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VANCOUVER MAYOR TOUTS POT LEGALIZATION
VANCOUVER MAYOR TOUTS POT LEGALIZATION
Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell has weighed in on the marijuana debate, and left no doubt where he stands.
Speaking at a conference on legalizing pot Saturday, Campbell said he supports the plan but added it pot were available legally, he would “tax the hell out of it.”
Campbell said every tax dollar would go to health care, noting that without the pot industry, British Columbia would be in a recession.
If pot ever is legalized, don’t expect Campbell to spark up.
“In fact, I’ve never even smoked marijuana,” the mayor told the conference. “My biggest fear is that I may like it more than cabernet, and then what the hell am I going to do?”
Campbell says it’s time to take the marijuana industry out of criminals’ hands.
“What I do want is to stop seeing people go to jail. I want to stop seeing the waste of resources, our resources, taxpayers’ resources,” he explained.
According to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which helped organize the conference, punishing pot users doesn’t make sense. The herb has been around for centuries but was only declared illegal about 80 years ago.
“You have to speak out,” says the BCCLA’s policy director, Kirk Tousaw. “You have to say, ‘Hey, I do smoke cannabis and I’m not a criminal.’ That’s the next step people have to take. They have to come out of the closet.”
The forum’s keynote speaker was Conservative senator Claude Nolin, who recently completed an 18-month Senate inquiry into marijuana use and laws in Canada, concluding marijuana should be legalized.
Ottawa’s plan to decriminalize marijuana is about to go up in smoke. The legislation hasn’t made it to a final vote — and won’t if the prime minister calls an election.
Still the issue will continue to burn, with the NDP vowing to make legalization a major election platform.
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MAKE POT PAY FOR HEALTH
Last month Langley-Abbotsford Conservative MP Randy White said he had a list of 80 to 90 people who were convicted cannabis growers who were also collecting welfare. He said those people should pay, with proceeds going to drug treatment.
Great idea – pot growers should pay, taxes and business fees as legal operations. Communities like ours could tap into the billions in revenue made in the industry and apply those funds to much-needed treatment for people addicted to alcohol and hard drugs.
The millions saved in police, court and jail costs would be better used for addiction prevention and treatment, in health care, schools and on our roads. Pot would be grown in greenhouses, not in basement suites.
It’s plain stupid of us to not take advantage of the entrepreneurial power of cannabis growers – think of the tourist potential in Abbotsford, attracting Americans with cash to cannabis cafes along the border.
Organized crime would lose a big source of revenue to legitimate operators as the price would drop and we may even see fewer young men shooting each other over drug wars.
As more people realize the damage done in the last 80 years by a policy of prohibition, it’s no longer a question of whether that policy will end but when.
The Canadian government has taken tentative steps toward legalizing grass, when in Dec. 9, 2002, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon suggested decriminalizing pot.
Plenty of reasoned government committees have supported decriminalizing marijuana, including one vice-chaired by White. A 2002 Senate report on drugs said cannabis prohibition was ineffective and it should be regulated, like booze. The risks being equal to alcohol or tobacco, the Senate committee noted, “the main social costs of cannabis are a result of public policy choices, primarily its continued criminalization, while the consequences of its use represent a small fraction of the social costs attributable to the use of illegal drugs.”
Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell, former RCMP officer and coroner, wants pot legal.
“I think we should legalize it, we should tax it to the max and take all the money that we get from it and put it straight into health care,” Campbell said. Mere decriminalization would not deter large-scale pot producers, who will risk arrest despite tougher penalties.
This is not just a crazy West Coast idea.
On April 24, an Ottawa Citizen editorial noted the U.S. commission looking at Sept. 11 causes found the Federal Bureau of Investigation was “too busy fighting the never-ending war on drugs,” instead of keeping watch on terrorists. The newspaper wrote: “One of the terrible costs of the war on drugs is the good that could be done if the money and manpower lavished on this futile fight were instead devoted to other priorities. Every officer doing buy-and-busts is an officer not going after thieves, rapists and murderers.”
On a smaller scale the same blindness afflicts us at home. In a March 12 Times article, Mission RCMP Corp. Murray Power said the 3,000-plant operation they busted days earlier was “the most efficient and effective operation I’ve ever seen.” Power said chasing down the increasing numbers of grow-ops was taking police away from other duties.
“General duty officers are getting double the workload and our community is getting half the service,” he said.
Yet recently Abbotsford Coun. Mark Warawa suggested police should crack down on businesses – legal businesses – that sell greenhouse supplies and rolling papers.
Prohibition of cannabis creates more crime, not less, yet that’s what Conservative policies would perpetuate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said knowledge is the antidote to fear. We need to educate ourselves about the effects of prohibition and question the sanity of continuing the policy. We need to demand to know how much the “war on drugs” costs us in Abbotsford.
The war against the hysteria and half-truths that support prohibition is not a spectator sport.
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POT DECRIMINALIZATION BILL IS ABOUT TO GO UP IN SMOKE
OTTAWA — The federal election will kill the bill to decriminalize marijuana, leaving one of Jean Chretien’s legacy issues out in the cold and pot smokers still facing potential jail terms, government insiders say.
The controversial legislation, which is awaiting a final vote in the House of Commons, will not make it through Parliament in the one week left in the session before Prime Minister Paul Martin is expected to drop the writ to begin an election campaign.
The proposed law, Bill C-10, would have removed jail terms for the simple possession of less than 15 grams of marijuana. Those caught with pot in that quantity would have faced the equivalent of a traffic ticket, costing $100 to $500.
The opposition Conservatives, who opposed the bill, insisted that the Liberals effectively killed the bill by treating it with deliberate neglect. It was repeatedly placed at or near the bottom of the list of bills to be debated, dragging out its progress through the Commons.
“They don’t want to get into the issue of drugs, because it’s a loser for them in an election,” said MP Randy White, the Conservative Party’s critic on drug policy.
“I think their polling is probably telling them the same thing our polling is showing — that it’s a loser with families.”
The bill is awaiting third reading in the Commons — the final vote that would allow it to pass the House. But even if that vote is held next week, it is not going to pass the Senate in a week. Bills to implement the budget and to reduce patent restrictions on AIDS drugs for Africa are the highest priorities, government officials said.
Parliament will sit next week, but a break is scheduled for the week after — when the Prime Minister is expected to launch an election campaign.
Mr. Martin is widely expected to call an election for June 28, which means he would drop the writ between May 17 and 23 — possibly on May 20, before the Victoria Day long weekend.
It means that the decriminalization of marijuana, first debated in the 1970s and proposed as law last year, will be left for a new Parliament to start all over again.
A federal election dissolves the Parliament and kills all the bills that have not been passed; the next government would have to start anew from introduction in the Commons.
Advocates of the bill argued that young people should not face lifelong criminal records for smoking a joint. The Justice Department estimates that 100,000 Canadians smoke pot daily.
The bill had faced criticism from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which suggested the bill would require tougher border policing, and from the RCMP, who said decriminalizing marijuana possession would make it harder to police serious drug crimes. Pro-cannabis activists say the government should go farther and legalize marijuana.
Mr. White said the government ignored the need for a real national drug strategy, which would include tougher penalties for so-called grow-ops, in which large quantities of marijuana are grown, and funds for local education. The Liberals merely tried to distract from the need for a broad drug strategy, he said.
Mr. White said that if elected, the Conservatives would not introduce a decriminalization bill.
“The issue is not decriminalization. The issue is, what do we do with drugs of all sorts?” Mr. White said.
Liberal government officials said the opposition slowed the progress of the bill, but Conservative House Leader John Reynolds laughed off that suggestion.
“There’s nothing holding them up,” Mr. Reynolds said. “They’ve got a majority.”
The bill was introduced when Mr. Chretien was in office, and Mr. Martin revived it this year.
Mr. Martin suggested publicly that he thought the bill should be toughened, but that amendments would be left up to MPs. Instead, it languished.
The Martin government’s legislative agenda has remained relatively light.
Mr. Martin had planned for a short session of Parliament before calling an April election but pushed back the vote after Auditor-General Sheila Fraser issued a report in February on the sponsorship program, which has become a scandal.
Among the bills that will die are the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, also known as the whistle-blower bill, which is supposed to protect civil servants who report impropriety or malfeasance within the government.
