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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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CN ON: OPED: Ottawa Can Do The Right Thing On Pot
Rachel Giese Toronto Star (CN ON)
Thursday 03 Aug 2000 Subj: CN ON: OPED: Ottawa Can Do The Right Thing On Pot Pubdate: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 Source: Toronto Star (CN ON) Author: Rachel Giese OTTAWA CAN DO THE RIGHT THING ON POT About 50 years ago, my grandparents' farm was visited by some RCMP officers who had spotted poppies growing in my grandma's kitchen garden. She had planted the flowers for their seeds which, along with cabbages and potatoes, represent the holy trinity of Slovak cuisine. Struggling with her English, she tried to explain this, but the Mounties didn't buy it. Fuelled by the era's anti-drug, anti-immigrant bigotry, they assumed my grandma, a church-going mother of four, was a drug-dealing, Bolshevik-breeding degenerate, harvesting poppies to supply opium dens. They confiscated her flowers and warned her not to grow them any more. I remembered this story a couple of years ago when an acquaintance was arrested for drug possession. Two police officers had watched his apartment for several weeks, after spotting a marijuana plant growing near his window. He lived in a poor neighbourhood above an Asian restaurant and the police, fuelled by our era's anti-drug, anti-immigrant bigotry, assumed they had discovered a dealer's warehouse. They arrested him, trashed his apartment and seized all his illegal substances - which amounted to the plant they saw through the window and half a joint. All told, there was less than one ounce of marijuana, and that included the entire plant - roots, stem and all. Plus ca change and all that, only my friend's story has a much different ending than my grandma's. When his case made it to trial, the judge, with her docket full of accused rapists and robbers, turned to my friend, apologized to him and then lectured the arresting officers for wasting her time and taxpayers' money on such a trivial matter. She dismissed the charges. With Monday's Ontario Court of Appeal ruling on marijuana possession, cooler and more sensible heads like these may now prevail in the national debate on drugs. Upholding a decision in the case of an epileptic man who smokes pot to control his seizures, the court ruled that sections of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act dealing with marijuana possession are unconstitutional. It gave Ottawa one year to amend the act or lose it. Currently, people with medical conditions that can be relieved by marijuana can only get it legally through a federal health department program. It's a ridiculously time-consuming process that has only granted about 50 people legal access to pot, although an estimated 150,000 Canadians need it to ease the symptoms of AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, epilepsy and chronic pain. Reluctant to act despite increasing public acceptance of pot use, the federal government has a year to make one of three choices: appeal the decision; accept the decision and rewrite the law to allow for medicinal use; or do nothing and allow the law to be struck down, effectively legalizing marijuana use. Appealing the decision would just be boneheaded. By now, the medicinal benefits of pot are widely accepted. Who wants to be known as the government that denied cancer and AIDS patients access to an effective, side-effect-free drug? But I hope the feds go even further and let the law lapse. Canada's war on drugs is an ineffective, money- and resource-wasting, public-relations-driven American import. True, there is devastating social and economic fallout from addictions to substances ranging from illegal drugs such as heroin to legal ones such as alcohol and cigarettes. But addressing that problem through the criminal justice system has never and will never begin to solve it. According to a Statistics Canada annual report on crime, marijuana accounted for three-quarters of all drug-related incidents in 1999; 66 per cent of those were for possession. That's a huge amount of policing to fight a benign substance that, at worst, leads to slothfulness and the munchies. Legalizing marijuana could free resources for addiction research and counselling. The federal government should take the appeal court's ruling for the gift that it is. The government should do nothing for a year, legalizing pot without really being the one responsible, thus deflecting any potential heat. This is exactly how the abortion law was struck down a decade ago. It's the cowardly way to go about decriminalizing a drug that, frankly, no one really thinks is a big deal any more. But it's probably the only way for the government to do the sensible thing.
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