The U.S. refused to allow a Canadian to enter our country because said Canadian had written about his experiments with LSD, which took place 32 years ago.

globeandmail.com: A few trips decades ago put an end to this one
Because Mr. Feldmar had never been charged with possession of the once-popular illegal drug, privacy advocates are even more alarmed by the way U.S. border guards at the busy Peace Arch crossing near Vancouver found out about it.

The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head.

Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer involved in privacy issues for 20 years, said the incident sends a frightening message to Internet users, particularly those who bare their souls online.

“Don’t ever put anything about any illegal activity on the Internet,” Mr. Oscapella warned yesterday. “It leaves a digital footprint for all to see, and it’s there forever.

“We’ve gone beyond Orwellian measures. The state can now do things with a flick of the switch that used to be incredibly labour intensive.”

I wonder if my plans to travel around the world for a few months when I’m 45 (after Jedi dies and before I get a new puppy) will be curtailed by having written all that I have written? At least consensual sex with adults isn’t illegal in most of the places I’d like to visit.

How would anyone ever learn about anything if no one ever wrote about it?

In this case, the guy is a widely published and apparently respected Vancouver psychotherapist.

It makes me wonder, sometimes, whether Americans have forgotten how to think critically. At the same time, I do recognize some validity of what one of the officials said — the guy had broken a law, and if we have a law, being too selective about what laws we enforce and when we enforce them undermines the whole point of having laws in the first place. If it’s a stupid law we need to change the law. And so on.

But. If you’re going to ban a person from the country because he broke a drug law 32 years ago and then wrote about it, then we deprive the US of lots of scholars, scientists, writers, entertainers, thinkers, and visitors from whom we might otherwise have learned something.

I just had a friend-of-a-friend stay in my house while I was traveling, and we overlapped for a couple of days, and it was a wonderful cultural exchange. I would not be surprised if at one time in his younger days he tried something at home that is illegal here; he’s currently involved in loving activity that is (bafflingly) still illegal in certain states; and my life would be less enriched if I’d never met him.

I hope the US border agents have better things to do than protect the country from non-violent tourists, and that as other incidents like this come to light we will work to enact smarter laws and policies around this sort of thing. We just haven’t been routinely naked for long enough for the rules to catch up to a sensible balance.