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Current Affairs 2007 - Statistics (51 items)
| 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 | 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 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 9, 2007 | Pot Possession Arrests on the Rise The number of people arrested for smoking pot rose dramatically in several Canadian cities last year after the Conservatives took office and killed a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana... Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax all reported increases of between 20 and 50 per cent in 2006, while Montreal and Calgary saw their number of arrests dip a few points from the previous year.
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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 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] |
| Jul 6, 2007 | QU: Growing Season: Are Farmers Really Being Intimidated? In Brome-Missisquoi and in Coaticook, farmers can sign a "social contract" with the Surete du Quebec . The contract gives police permission to venture onto the land at any time in search of outlaw plantations. Otherwise police can't check a property without probable cause, or permission from the landowner. ...However, cases of intimidation may not be as common as news coverage would make it seem. Media reports of farmers being threatened by growers are common, but often lack people willing to come forward to back up the allegations. Just how often it actually happens is unclear.
"I've had no cases of intimidation reported," Potvin said.
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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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| 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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| May 26, 2007 | An Invasion Of Privacy Pacing around his living room Wednesday, Richard Pitt can't believe the city's safety inspection team is late.
He points to an inspection notice delivered to his home on 119 B Avenue in Pitt Meadows.
The team was to arrive at 10:30 a.m. It is 45 minutes late.
When two police cars, a fire department pick-up and bylaws truck pulled up in front of the house to check for an illegal marijuana grow operation, Pitt was ready.
"It's an invasion of privacy," he said.
"It has taken two hours out of my day."
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| May 16, 2007 | Hemp, Canola Studied For BC Bioenergy Even before significant increases in temperature, climate change is starting to prompt shifts in B.C. agriculture.
Increased interest in carbon-neutral fuel sources has put the focus on ethanol and biodiesel options for farmland. One of the crops that has popped up around B.C. is industrial hemp, a fast-growing plant that produces vegetable oil as well as tough fibre used in rope and textiles.
A 110-acre hemp crop was planted in the 100 Mile House area in 2006. The agriculture ministry says smaller hemp plantings have been done in Smithers, West Moberly near Fort St. John and on Vancouver Island.
B.C. Agriculture Minister Pat Bell said the 100 Mile House pilot project is being increased to 200 acres this year, to get to a volume where processing facilities could use it to produce fibre and potentially ethanol. B.C. is following the lead of Manitoba, which has 28,000 acres in hemp, and Saskatchewan with 14,000 acres in cultivation.
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