Pubdate: Wed, 27 Mar 2002
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2002 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  http://www.vancourier.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474
Section: Opinion
Author: Allen Garr

MAYOR WANTS POT DECRIMINALIZED

The mayor of Vancouver and chairman of the police board says marijuana 
should be decriminalized. If Philip Owen had his way, pot would be 
available for sale the same way other drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, are. 
He figures we'd all be better off for it.

Among major Canadian mayors, premiers and prime ministers, Owen is the 
first to take this stand. But it's completely consistent with his drug 
policy, which is based on harm reduction and recognizes drug addiction as a 
medical problem, not a criminal activity.

Most politicians continue to duck the issue. Just over 30 years ago, 
another Vancouver mayor, Tom Campbell, was so determined to stamp out pot 
smoking and the hippies who promoted it that he whipped the city cops into 
a riot against peaceful participants in a Gastown smoke-in.

Now about half of all Canadians think pot should be legalized, and a whole 
range of baby boomer politicians are admitting they've lit up. In the 
recent run for the Tory leadership of Ontario, no fewer than three 
candidates, including the winner and new premier Ernie Eves, admitted to 
turning on. One said he had "never exhaled."

Owen, by the way, says he has never smoked pot. "It just wasn't around" 
when the now 69-year-old was in high school. His drug of choice was beer. 
He says: "I never even heard about [marijuana] until I was married." He 
didn't choose to explain the relationship between the two events.

Now he believes the public is ready for a debate over hard and soft drugs 
and thinks the laws should be changed.

Drug cases have the court system as jammed up as an over-used bong. The war 
on drugs has been an expensive failure. Owen estimates Vancouver police are 
spending "in excess" of $1 million a year making pot busts with no apparent 
impact on pot use.

The federal government was pressed by an Ontario Supreme Court ruling a 
year ago to come up with regulations on the use of marijuana for medical 
purposes. As a result of the ruling, a number of "compassion clubs" have 
popped up across the country where people with doctors' certificates can 
purchase pot and puff away.

But the feds are still fiddling around with proposed changes and cops are 
continuing to bust club operators. Last week, Ted Smith, the fellow who 
runs a club in Victoria, was hauled away by police. While he awaits a court 
date and an inevitably light sentence, someone else has stepped in to deal 
dope for him.

For those of you who are about to set your hair on fire at the prospect of 
a tsunami of stoned school kids in the wake of more liberal drug laws, Owen 
makes the point that in jurisdictions where pot is legal for sale, use of 
the weed by kids is lower than where it's illegal.

He compares Amsterdam, where pot is legal, with San Francisco, where it's 
not, and says twice as many high school students have smoked the weed in 
the town where little cable cars go halfway to the stars as in the Dutch city.

Owen adds that marijuana possession was just made legal in Switzerland and 
while the U.S. continues to wage war on the weed, possession is legal in 
several states, including New York, California and Ohio (the state that's 
round at both ends and high in the middle.)

One of Owen's main points to support his position on pot is that it will 
get the crooks out of the business. That presumably will put an end to the 
dangerous situation created by indoor grow-ops, which are too often little 
more than fire traps run by biker thugs. He makes the same argument to 
support safe injection sites and the limited distribution of heroin.

While there may be public support for Owen on this, political support is 
less certain. His drug policy helped get him tossed out of the NPA. You 
could say he's got nowhere to go but up.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens