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Current Affairs 2007 - Top Rated (36 items)
| Nov 23, 2007 | Harper's Misguided War on Pot Justice Minister Rob Nicholson's new package of mandatory sentences for marijuana dealers, announced on Tuesday, seems to involve some perverse incentives. Under the bill, a grower who is caught with between one and 200 plants and is found to have the intention of trafficking will receive a non-negotiable minimum of six months in prison, unless he can show that he is eligible for judicially ordered treatment under the auspices of a drug court. The maximum penalty for having a few pot plants on the premises will be increased to 14 years.
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| Nov 15, 2007 | Pot Activists Hail Ruling (Invalid law) Marijuana activists are hailing a recent court ruling as the beginning of the end of Canada's prohibition on pot, but the Crown dismisses the decision as non-binding.
A trial judge in Oshawa, Ont., threw out charges of simple possession of marijuana against three young men on Oct. 19, relying on a previous court ruling that found Canada's pot law unconstitutional. In making his decision, Judge Norman Edmondson cited a decision last July by a fellow judge of the Ontario Court of Justice.
[ See: http://thepotlawhasfallen.ca/, especially if you have been charged with possession of cannabis ] |
| Oct 30, 2007 | Promoting One Of The Deadliest Drugs Of All A glossy brochure recently dropped out of my newspaper: "Discover your taste for whisky," it advised. As it happens, I discovered my taste for whisky long ago and so was not in need of this advice. But it struck me as surpassingly odd that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is spending a considerable amount of money to persuade the uninitiated to try potent forms of a psychoactive drug whose known risks include addiction, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disorders, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer, fetal alcohol syndrome and fatal overdose.
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| Oct 23, 2007 | Europeans Know Drug Abuse Is an Illness, Not a Crime Europe has a drug problem, and knows it. But the Europeans' approach to it is quite different from the North American "war on drugs."
I spend 120 days a year in Europe as a travel writer, so I decided to see for myself how it's working. I talked with locals, researched European drug policies and even visited a smoky marijuana "coffee shop" in Amsterdam. I got a close look at the alternative to a war on drugs.
Europeans are well aware of the North American track record against illegal drug use.
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| Oct 22, 2007 | A Criminal Mind: Juries Can Nullify, Just Don't Tell The common law recognizes the jury's power not to convict when a law is unfair, or when it would unfairly impact upon the accused. This is known as jury nullification. The trilogy of Canadian cases from the Supreme Court of Canada that have dealt with this are R. v. Morgentaler ( 1988 ), R. v. Latimer ( 2001 ), and the recent case of R. v. Krieger ( 2006 ).
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| Oct 9, 2007 | Pot Holes In Harper's Drug Policy What really irks me is the fact that possession and/or distribution of marijuana also falls under this new law. I'm all for the legalization, not decriminalization, of pot. I believe that this is one illegal substance that should not be categorized along with other, more serious drugs.
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| Oct 6, 2007 | What's Harper Smoking? Stephen Harper's announcement Thursday of a new national drug strategy served at least one valuable purpose: It conclusively demonstrated that the prime minister knows nothing about drugs or drug policy.
The list of misinformed, misleading or nonsensical statements uttered by Mr. Harper is long and this space short, so let me skip quickly to the highlights.
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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 8, 2007 | Too Bad the Hippie Generation Has Turned Into a Bunch of Hypocrites Young intellectuals staged sit-ins and demonstrated against rules and structure during the '60s. Now firmly in positions of power, they have established human-rights tribunals and other kangaroo courts to stifle free speech and punish nonconformists. ...
The generation that challenged and toppled the rigid status quo at universities now prohibits dissenting views on campus, and blatantly uses the education system for purposes of indoctrination. ...
Those who once proudly questioned authority demand absolute acquiescence to radical feminism, affirmative action, climate-change paranoia, anti-Americanism and other tenets of political correctness. ...
On top of it, this generation of supposed anti-materialists has accumulated more wealth than any previous generation and made it virtually impossible for anyone under 30 to even dream of owning their own home.
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| 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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| 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 | 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 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 12, 2007 | Morality Squad Should Lay Off Kieran King didn't even make it to his 16th birthday before being metaphorically shot down by the morality squad.
King, a Grade 10 student at Saskatchewan's Wawota Parkland School, was handed a three-day suspension for protesting the school's reaction to his views on marijuana.
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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 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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