enforceable restriction against sale to minors. Crack sales, on the other hand, are almost totally unmonitored and free of legal action.

In areas where drug use has been regulated (India, Switzerland, UK, Bolivia, Mexico, California, Holland, and elsewhere), moralists' fears of rampant usage increases have been unfounded – in fact, regulated drug use rates often drop.

Many nations have experimented with the idea of drug regulation over past decades, and have generally been rebuffed by the all-powerful US. Lately, that trend has been crumbling as the US' moral authority has been washed away by the excesses of arrogant, greedy foreign policy, and as economic downturns and drug violence have forced Latin American states to turn towards legalisation as a way to take funds away from the drug gangs.

With the US in financial upheaval, more and more cash-strapped state governments are decriminalising drugs as a way to save money and even raise tax revenue ordinarily lost to underground drug sales.

In the interests of stopping the gang violence, achieving meaningful drug prevention, and saving lives, we should formally approach the US Counsel General and suggest that US drugs and guns are shredding the fabric of Bermudian society. We should tell them that unless they are able to staunch the flow of drugs and guns into Bermuda, we will have no choice but to regulate these drugs to protect ourselves from the hail of bullets emanating from US guns.

Or, for the sake of sending the right "message" to our youth, we can maintain the status quo, leaving our children to bleed in the streets, leaving our addicts un-noticed and untreated, letting gangs infiltrate prisons, Customs, Parliament and Police (and let's not kid ourselves about that truth for one minute longer – dope money and serious gang threats are enough to turn good government employees into criminals).

There are two main forces blocking life-saving drug policy reform: churches and drug gangs. The drug gangs will probably not be willing to give up their income, and right now, the churches' opposition to life-saving measures (for the sake of church law) are not only helping the gangs, but also are breaking Jesus' lesson about doing right by our fellow man. Once Jesus preached that a farm animal shouldn't be left to die solely due to church law bans on rescuing animals on the Sabbath. Today, we preach Jesus' gospel, but leave our children dying in the streets for the sake of an abstinence law which is utterly ignored by drug users anyway. With any luck, Bermuda's clergy will look to God for wisdom, and will re-learn Jesus' lesson that saving lives is more important than doctrine.