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Current Affairs 2008 - Top Rated (37 items)
| Nov 15, 2008 | Forget Facts, Common Sense Or Decency There's been quite a kerfuffle on the letters page recently on the legalization of marijuana.
That we're still even debating this issue, some 70 years after weed's defacto criminalization, is astounding. Every reputable government study, independent study and report out there has stated, unequivocably and for decades, that pot is marginally harmful and shouldn't be a criminal matter.
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| Oct 27, 2008 | Government's pot appeal up in smoke TORONTO - The federal government lost a court appeal Monday, paving the way for an end to its monopoly supplying medical marijuana to patients.
Justice Department lawyers had sought to appeal a lower-court ruling that granted licensed producers the right to grow marijuana for more than one patient.
But the three-judge panel said it was not persuaded by government lawyers who argued that allowing a grower to supply more than one patient would lead to an unregulated industry.
In January, a federal court judge struck down the one-to-one ratio as unconstitutional and unnecessarily restrictive.
The ruling was stayed pending Monday's appeal.
Lawyer Alan Young, who represented medical marijuana users, said the ruling was a victory for "sick people."
"It's time for Health Canada to recognize that medical marijuana is an established part of the regiment for a lot of patients," Young said outside court.
"Instead of thwarting patient needs, they should be accommodating patient needs and hopefully this case will be a signal to them."
Authorized users who cannot grow their own marijuana can designate a grower or access government-issued marijuana supplied by Prairie Plant Systems in Manitoba.
But a group of 30 patients who challenged the regulations argued the government supply was weak and they should have the right to choose their source.
They were lobbying to be lawfully able to purchase marijuana from Carasel Harvest Supply Corp., which, under the current regime, was not allowed to supply more than one patient with medical marijuana.
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| Oct 22, 2008 | Wonderdrug? The medicinal use of Cannabis goes back around 4 000 years. In 1550 BC, the Ebers Papyrus ( Ancient Egypt ) described the medical uses of marijuana. The Ebers Papyrus is one of the oldest medical documents
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| Oct 10, 2008 | The War On Drugs Is A Mess The World Drug Report is crude propaganda.
Journalists and politicians who take it at face value contribute to the manipulation of public opinion and the stifling of meaningful debate. And that is unacceptable at a time when Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in the War on Drugs.
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| Oct 9, 2008 | Laws Gone To Pot A report on marijuana written by a team of world experts suggests countries interested in more rational cannabis laws simply ignore drug treaties and go their own way.
"Control regimes that criminalize users are intrusive on privacy, socially divisive and expensive. Thus, it is worth considering alternatives," says the Global Cannabis Commission Report presented in the British House of Lords last week.
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| Aug 27, 2008 | Alberta's Reefer Madness Hitting New Highs As Albertans go, they outnumber Catholics, smokers, Edmontonians, voters and overweight folk -- though a massive intake of potato chips might soon balance out the latter.
They're pot smokers, and a new study by Health Canada shows a staggering -- and presumably peckish -- 45.3% of Albertans have inhaled marijuana, with 34.7% returning for a regular hit of weed
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| Aug 20, 2008 | Is Society Benefiting From The War On Pot? By all accounts, Mike McCormick minded his own business and never hurt another soul.
He lived off the land, hunting, digging clams and cutting his own firewood. And he grew pot. Lots and lots of pot. In fact, when police stumbled across McCormick's shack in the woods behind his house, there were 243 plants growing inside it. ...Other than lawyers, who benefits from criminalizing pot smokers?
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| Aug 3, 2008 | Dumb Drug Policies Enrich Criminals The net result of our irrational drug policies is that we enrich the criminals and criminalize ordinary citizens. We control tobacco and alcohol far more effectively than we control any illegal drugs. If those are the results we want, these policies are perfect.
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| Jun 4, 2008 | No Hope In Fighting Dope The war on drugs has been fought. We lost. So what now?
For starters, we should admit defeat and legalize marijuana.
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| May 27, 2008 | Study Shows Marihuana Use Not A Threat Augustana sociology professor Geraint B. Osborne is of the opinion that people who use marihuana are no more a criminal threat to society than are alcohol and cigarette users.
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| May 23, 2008 | Barbara Kay vs. Mary Jane Ms. Kay has assembled a file of evidence -- of varying quality -- on some dangers that cannabis may legitimately pose. Having presented it, she thus "respectfully ask[s] the Post to reconsider its editorial stance on the legalization of pot." Our stance was, and is, that as terrible as you can possibly make marijuana sound by the use of anecdote and by cherry-picking the scientific literature, you cannot make a credible argument that its public health and other social effects are as bad as those of alcohol and tobacco.
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| May 23, 2008 | Canada's Laws Going To Pot They fought the law and the ... law lost.
In fact, Canada's petty, nanny-state prohibition on simple marijuana possession has been repeatedly revealed as either non-existent or as murky as well --used bong water.
Except, you'd never know it as the charges continue to be laid and judicial resources go up in smoke.
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| May 2, 2008 | Expert Testifies Cannabis Helps Slow Aging .C. Provincial Court heard Thursday that cannabis is safer than aspirin and can restore the balance in people's bodies to help fight illness.
That was the testimony of Dr. Robert Melamede, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, who was brought in by the defense team for the four men accused in the Holy Smoke Culture Shop drug trafficking case taking place in Nelson this week.
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| May 1, 2008 | Pump Up The Rebellion Nothing in last week's rulings detracts from this position. But in the rush to keep kids safe from themselves, some of us adults have forgotten what we do want them to take in at school. Critical thinking and questioning authority should be right up there. Certainly, in my time we were explicitly taught the lessons of moral and social panics exploited by authoritarian figures. In history, for example, we learned about Hitler and other fascist leaders mobilizing supporters on this basis, and in English, we studied Arthur Miller's allegory about the 1950s McCarthy hearings, The Crucible.
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| May 1, 2008 | Sniffing Out the Larger Implications of the Dog Sniff Cases Dogs "Search" When they Sniff for Narcotics
Most importantly, all nine justices (essentially) agreed that when a police dog trained to sniff out narcotics focuses its olfactory powers on an individual's knapsack or luggage, the target's reasonable privacy expectations are encroached upon. In other words, this constitutes a "search" for s. 8 Charter purposes, a conclusion that triggers the "reasonableness" requirements of the guarantee.
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| Apr 27, 2008 | UVic Prof Lectures PM On Tories' Drug Policy University of Victoria professor Susan Boyd's weekly letters to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on drug research haven't garnered a response from the federal government, but others around the world are reading.
...On Feb. 1, Boyd, along with the Beyond Prohibition Coalition of Vancouver, launched a website at www.educatingharper.com to inform the prime minister and concerned Canadian citizens about drug policy and harm reduction.
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| Apr 25, 2008 | Supreme Court Muzzles Sniffer Dogs The use of drug-sniffing police dogs in the random search of a southwestern Ontario school and a Calgary bus terminal was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday.
In a 6-3 decision, the top court ruled that the actions breached Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which covers what constitutes reasonable search and seizure.
The ruling, which could have an impact on police powers across the country, centred on two cases.
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| Mar 31, 2008 | Marc Emery Should Not Be Extradited This editorial board has more than once presented its strongest moral case for the Canadian government to block the extradition of Marc Emery, the West Coast marijuana advocate who faces a possible life sentence south of the border for operating a mail-order seed business out of his Vancouver headquarters. It is our view that the differences in the two countries' handling of seed vendors make extraditing Emery a shameful abdication of judgment by the Canadian authorities.
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| Mar 28, 2008 | Abstinence Not The Only Way Off Drugs An alternative to abstinence is gaining acceptance among people working with those who struggle with drug addiction. ..For example, a client may come to detox to stop smoking crack cocaine, but intends on smoking marijuana when he gets out because a gradual detox approach is what makes sense to them.
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| Mar 27, 2008 | Alberta: The Nanny State Indeed, they considered it necessary in the preamble to the Drug-Endangered Children Act to state categorically that "children exposed to illegal manufacturing of drugs, indoor cannabis operations, trafficking and other forms of illegal drug activity are victims of abuse."
That is as wild a claim as it is unsupportable. But the circumstances under which it may be invoked are so broad there is little that can be done to counter its stupidity. Although the preamble suggests that only the really serious stuff is the object of the Act, a child is deemed to be drug-endangered if he or she is "exposed" to illegal substances. That's it. Full stop.
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