Lincoln Stein no longer recommends the use of the visible CGI object, simply because the number of CGI objects in a typical program is merely one. Instead, pull in the methods you need as subroutines. If parameter access is all that's required, use:

use CGI qw(param);
...
my $source = param('source');
my @destination_states = param('dest'); # multi-select
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But I typically use

use CGI qw(:all);
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since I'm also using the HTML generation shortcuts.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker