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