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Current Affairs 2007 - Culture (83 items)
| 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 3, 2007 | Activist Spreads His Message The journey for justice, which began in Victoria, has Magnuson rollerblading 12,000 miles to Ottawa, where his journey culminates on Remembrance Day.
Many commuters may spot the activist rolling along highways and downtown streets, sporting a Canadian cannabis flag on the end of a hockey stick.
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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 18, 2007 | Marijuana Maverick Says It's About Rights Two weeks ago a civil suit, launched by Reimer, was thrown out of court with Ottawa Justice C. McKinnon saying that Reimer "was the author of his own misfortune."...
"It's not publicity," says Reimer, who's been lighting up joints on a daily basis since he was 13. "What I want to do is to make sure people stand up for their right."
With tears filling his eyes, he adds, "I love my county; it's getting less and less free all the time and it's very scary."
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| 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 14, 2007 | What's Really Fuelling This Economic Boom? While Canada ranked behind the U.S. and Mexico - which "may be the world's largest cannabis herb producers," according to the report - we're still known around the world for our B.C. bud. And with just 13.1 per cent of Canada's population, according to 2004 figures, our 40 per cent share of the nation's pot production adds up to a lot of grow ops per capita.
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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 11, 2007 | CFL Gone To Pot, Ex-Player Says A Lot Of Players In The Cfl Smoke A Lot Of Marijuana.
This is the word from Sean Millington, who spent 13 seasons as a running back with the B.C. Lions, Edmonton Eskimos, Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Toronto Argonauts and who has been a member of the CBC's CFL broadcast crew off and on since 2003. ...Millington claims that, unlike NFLers, CFLers generally don't get paid enough to be able to afford drugs -- except for marijuana.
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| Jul 10, 2007 | We're Champion Potheads Marijuana use in Canada is the highest in the industrialized world, far higher than in the Netherlands where it's legal, and more than four times the global rate, a report by the United Nations has found....The data show Canadian usage fifth after Zambia ( 17.7 per cent in 2003 ), Ghana ( 21.5 per cent in 1998 ) and Papua New Guinea and Micronesia tied for first place at 29 per cent each in 1995.
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| Jul 8, 2007 | Your Fate If Arrested For Pot Smoking? Marc-Boris St-Maurice has been arrested so many times for marijuana possession that he serves as a one-man clinical study in the fate reserved for those caught with small amounts of pot.
The study's theme would be inconsistency.
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| Jul 6, 2007 | Pot Documentary Has Local Filmmaker On A Roll A Kelowna man's documentary film about the marijuana industry is making waves on the film festival circuit.
The Union: the business of getting high, won outstanding feature documentary honours at the Winnipeg International Film Festival last month. Next month, it is slated to appear at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
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| Jun 28, 2007 | Punting Pot Inmates Use Footballs And Baseballs To Smuggle In Drugs
Guards at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre foiled a bizarre attempt to smuggle drugs in a football.
On Saturday night, a prisoner doing cleanup duty triggered an alarm when he got too close to a fence line at the jail, sending guards scurrying to the scene, where they grabbed the inmate and discovered a football filled with tobacco, said Solicitor General spokesman Christine Skjerven.
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| Jun 26, 2007 | MB: Local Energy-Drink Maker Pitches To Pot-Heads Clarus Canadian Springs is carrying Bong Water Energized Sports Drinks, a line of beverages where references to marijuana and the drug subculture abound.
Bong Water is the brainchild of Growth Capital Group. The drinks are made with Clarus's own spring water.
Bong Water comes in four versions -- the Original Bong Water 420 Chronic Tonic, Purple Haze, Green Dreams and Rasta Cherry. The drinks are available at stores in Canada and the U.S.
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| Jun 14, 2007 | SN: Rally Held in Support of Free Speech Rights The residents of Wawota, population 500, were surprised to see protesters waving signs and shouting into a megaphone Tuesday....
Student Kieran King is the focus of the activity in Wawota. He was suspended from school for three days after disobeying the school's lockdown order during a walkout protest.
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| Jun 7, 2007 | Wanted: Tokers In Suits Time For Greying Potheads To Come Out Of The Closet And Back Anti-Prohibition Battle In 1977, only 18 per cent of cannabis smokers were over the age of 30, but in 2001 the percentage shot up to 49....
Considering this changing demographic, it's surprising that our drug laws haven't been reformed and liberalized. Most people blame the looming presence of the U.S. "war on drugs," but I think we've failed on the road to rational drug law reform because aging drug users rarely come out of their smoky closets to enter the political debate.
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| Jun 7, 2007 | ON: Man Pleads Guilty to Pot-By-Post Plan A medical marijuana crusader accused of mailing pot to fellow users in the United States and Britain pleaded guilty yesterday to committing mischief by using Canada Post services "without proper authority."
Following Marco Renda's plea, federal prosecutor David Doney asked the court to withdraw three counts each of trafficking and exporting a controlled substance and a single count of possession of a controlled substance.
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| May 26, 2007 | Vaporizing The Threat Of A Weed Bust On a weekend afternoon at the Hot Box Cafe in Kensington Market, three young women are sipping greenish blender drinks. Up on a chalkboard are the house rules, which include "no smoking" and, in big, capital letters, "BYOP."
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| May 12, 2007 | Weed Is Universal, So What's The Fuss? We all know that crack is bad news but when it comes to marijuana, the message is less clear. Even though students have had it drilled into their heads to just say no to all drugs, many don't see pot as hazardous. Talk about negative side-effects such as memory loss, depression, increased risk of heart attacks, respiratory illness and schizophrenia and youth either shrug these problems off or attribute them to conservative alarmism. Perhaps our attitude to the drug has become a little too lax.
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| May 10, 2007 | Pot Prince Blesses Herbal Affair Thousands upon thousands of tokers are demonstrating the normalization of cannabis at the Saturday, May 5, Global Marijuana March and fest with some hardcore puffing....
But the presence of Prince of Pot Marc Emery, facing extradition for selling pot seeds stateside, as lead parade marshall helps ensure the smokefest's hard edge. Emery's canna-celeb cachet has enthusiasts asking for photos and autographs. Here are 20,000 people proving they aren't criminals but a marijuana marketplace requiring regulation and taxation. Pre-march, vendors in the park get lots of excited attention.
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