Pubdate: Fri, 21 Apr 2017
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2017 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Fr . Raymond de Souza
Page: A10

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS ON LEGALIZATION

The federal government slipped its marijuana bill into the House the
day before Good Friday, with almost no one around to ask questions.
The government itself had few answers to the more pressing issues,
leaving most important matters to be determined later, by other levels
of government. So in the same spirit, herewith various questions that
do not appear to have adequate answers.

What is the social good that marijuana legalization is intended to
achieve? The arguments for legalization - removing the burden on the
criminal justice system, not impeding future career prospects with a
youthful criminal conviction, removing the scope for organized crime -
are negative in nature, getting rid of various supposed bad things.
But what is the good that we can expect from making marijuana more
readily available? Is there any? Can we expect greater labour
productivity, higher educational achievement, enhanced physical
fitness, a lower carbon footprint, a better equalization system?

 From the armed forces to universities to big banks to telcos, mental
health initiatives are near ubiquitous. It is widely acknowledged that
pot-smoking by teenagers compromises mental health for a significant
proportion of them. That will certainly increase with easier marijuana
access. Is that just the price we pay for the ambiguous and
unspecified benefits?

Perhaps for the above reason, the government is determined that making
marijuana easily available to 18-year-olds should not increase access
to 17-year-olds. A popular way for a 16-year-old to get liquor is for
his 20-year-old brother to buy it for him. If same brother now passes
on a bag of weed with the mickey of vodka, he could be subject to 14
years in prison. Are the police and the courts plausibly going to
enforce such penalties?

Canada's native chiefs are hot for easy pot. Last December the chiefs
of the Assembly of First Nations unanimously supported a resolution to
ask the government for "priorities and incentives to ensure that First
Nations are given the opportunity to participate and benefit fully
from the development of this new and emerging sector."

Legal marijuana will be subject to some excise tax, like cigarettes,
alcohol and gasoline. Aboriginal Canadians are exempt from such taxes,
making reservations good places to get cheap cigs and gas, and ideal
places to run illegal smuggling operations. In Ontario, it is
estimated that at least a quarter of all cigarettes are produced
tax-free on reservations and sold on the black market. How will the
health, education and employment of native Canadians be enhanced by
adding cheap weed to the "industries" reservations host?

Marijuana will be addictive for a certain proportion of users. Isn't
there a certain madness in expanding the range of addictive substances
readily available in aboriginal communities?

"We are certainly not going to do anything that contributes to
addictions," says former Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil
Fontaine, who has his own pot-producing company, now in the medical
marijuana business, but no doubt with an eye to future expansion. "I,
for certain, understand the huge challenges our community faces about
addictions, but this is clearly not about that," Fontaine said. What
is it about then?

Is it perhaps possible that cannabis reform is being driven by
something of a guilty conscience from a certain privileged class?
Fabulously rich kids who graduate, say from McGill before spending a
few winters snowboarding in Whistler, don't have to worry about
blotting their copybook with a pot conviction. The police don't make
trouble for them, lest any criminal unpleasantness impede taking up a
future foreign assignment with McKinsey or PricewaterhouseCoopers. But
the police do make trouble for those who are neither rich nor
influential, and can't get hired to drive a truck because of an
inability to cross the border.

My colleague Andrew Coyne rightly observes that "how successful we are
at taking the business away from organized crime will depend on the
particular taxation model: you want to set the price just low enough
to make it worthwhile for existing users to switch to legal sources,
without setting it so low as to cause a major expansion in
consumption." Does anyone think that the bang-up job our various
governments do on cigarette smuggling, health-care management and
electricity prices breeds confidence that they are going to get the
elasticities of demand and substitution effects right on cannabis?

Why does the government include in its cannabis package authorization
for police "to demand breath samples of any drivers they lawfully
stop, without first requiring that they have a suspicion that the
driver has alcohol in their body"? That means a police officer who
stops me because my licence plate registration sticker is expired can
demand a breathalyzer just because he takes a dislike to me. Maybe he
doesn't like Catholics. Maybe he hated my last column. Why is this
blatantly unconstitutional bodily search without cause being
permitted? Is there a shortage of police harassment in Canada?

Anyone have answers?
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MAP posted-by: Matt