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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Canada: Let's remember Prohibition -- and legalize marijuana
John Ibbitson The Globe & Mail, Canada
Tuesday 02 Nov 2004 The commercial cultivation of marijuana, once largely confined to British Columbia, has spread nationwide. In Ontario, the harvest has grown by an estimated 250 per cent in the past two years. Police recently raided grow-ops in Moncton. In Edmonton, real-estate agents are exploring their legal liability for selling a house that turns out to have been a nursery. Remember this, when you consider Bill C-17. The Liberal government's third attempt at decriminalizing marijuana possession was introduced in the House yesterday. Whether the bill makes it into law will largely depend on whether Parliament lasts long enough to get it through. Ottawa has been considering such legislation now for a year and a half. In that time, as usual, political considerations have fallen behind reality. Evidence is sketchy -- there is, as yet, no marijuana marketing board -- but various studies suggest that pot is now one of Canada's major cash crops. RCMP marijuana-plant seizures have increased fourfold in the past four years. The Electricity Distributors Association estimates that Ontario utilities are losing as much as $200-million a year from illegal taps of power lines by grow-ops. Some people believe the retail value of the national marijuana harvest surpasses the wheat or dairy industries. In an effort to control the spread of grow-ops, governments are skirting with unconstitutional laws. The Ontario government has introduced legislation that would permit authorities to cut power to homes suspected of growing marijuana. At the federal level, Bill C-16, which was also introduced yesterday, will expand police powers to compel blood, saliva or urine tests for suspected drugged drivers. Both laws may well offend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Today, the Mounties begin a two-day conference on the problem of grow-ops and what to do about them. They are unlikely to grapple with the real solution. We are rapidly moving to the point where the state will have no choice but to move beyond decriminalization and toward legalization and regulation. Otherwise, we could be back to the 1920s and the challenge to state power that accompanied Prohibition. According to Statistics Canada, 12 per cent of adult Canadians in 2002 admitted to smoking pot at least once in the previous 12 months. (The real number is probably higher.) That doesn't make it a good thing, but it does make it a common, socially acceptable, thing. Opponents of legalization point to the many safety hazards of pot consumption: It can be far worse for your lungs than cigarettes; it is addictive (psychologically, if not physically); and putting it in the hands of Labatt or Imperial Tobacco would offer societal sanction of a dangerous drug. Except that society already regulates tobacco and alcohol because they're dangerous. Banning them is impossible, given their widespread use, and so governments permit their sale under strict conditions, accompanied by heavy taxation to mitigate their societal cost. Regulating cannabis would provide a cash crop for the struggling agriculture sector that, rest assured, would not require government subsidies. Strict laws and punitive taxes would make sure the weed would be no easier for underage tokers to obtain than it already is. Legalization would be a blow to organized crime, would improve health and safety conditions among cultivators, would increase tax revenues, and would relieve governments of the temptation to violate the Constitution in their futile efforts to shut down the industry. We shouldn't be legalizing marijuana because we want to feel all right. We should be legalizing and regulating it in recognition of the truth that this soft but potentially dangerous drug has crossed the threshold of respectability in middle-class society. Let Parliament pass Bill C-17. (Bill C-16 may need another look.) Then let's get to work on the bigger job of figuring out how to control recreational drug use in a society that has decided there's nothing wrong with occasionally getting stoned. jibbitson@globeandmail.ca
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