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Current Affairs 2008 - Government (110 items)
| 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 21, 2008 | BC: Compassion Club Seeks Expansion NANAIMO I A group that provides marijuana to sick people hopes to expand into a storefront location in downtown Nanaimo within a few weeks.
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| May 21, 2008 | Meaford Couple To Challenge Pot Law A Meaford man and woman will fight drug charges - laid one month before he received licences to possess and grow marijuana for medicinal purposes - by arguing Canada's marijuana possession law is unconstitutional.
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| May 21, 2008 | Studying Pot's Effects On Drivers Over the next two years, Asbridge and the rest of his team plan to survey 1,500 people in three different Canadian hospitals, including the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, and two more hospitals located in Toronto.
[They are only collecting data from hospitals? What about those who drive under the influence of cannabis who don't make it into a hospital?] |
| May 20, 2008 | Military Drug Tests Find 1 In 20 Using More than one in 20 Canadian soldiers and sailors in non-combat roles tested positive for illicit drug use in random tests conducted on more than 3,000 military personnel from coast to coast. The results provided to The Canadian Press show that over a four-month period, 1,392 sailors in the navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets and 1,673 soldiers in the army's four regions and training branch were subjected to blind drug testing.
Averaged out, 6.5 per cent of those tested in the navy and 5 per cent in the army indicated positive results, almost entirely for marijuana.
The Canadian Forces personnel will eventually switch to cocaine or meth like others who are drug tested... it only stays in the system for several days instead of 30 days like cannabis... |
| May 20, 2008 | Drugs A Booming BC Business Marijauna is our number 1 economic contributor, and like all successful businesses, it's growing. It isn't restricted to just one part of the province either. Marijuana is grown all over the place, even in the hinterlands, it's truly a provincial bonanza. MacLeans says it's a $5 billion to $7 billion a year business. The hard drugs bring in billions and we also do well with manufactured drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy.
A BC Business magazine report ranks the marijuana industry as the province's second largest business, but that's still significant.
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| May 13, 2008 | Grow-Op Hunt Sparks Class-Action Suit A Coquitlam homeowner has filed a class-action lawsuit after his power was cut off and his tenant forced to move out following a search for a marijuana grow-op. ...Monaco's case is the fifth lawsuit against Coquitlam since last year. One is in small-claims court, two are petitions, and one is a writ.
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| May 10, 2008 | Pot Of Gold Not What Local Grower Wants Local cannabis company Island Harvest wants to grow weed for the government and potentially become the only legal supplier in the country.
But they said if they were given a monopoly on selling cannabis, it would be a step in the wrong direction for medicinal users.
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| May 8, 2008 | Court Rulings Allow for Protection of Students And Their Charter Rights A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision concerning police use of trained dogs to ferret out drugs in schools has some school administrators up in arms. But the decision is a reasonable one, as it protects students' constitutional rights while still allowing police searches in certain circumstances.
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| May 5, 2008 | BC: Holy Smoke Trial Wraps Testimony wrapped up in the Holy Smoke drug trafficking trial Friday after four Nelson-area witnesses took to the stand to testify that cannabis has helped them deal with disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
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| May 2, 2008 | BC: Drug Case Dropped Due To Court Delay Charges have been dropped against two men accused of trafficking pot because of an excessive delay in bringing the case to trial.
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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 30, 2008 | BC: Accused Admit Selling Cannabis NELSON - The owners of the Holy Smoke Culture Shop have admitted in provincial court to selling organic cannabis from their downtown premises.
However, they are putting forward a "defence of necessity," saying they did more good than harm.
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| Apr 28, 2008 | Drug Laws Tested This Week In B.C. Supreme Court In another courtroom, the Vancouver Island Compassion Society will continue its assault on the anti-cannabis criminal law with the resumption of testimony from Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who led the 2002 parliamentary review of drug policy that concluded pot should be legalized.
They're interrelated cases with national repercussions that rely on a substantially similar body of jurisprudence.
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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 26, 2008 | Legislation Now Exists To Win War On Drugs On March 14, 2008, Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, announced $8.9 million in funding over two years under the new National Anti-Drug Strategy. This investment is a major step towards a significant crackdown on illegal drugs in our communities.
The funds will help the RCMP to combat the production and distribution of illegal drugs as well as work to dismantle criminal organizations. ...I am proud to be part of the government that is bringing this much needed help to the communities of Yellowhead.
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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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| Apr 24, 2008 | Prohibition, Pot and Politics There's a certain strong odour a visitor notices when first stepping into the Compassion Club medicinal marijuana distribution centre on Rachel and St-Laurent. It doesn't take any time to figure out what it is. Marijuana activists have called the building home for years, and, if Boris St-Maurice gets his way, the weed will make it back to the forefront of a national dialogue sooner probably than the federal Conservative Party would like.
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| Apr 23, 2008 | BC: Lawyer Fights 'Totalitarian' Grow-Op Law His lawyer, Joseph Arvay, is seeking to have the B.C. Supreme Court overturn the provincial government's amendments to the Safety Standards Act, which were designed to allow police officers access to homes where marijuana is suspected of being cultivated without going through the lengthy process of obtaining a search warrant issued under the Criminal Code.
Police have complained that the sheer numbers of homes being used to grow marijuana in B.C. make it impossible for them to use the search warrant process to close them down.
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| Apr 18, 2008 | Team Shuts Down 200 Pot Farms The municipal team does not arrest growers, but forces them to move on.
Langley's Safety Inspection Team has been moving at a faster pace than anyone expected in the past year.
On Tuesday, Township Mayor Kurt Alberts told the Chamber of Commerce that the teams have shut down 217 marijuana grow operations.
"That's three to five per week," Alberts said.
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