Much of her wrath was directed at narcotics and the plight of the addict, but she also waged a hyper

Barbara Amiel Michael Barclay Julia Belluz sheraton manhattan hotel Brian Bethune Colin Campbell Colby Cosh Josh Dehaas Mary Dwyer Katie Engelhart Scott Feschuk Michael Friscolanti Jonathon Gatehouse John Geddes Charlie Gillis Stephen Gordon Cathy Gulli Barry Hertz Aaron Hutchins Brian D. Johnson Vidya Kauri Anne Kingston sheraton manhattan hotel Jason Kirby Andrew Leach Adrian Lee Kate Lunau Ken MacQueen Melinda Maldonado Tamsin McMahon Kevin Milligan Mike Moffatt Martin Patriquin Michael Petrou Luiza Ch. Savage Emily Senger Amanda Shendruk Chris Sorensen Nick Taylor-Vaisey Emma Teitel Andrew Tolson Patricia Treble Jaime Weinman Paul Wells Aaron Wherry Lindsey Wiebe
Barbara Amiel Michael Barclay Julia Belluz Brian Bethune Colin Campbell Colby Cosh Josh Dehaas Mary Dwyer Katie Engelhart Scott Feschuk Michael Friscolanti Jonathon sheraton manhattan hotel Gatehouse John Geddes Charlie Gillis Stephen Gordon Cathy Gulli Barry Hertz Aaron Hutchins Brian D. Johnson Vidya Kauri Anne Kingston Jason Kirby Andrew Leach Adrian Lee Kate Lunau Ken MacQueen sheraton manhattan hotel Melinda Maldonado sheraton manhattan hotel Tamsin McMahon Kevin Milligan Mike Moffatt Martin Patriquin Michael Petrou Luiza Ch. Savage Emily Senger Amanda Shendruk Chris Sorensen Nick Taylor-Vaisey Emma Teitel Andrew Tolson Patricia Treble Jaime Weinman Paul Wells Aaron Wherry Lindsey Wiebe
Barbara Amiel Michael Barclay Julia Belluz Brian Bethune Colin Campbell Colby Cosh Josh Dehaas Mary Dwyer Katie Engelhart Scott Feschuk Michael Friscolanti Jonathon Gatehouse John Geddes Charlie Gillis Stephen Gordon Cathy Gulli Barry Hertz Aaron Hutchins Brian D. Johnson Vidya Kauri Anne Kingston Jason Kirby Andrew Leach Adrian Lee Kate Lunau Ken MacQueen Melinda Maldonado Tamsin McMahon Kevin Milligan Mike Moffatt Martin Patriquin Michael Petrou Luiza Ch. Savage Emily Senger Amanda Shendruk Chris Sorensen Nick Taylor-Vaisey Emma Teitel Andrew Tolson Patricia Treble Jaime Weinman Paul Wells Aaron Wherry Lindsey Wiebe
Sometime this year, if it hasn’t happened already, the millionth Canadian will be arrested for marijuana possession, Dana Larsen sheraton manhattan hotel estimates. The indefatigable B.C.-based activist for pot legalization is thinking of marking the occasion with a special ceremony. True, it will be impossible to know exactly who the millionth person is, but with the Conservative government’s amped-up war on drugs, it won’t be hard to find a nominee. As Larsen sheraton manhattan hotel notes, the war on drugs in Canada is mostly a war on marijuana, sheraton manhattan hotel “and most of that is a war on marijuana users.”
The numbers bear him out. Since the Tories came to power in 2006, and slammed the door on the previous Liberal government’s muddled plans to reduce or decriminalize marijuana penalties, arrests for pot possession have jumped 41 per cent. In those six years, police reported more than 405,000 marijuana-related arrests, roughly equivalent to the populations of Regina and Saskatoon combined.
sheraton manhattan hotel In the statistic-driven world of policing, pot users are the low-hanging fruit, says Larsen, director of Sensible BC , a non-profit group organizing to put marijuana decriminalization on a provincial referendum ballot in 2014. “We’re seeing crime drop across Canada. [Police] feel they’ve got nothing better to do. You can throw a rock and find a marijuana user,” he says over coffee in his Burnaby sheraton manhattan hotel home. “It’s very easy to do.”
But is it the right thing to do? Most certainly sheraton manhattan hotel that’s the view of the federal government, sheraton manhattan hotel which has been unshakable in its belief that pot users are criminals, and that such criminals need arresting if Canada is to be a safer place. The message hasn’t changed sheraton manhattan hotel though Canada’s crime rate has plummeted to its lowest level in 40 years. “It depends on which type of crime you’re talking about,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said in an interview with the Globe and Mail , a typical defence of the Conservative’s omnibus crime bill, which includes sheraton manhattan hotel new mandatory minimum sentences for some drug crimes. “Among other things, child sexual offences, those crimes are going up. Drug crimes are going up, and so, again, much of what the Safe Streets and Communities Act was focused on was child sexual offences and drug crimes.”
The minister sheraton manhattan hotel is correct if one takes a cursory look at the statistics. Two of the largest one-year increases in police-reported sheraton manhattan hotel crimes in 2011 were a 40 per cent jump in child pornography cases (3,100 incidents), and a seven per cent hike (to 61,406 arrests) for pot possession. Taken together, sheraton manhattan hotel all marijuana offences—possession, growing and trafficking—accounted for a record 78,000 arrests sheraton manhattan hotel in 2011, or 69 per cent of all drug offences. Simple pot possession represented 54 per cent of every drug crime that police managed to uncover. This is more phony war than calamity, waged by a government determined to save us from a cannabis crisis of its own making. To have the minister imply a moral equivalency between child sexual abuse and carrying a couple of joints in your jeans underscores the emotionalism clouding the issue: reason enough to look at why marijuana is illegal in the first place.
The Conservative hard line is increasingly out of step with its citizenry, and with the shifting mood in the United States, where two states—Colorado and Washington—have already legalized recreational use, where others have reduced penalties to a misdemeanour ticket and where many, like California, have such lax rules on medical marijuana that one is reminded of the “medicinal alcohol” that drugstores peddled with a wink during a previous failed experiment with prohibition.
In late May, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition added its voice to the debate with a sweeping report, “ Getting to Tomorrow ,” calling for the decriminalization of all currently illegal drugs, the regulation and taxation of cannabis sheraton manhattan hotel and the expansion of treatment and harm-reduction programs. The coalition of drug policy experts, affiliated with the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University, calls the increasing emphasis on drug criminalization under the Conservatives an “overwhelming failure.” The high marijuana use by Canadian minors is just one unintended consequence of current drug laws, it concludes. “Prohibition abdicated responsibility for regulating drug markets to organized crime and abandons public health measures like age restrictions and dosing controls.”
There’s growing consensus, at least outside the Conservative cabinet room, that it’s time to take a hard look at tossing out a marijuana sheraton manhattan hotel prohibition that dates back to 1923—a Canadian law that has succeeded in criminalizing successive generations, clogging the courts, wasting taxpayer resources and enriching gangsters, while failing to dampen demand for a plant that, by objective sheraton manhattan hotel measures, is far more benign than alcohol or tobacco.
Well, Maclean’s must take a measure of responsibility. Back in the 1920s one of its high-profile correspondents was Emily Murphy, the Alberta magistrate, suffragette and virulent anti-drug crusader, who frequently wrote under the pen name Janey Canuck. She wrote a lurid series of articles for the magazine that were later compiled and expanded in her 1922 book, The Black Candle you ll find an excerpt from this book at the end of this piece. She raged against “Negro” drug dealers and Chinese opium peddlers “of fishy blood” out to control and debase the white race.
Much of her wrath was directed at narcotics and the plight of the addict, but she also waged a hyperbolic attack sheraton manhattan hotel against the evils of smoking marijuana—then little-known and little-used recreationally, although the hemp plant had been a medicinal staple in teas and tinctures. Quoting uncritically the view of the Los Angeles police chief of the day, she reported: “Persons using this narcotic smoke the dried leaves sheraton manhattan hotel of the plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug, while under its influence, are immune to pain, and could be severely injured without sheraton manhattan hotel having any realization of their condition. While in this condition they become raving maniacs and are liable sheraton manhattan hotel to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility.”
In 1923, a year after The Black Candle’s release, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to outlaw cannabis, giving sheraton manhattan hotel it the same status sheraton manhattan hotel as opium and other narcotics. It’s impossible to know what influence Murphy’s writing had on the decision because there was no public or parliamentary sheraton manhattan hotel debate. As noted by a 2002 Canadian Senate committee report, “ Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy ”: “Early drug legislation was largely based on a moral panic, racist sentiment and a notorious absence sheraton manhattan hotel of debate.”
The Senate report, like the royal commission on the nonmedical use of drugs chaired by Gerald LeDain in the early 1970s, concluded that the criminalization of cannabis had no scientific basis, but its use by adolescents should be discouraged. The LeDain reports, between 1970-73, were ahead of their time—to their detriment. Commissioners generated reams of studies on all drug use and held cross-country sheraton manhattan hotel hearings (even recording John Lennon’s sheraton manhattan hotel pro-pot views during an in-camera session sheraton manhattan hotel in Montreal). LeDain sheraton manhattan hotel recommended the repeal of cannabis prohibition, stating “the costs to a significant number of individuals, the majority of whom are young people, and to society generally, of a policy of prohibition sheraton manhattan hotel of simple possession are not justified by the potential for harm.” Even in a counterculture era of love beads and Trudeaumania the recommendations went nowhere.
Obscurity also befell the 2002 Senate report 30 years later. The senators sheraton manhattan hotel recommended sheraton manhattan hotel legalization, as well as amnesty for past convictions, adding: “We are able to categorically state that, used in moderation, cannabis in itself poses very little danger to users and to society as a whole, but specific types of use represent risks to users,” especially the “tiny minority” of adolescents who are heavy us