Pubdate: Thu, 22 Aug 2013
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2013 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456

REFORM OUR DOPEY LAWS

Canada's police chiefs deserve credit for proposing a less punitive 
approach to minor drug offences

If you're caught knocking back a beer in a Toronto park, the worst 
rap on the knuckles you're likely to face is a $125 fine. Get busted 
smoking a joint and you could be unlucky enough to get a date with a 
judge and face a $1,000 fine or six months in jail, or both.

To Canada's police chiefs, this is harsh. And they're right. By now 
millions of Canadians have rolled a joint or two, and the courts 
wisely tend to go easy on first offenders and those caught with small 
amounts. But Ottawa perversely continues to criminalize the 
possession of even tiny quantities of cannabis.

Short of looking the other way, the police still have no option but 
to charge casual marijuana users with simple possession. That means 
costly paperwork for the cops, yet more strain on the overtaxed 
justice system and criminal convictions and records that can 
adversely affect citizenship, jobs and travel. It's also hugely 
inefficient. Barely half of drug-related cases result in convictions.

All this is a ghastly waste, leaving taxpayers footing the bill for 
the 57,429 cannabis-possession offences (not trafficking, production 
or distribution) that police reported last year. It's about as self 
defeating a system as could be devised.

The case for reforming Canada's dopey dope laws is overwhelming, and 
the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police gets that with their 
proposal that cops be allowed to issue tickets for simple possession. 
It's an idea whose time has come . . . four decades ago. In 1973 
Gerald Le Dain's royal commission on drug use urged the 
decriminalization of simple possession. While the police chiefs to 
this day can't bring themselves to go that far - they don't support 
decriminalization or outright legalization - they do want officers to 
have the additional option to issue tickets in "the large majority" of cases.

It's a baby step, at a time when Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is 
boldly proposing a more coherent approach in the form of outright 
legalization. But at least it toddles in the right direction, one 
we've considered before. In 2003 Jean Chretien's government toyed 
with the idea of reducing the penalty for simple possession to a $180 
fine for youths and $290 for adults caught with 15 grams or less. 
That went nowhere, thanks in part to George W. Bush's "war on drugs." 
Ottawa was loathe to irritate the neighbour. But the idea made sense 
in its time.

Sadly, the same can't be said for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's 
ideology-driven Reefer Madness approach to drugs. On his Conservative 
watch since 2006 arrests for cannabis possession have soared and 
harsher mandatory penalties have been brought in for growing as few 
as six plants.

All that time Canadian public opinion has been moving in the opposite 
direction. A narrow majority now favours legalization. The Americans, 
too, are de-escalating their own benighted, prison clogging war on 
drugs by scrapping mandatory minimums and by letting judges divert 
offenders into drug treatment and job training programs. Here again, 
Harper is out of step.

When even Canada's police chiefs are calling for a less punitive 
approach to minor drug offences, the government's obduracy on this 
issue is simply obtuse.

Back in 2000 the Ontario Court of Appeal had its say on the matter. 
Cautiously, it held that marijuana's "effects are probably not as 
benign as was thought some years ago." Still, the justices noted that 
cannabis is less damaging than hard drugs, tobacco and booze. It 
doesn't induce criminal behaviour. It carries no overdose risk. So 
much for the Reefer Madness argument. Now the police chiefs have just 
left no doubt that charging 57,000 people last year was judicial overkill.

It's time for Ottawa to mellow out, and ease up.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom