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Current Affairs 2007 - Government (150 items)
| 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 9, 2007 | Why Is This Canadian Pot Dealer Campaigning for Ron Paul? He's Looking for a Pardon.
Marc Emery agrees his campaign-organizing effort for some 2008 U.S. presidential candidates is a bit unorthodox. He's Canadian, his political base of operations is the B.C. Marijuana Party in Vancouver, and he can be arrested if he sets foot into America.
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| Aug 9, 2007 | BC: Trial to Hear Testimony From Senator Who Backed Marijuana Legalization A Canadian senator who has called for the legalization of marijuana took the stand yesterday in the trial arising from a raid on the Vancouver Island Compassion Society's grow operation.
Pierre Claude Nolin chaired the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which unanimously called five years ago for legalization of the drug in Canada. The committee recommended the government license production and sale of marijuana, which would be available to any Canadian citizen over the age of 16.
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| Aug 4, 2007 | BC: Medicinal Pot Grower Sees Huge Demand VICTORIA - A Vancouver Island grower of organic marijuana is being inundated with pleas for pot from disease sufferers, but Health Canada says he can supply only one person, a provincial court trial has been told.
Eric Nash said he wrote to Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement with a list of 121 people, all approved by Health Canada to use marijuana as medicine and asking him to grow it for them. One of them was a former RCMP officer diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
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| Jul 31, 2007 | Evansburg Man Plans To Sue Police A man from Evansburg is suing the RCMP for seizing marijuana plants he says he was growing for medicinal purposes. Two years ago, Steve Chorney received a licence under the federal medical-marijuana program to grow a limited number of plants to manage chronic pain in his legs, which has prevented him from working since 1996.
At about 10 a.m. on July 23, Chorney said three RCMP members arrived at his house in three separate vehicles, made a bee-line for the plants and started pulling them out of the ground.
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| Jul 24, 2007 | AB: RCMP Seize Medical Pot User's Plants An Evansburg man who takes pot for his pain fears he's about to get sicker after police seized his weed yesterday. ..."According to Health Canada, there is no licence in place for this individual," said Cpl. James House of the Evansburg RCMP.
Chorney, though, said he was in the midst of getting his licence renewed in order to move his plants outdoors.
[Many legal exemptees have stated that the police subject them to raids and prosecution after the government fails to provide them with timely protection. How can police cause so much harm to the sick and still sleep at night?] |
| 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 | 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 17, 2007 | Marijuana Possession Ruling May Cause Some 'Confusion' A recent ruling about Canada's pot laws might make it difficult to crack down on simple possession, legal experts say.
But don't rush out and roll a joint in public just yet.
Alan Young, Osgoode Hall law professor and marijuana legalization activist, said yesterday the grace period may not last long and doesn't stop cops from doing their job.
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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 13, 2007 | Judge rules Canada's pot possession laws unconstitutional A Toronto judge has ruled that Canada's pot possession laws are unconstitutional after a man argued the country's medicinal marijuana regulations are flawed. The man has no medical issues and doesn't want a medical exemption to smoke marijuana....In court, the man argued that the federal government only made it policy to provide marijuana to those who need it, but never made it an actual law. Because of that, he argued, all possession laws, whether medicinal or not, should be quashed....The judge agreed and dismissed the charges.Borenstein has given prosecutors two weeks before he makes his ruling official.
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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 11, 2007 | What's Really Fuelling This Economic Boom? ...Linking unrelated trends can be dangerous, as any statistician will tell you, but we can't help but wonder how much of B.C.'s economic and real estate booms are really due to our standing as national pot kings.
There's got to be some way all those people are affording all that high-priced real estate -- the average B.C. house price reached a record high of $454,945 in May, according to the Real Estate Weekly...But how strong would our economy be if grow ops -- and all the money they generate both directly and indirectly -- were taken out of the equation? ..During B.C.'s pot boom, real estate prices continue to climb unbelievably high.
Coincidence? Maybe.
[No coincidence, and politicians know it. Remember the raid on the BC legislature and the grow op raids tied to the same people..Coincidence? Maybe.] |
| Jul 7, 2007 | BC: Dope Bylaw Ignored Landowners are turning a blind eye to North Cowichan's bylaw mandating bi-monthly property inspections.
In February, the municipality introduced the bylaw to crack down on marijuana growing operations.... Of the North Cowichan properties Allan manages through Rowan Property Management Ltd., half of the owners instructed Allan to ignore the bylaw.
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| Jul 7, 2007 | ON: Niagara Grow-Op Strategy Praised By Province At a press conference outside the Niagara Falls police station, Niagara Falls MPP Kim Craitor announced the Liberal government was expanding its "guns, gangs and grow-ops project" to combat violence and build safer communities.
[The violence and economy created by prohibition becomes larger and more entrenched every year at the expense of civil society - but not enough members seem to notice or care - yet] |
| Jun 17, 2007 | Patients Complain Health Canada Wants To Keep Weed Weak Health Canada has been contacting doctors who prescribe medical marijuana for their government-approved patients, advising them to keep the dosages low.
Some users say that not only violates doctor-patient confidentiality, it's also wrong for bureaucrats to make judgments about the medical needs of people they've never seen.
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| Jun 13, 2007 | Put the Gangs Out of Business: Legalize D Childhood and adolescence should rightfully be a time of love, learning and life. But for thousands of young Canadians, their journey to adulthood is marred forever by street-gang involvement, which almost always means an active role in the massive business of illicit street drugs, too. ...Many allocate blame to street gangsters for this sorry state of affairs -- the idea being that if it weren't for these aggressive and money-hungry "pushers," we wouldn't have such a problem. However, this reasoning is incomplete: It fails to consider the demand generated by millions of Canadians of all ages who, at least once this year, will act on their desire and make a back-alley purchase of an illicit drug...Finally, we need to embark upon drug legalization, which will starve gangs of their principal oxygen supply and serve to upset the attractive risk-reward proposition that every new gangster now faces.
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| Jun 8, 2007 | Unpaid Pot Bills a Chronic Problem Any other terminally ill patient in Canada would have all his prescriptions covered by the Canadian health care system.
Jason Wilcox owes so much money for his medication, Health Canada has cut off his supply and threatened to send a collection agency after him.
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