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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Canada: Editorial: It's Time To Legalize Pot
National Post (Canada)
Saturday 01 Apr 2000 Subject: Canada: Editorial: It's Time To Legalize Pot Pubdate: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 Source: National Post (Canada) TIME TO LEGALIZE POT Last year, the Association of Canadian Police Chiefs announced support for the legalization of simple possession of marijuana and hashish. Recently Keith Martin, a Reform MP (and a practising emergency room physician), introduced a private members bill that would decriminalize marijuana. And while his bill has languished, its gist has been adopted by the Liberals. At the final plenary session of the Liberal convention, delegates backed a proposal to decriminalize simple pot possession. This movement to call off the war against marijuana is gaining strength in other countries as well. A report prepared for the British government by Viscountess Runciman, Drugs and the Law, suggested this week that marijuana possession should be punishable only by fines. In the United States, half a dozen state referendums since 1992 have urged the legalization of marijuana for medical uses. And some legislators -- such as Republican congressmen Jim Ramstad (MN) and Tom Campbell (CA) -- have publicly charged that the "war on drugs" has been a costly failure. None of this suggests that decriminalizing marijuana would be a positive good. The drug is still something to be discouraged. It is mind-altering; and smoking it is both physically and psychologically unhealthy. If recreational marijuana use could be wiped out at one stroke, the world would be a better place -- as it would be if tobacco could be removed from the world and our memories. But such developments are a more impossible dream than anything experienced under hashish. And the actual policy we have -- the war on drugs -- does a very great deal of observable harm. Because the drug trade is illegal, it is unregulated and untaxed; there is no quality control and some illegal drugs are strengthened with cheap poisons; disputes are settled gangland style by sawn-off shotguns; massive teams of policemen are diverted from solving worse crimes; others are corrupted; and respect for the law is eroded when millions of young people are enticed into flouting a law that is itself enforced capriciously. The sum of all of these social harms outweighs the threats posed by the object of prohibition itself -- and that prohibition is manifestly ineffective. Even under the war on drugs, they are readily available in any North American city. And though marijuana is dangerous, exactly how dangerous is it? According to the World Health Organization, every year tobacco kills 3.5-million people directly or indirectly. Alcohol kills another 750,000. How many are killed by marijuana? None. Almost none anyway. According to The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, "there are no confirmed published cases worldwide of human deaths from cannabis poisoning ... the most serious possible consequence of acute cannabis use is a road-traffic accident if a user drives while intoxicated." Marijuana, moreover, is not addictive and, unlike alcohol, does not promote aggressive behaviour. In a report on the medicinal uses of marijuana commissioned by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Institute of Medicine concluded last year that "except for the harms associated with smoking, the adverse effects of marijuana are within the range tolerated for other medications." Yet Canadian police departments spend millions on the criminal campaign against this substance. Almost three out of every four drug arrests involve cannabis. Cannabis possession alone accounts for almost half of all offences. Some sufferers of cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and epilepsy who rely on marijuana to effectively palliate their symptoms are prosecuted as criminals -- or hamstrung with maddening bureaucratic roadblocks. And all the while, cigarettes are sold over the counter in pharmacies and convenience stores; and alcohol is on the menu at Red Lobster. We try to contain the ill effects of alcohol and tobacco by public education, labelling requirements, strict quality control, restricting access to minors, and so on. Over the centuries our society has developed cultural safeguards and social conventions that help us to use alcohol wisely. And we distinguish between the use and abuse of these socially acceptable drugs in a way that we have not yet learned to do toward marijuana. Marijuana legalization has long been the subject of academic debate. The time has come to turn conjecture into law. Canada's police, judges and prosecutors have better things to do with their time than track down those who produce and consume a substance no more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. We should begin the decriminalization of marijuana by immediately reducing the punishments that can be imposed for its possession to modest fines -- and start thinking about how to regulate its use.
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