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Current Affairs 2007 - Reform (90 items)
| Aug 27, 2007 | Campaign Should Pass On Pot If the federal government is serious about starting a massive anti-drug campaign aimed at youth, it had best ensure the message makes sense. At this point, it doesn't. ...He made special mention of marijuana, reminding the doctors in attendance that pot today is more potent from any they might have smoked in their youth.
That's where Clement's message is troubling. Lumping in pot use with harder drugs is a tenuous link at best, and to build a campaign around it risks sinking the whole message.
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| Aug 25, 2007 | Is It Or Isn't It? The Pot Pendulum Swings Again Just As Canadians Are Embracing Pot As Never Before, the Government Plans a New War on Drugs. the Move Is Fitting, Given This Country's Ambivalent Relationship With Weed Over the Decades ...For a lot of Canadians, the debate is over: They like pot, they smoke it.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | Roach Burn (class action suit) The irony is too delicious. A lawyer named Roach, in this case Charles Roach, taking on the feds' reefer madness pot laws. Roach argues in a class action filed Tuesday ( August 7 ) in federal court that laws making possession of pot illegal have had no force or effect since July 2001. That's when the federal government was ordered to enact a constitutionally valid law. It still hasn't. Roach's suit asks for $25 million in compensation for persons prosecuted under pot laws. Maybe the threat of having to pay out millions in damages will finally light a fire under the feds' asses to stop with their anti-cannabis charade. We're happily holding our breath on this one.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | ON: Church Argues Marijuana A Sacrament CHURCH ARGUES MARIJUANA A SACRAMENT
Parishioners Plan Charter Challenge, Say Current Policy Infringes On Their Religious Rights
If some religions sip wine at the altar, others should be allowed to smoke pot. At least according to Rev. Edwin Pearson and Rev. Michel Ethier, two ordained ministers behind a proposed $25 million class action lawsuit challenging Canada's marijuana laws.
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| Aug 6, 2007 | Cannabis Country COREN: Quite so. Theft, rape and assault are also apparently unstoppable, so we might as well decriminalize or legalize them as well. Just because something is common does not mean it is acceptable. Individuals who use this stuff privately are seldom touched. It's the dealers who are arrested and quite rightly too.
[The lamest prohibitionist argument of them all... how much public support is there to legalize murder? How many government commissions have studied the issue? ] |
| Aug 5, 2007 | Beware of Uninformed Warnings About Risk But let's assume that The Lancet paper really does show that marijuana causes psychosis. And let's assume the increased risk really is as high as 200 per cent. What does that mean? Nothing. Rather, it means nothing by itself.
If the lifetime risk of being crushed by an asteroid were to triple, we would ignore it because the original risk is so tiny. But a tripling of the lifetime risk of getting cancer is serious because the existing risk is big. So to make sense of the increased risk of psychosis, we have to know what the existing risk of psychosis is. Without that, these stats are scary but meaningless.
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| Aug 1, 2007 | Tougher Controls Not Needed, Experts Say A British study claiming pot smokers have a 40 per cent higher risk of developing psychotic illnesses does not prove tougher Canadian drug laws are needed, experts say.
Canadian researchers say stiffer penalties here have traditionally failed to curb marijuana use in a country that has one of the highest per capita number of pot smokers on Earth.
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| Jul 31, 2007 | Drugs And The Police In 1967, John Conroy was a clean-cut University of B.C. student and a member of the varsity swim team. It wasn't until after he graduated that he formed the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ( NORML ) in Canada, becoming its first president....Today, an estimated 600,000 Canadians have been busted for pot possession. A recent United Nations drug report said five million Canadians smoked pot in 2004, the fifth-highest percentage of usage in the world.
[ The 600,000 Canadians with criminal records was true in the early 1990's, but more than 1.5 million are now estimated to have criminal records.] |
| Jul 30, 2007 | Reform Pot Laws - Do It For 1.5 Million Canadians IT'S TIME to admit that one of the biggest "drug problems" in this country is the obsolete legal framework that criminalizes, stigmatizes and ultimately fails to regulate marijuana use. ...It's time, almost 40 years after the LeDain Commission called for more liberal pot laws, to make the stuff legal. And to get rid of a needless stigma for so many citizens.
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| Jul 20, 2007 | Marijuana Laws Beyond Ridiculous The issue has nothing to do with whether marijuana is bad for you. The issue was and is do you deserve a criminal record or even jail time simply for lighting a joint?
The answer is of course you don't . Criminal records are for criminals. Rapists, murderers, child molesters, even drunk drivers and petty vandals are criminals. Pot smokers are not...Marijuana laws aren't just wrong they're beyond ridiculous and nearly everybody knows it. Everybody except our government apparently.
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| Jul 20, 2007 | The Wrong Course On Marijuana It's disheartening to see Canada sliding backwards on drugs, embracing policies that have been proven to do considerable damage while accomplishing nothing.
Policies like treating marijuana possession as a criminal offence. ...It is foolish to continue down such a destructive, costly path.
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| Jul 18, 2007 | Pot Laws Do More Harm Than Good How many people you know have used marijuana in the past year? Would you consider them criminals?
...We hope that Senator Larry Campbell's call for decriminalization for small amounts of marijuana once again gains traction.
He rightly points out that 600,000 Canadians who have been charged with marijuana possession offences have criminal records,
[Actually there were 600,000 criminal records in the early 1990's. See Source
It is estimated to be 1.5 million now. See Source] |
| Jul 18, 2007 | We're Not Dopes Recent results about marijuana use raised more than a few eyebrows in this nation: Canada is tops in the industrialized world in terms of marijuana use... So, we are tops among Western countries in terms of pot use. It could be worse. We could be the biggest cocaine snorters on the planet. That dubious honour goes to Spain. Iran wins out for heroin, Australia for ecstasy and the Philippines for amphetamines.
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| Jul 13, 2007 | The Police Aren't Experts On Drug Use When the renowned social scientists of the Canadian Police Association testified to a Senate committee on illicit drugs, they claimed there is lots of evidence that liberal drug policies lead to greater drug use. "Legalization and permissiveness will increase drug use and abuse substantially," a spokesman told the senators. ..The experts I listen to are scientists. "Existing research seems to indicate that there is little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use," concluded a 2001 report by a panel of the National Research Council, one of the U.S. National Academies of Science, probably the most esteemed scientific body in the world.
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| Jul 12, 2007 | Walking Backwards Into A Wall If politics is supposed to lead the nation in debate, we're being taken for quite a ride when it comes to pot and the law.
Discovering that, in 2006, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax experienced up to 50-per-cent increases in cannabis-related arrests, is like walking backwards into a wall.... It's about time that we get over the stigma associated with many of the false assumptions that dominate this debate, and pragmatically move forward on eliminating pot prohibition.
As someone who has both walked the streets as a member of the RCMP's drug squad and examined legislation for passage into law as a Senator, I have a sharp understanding of what constitutes a criminal.
Those that use pot just don't fit the profile.
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| Jul 11, 2007 | Legalizing Pot Makes Sense What's really remarkable about Canada's status as a cannabis capital is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it - -- reasons that do not amount to disliking it for its own sake -- you would have an awfully hard time finding them....That would seem to leave very little, aside from the omnipresent trade and travel considerations that come from being a neighbour of the U.S., to stand logically in the way of decriminalization.
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| Jul 1, 2007 | High Time IN handing a grow operator a conditional sentence last month, North Vancouver provincial judge Doug Moss expressed frustration the court could not do more to curb his activities.
We share Moss's frustration, but we believe it is misdirected. ...Drugs - marijuana included - should be legalized, regulated, and restricted internationally, much the way cigarettes are. Drugs cannot be vanquished, but the criminals who pedal them can. The dangers of legalized drugs are manifold, but they are nothing compared to the dangers of the status quo.
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| Jun 29, 2007 | Revisit Pot Law They called prohibition, the banning of the production, distribution and sale of alcohol early in the last century 'The Noble Experiment.' It was supposed to rid society of drunkenness, poverty, crime and various other societal ills.
By any measure, it was a catastrophic failure.
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| Jun 28, 2007 | What Are They Smoking Over At The Globe? After doing independent research on marijuana 15-year-old Saskatchewan Grade 10 student Kieran King told his friends that, in his opinion, marijuana was less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco....When King protested, he was suspended from school for three days.
...This week the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente took a similar tack while applauding the school's position.
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| Jun 23, 2007 | Evidence Of 'Reefer Madness' Abounds 'THE one great principle of the... law," wrote Charles Dickens in Bleak House, "is to make business for itself." That's a thought worth worrying if you are trying, as I am, to understand federal government's position on the medical and recreational use of marijuana.
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