Pubdate: Mon, 07 Dec 2015
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The Buffalo News
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: William Marsden, Washington Post

LIBERAL MAJORITY MAY PUSH CANADA TO MAKE POT LEGAL

MONTREAL - For police forces across Canada, the month of August is 
harvest time.

Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, 
shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down 
marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and 
forest clearings.

If the grower is unlucky enough to be caught red-handed, he is cuffed 
and taken off to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these 
hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to 
incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about 
two weeks, and then it's back to normal police work.

Has this war on marijuana worked?

"No, it hasn't," said Clive Weighill, chief of the Saskatoon police 
force, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and 
a veteran of the August raids.

Times, however, are beginning to change in Canada.

The new Liberal government has promised to act quickly to legalize 
marijuana for general use, which would make Canada the first G-20 
country to end cannabis prohibition on a national level.

Weighill is among those in favor. "We are looking to the United 
States and the Colorado experience, the Washington experience, and we 
hope to learn from that."

The opposition Conservative Party strongly opposes legalization, 
claiming it will make cannabis "more easily available to youth." 
During the recent election campaign, former Conservative prime 
minister Stephen Harper said marijuana is "infinitely worse" than tobacco.

But faced with a large Liberal majority supported by the socialist 
New Democratic Party, the Conservatives are powerless to stop legalization.

Although the war on drugs in Canada has been nowhere near as dramatic 
as the ones waged in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the United States, 
it has nonetheless involved violence and consumed considerable 
financial and human resources. In the late 1990s in Montreal, an 
outlaw biker gang war claimed 165 lives and ended only after a crime 
reporter was shot seven times (he lived) and the Hells Angels 
threatened to assassinate politicians. The violence was all about the 
control of illegal drug sales, including marijuana.

The Liberals point out that more than 600,000 Canadians have criminal 
records for simple possession of marijuana, and the number continues 
to grow. They say it is a needless destruction of lives.

Each year, the federal government spends as much as 500 million 
Canadian dollars (roughly $374 million U.S.) on drug enforcement and 
prosecution, according to the auditor general. About 50 million 
Canadian dollars go to raiding marijuana plantations. These figures 
do not include the money spent by provincial and municipal authorities.

Yet a large number of people still use cannabis. For about a decade, 
studies have shown that past-year use among Canadians age 15 to 24 is 
the highest in the developed world, with a recent study putting the 
rate at 24.6 percent. For adults 25 and over, the figure drops to 8 percent.

"Our system is badly, badly flawed," said Eugene Oscapella, a law 
professor at the University of Ottawa and longtime advocate for 
legalization. "I keep asking myself a question that I have been 
asking for 30 years: Could we have done a worse job if we tried? 
Could we have found a way to create more dysfunction than we managed 
to create?"

The Canadian Center on Substance Abuse, a federally funded research 
organization, has already cautioned against rushing into legalization.

After a fact-finding mission to Colorado and Washington, their 
experts' answer was to "go slow."

"We have to be clear on what our goal is, why are we doing this," 
Rebecca Jesseman, a specialist in performance mechanisms at the 
center, said. "Are we looking to promote public health? Are we 
looking to reduce youth access? Are we looking to cut out the black 
market? What is the primary goal, because that will also help us 
shape regulations, monitor our progress towards that goal and monitor 
our success."

Canada legalized medical marijuana about 15 years ago. Health Canada 
has so far issued 26 production and distribution licenses to about 20 
companies.

Recent mergers and acquisitions indicate an industry consolidation as 
companies compete for a bigger share of a still-developing business, 
which Health Canada claims has a potential of about 450,000 daily 
customers. At current prices, that represents an industry worth 1.2 
billion Canadian dollars  about $900 million U.S.

Canopy Growth, now the largest medical marijuana company in Canada, 
has 7,300 registered medical customers and is "very well positioned" 
to jump into the recreational market, company founder and chief 
executive Bruce Linton said.

"We already have been ramping up to be ready for that," he said.

Oscapella, however, looks at the growth of companies like Canopy as a 
potential nightmare. He fears the concentration of corporate power 
into a "Big Pot," with the kind of vested interests associated with 
global alcohol and tobacco companies.

"My goal is to have what is inevitable in our society be as safe as 
possible and to try to discourage harmful use," he said. "That is 
very different from what big industry would want with cannabis."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom