cannabisnews.com: Fine Balance 





Fine Balance 
Posted by CN Staff on May 31, 2003 at 16:05:39 PT
Editorial
Source: Halifax Herald 
In the United States, the religious right claims to speak for the "moral majority" when it campaigns against liberal values. In Canada, the "quiet consensus" is invoked, not to stop liberalization, but to justify it. Up here, the "quiet consensus" is the Gulf Stream of the political climate, progressively warming our leaders to social change - from Sunday shopping all the way to gay rights and tolerance of abortion. 
Drug policy is no exception. When Justice Minister Martin Cauchon unveiled his plan this week to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, he drew from the age-old well of the silent majority, saying "most Canadians" believe our pot laws are outdated. No doubt, this is true - some surveys have shown up to 70 per cent of Canadians support modernizing drug laws; a generation ago, it was a 50-50 split. Strangely, the existence of a vague consensus does not appear to have made Mr. Cauchon's plan any less contentious. Caught between critics who think Ottawa has gone too far and those say it hasn't gone far enough, he is finding it lonely in the middle. But we believe he has struck a fine balance. There is nothing in Mr. Cauchon's bill that encourages cannabis abuse. Marijuana possession is still illegal. Possession of 15 grams or less is punishable by a fine, a heftier one if you're an adult. If you have between 15 and 30 grams on you, you could be either ticketed or charged, and face up to six months in jail. Graded offences would also apply to pot growers. Cultivating one to three plants at home is subject to a $5,000 fine or a 12-month jail sentence. The current penalty can be as much as seven years in jail, but the revised one remains too harsh in the sense that do-it-yourselfers risk less by buying it from the black market. However, under the new law, cultivating 50 plants or more could now net you a maximum of 14 years. This is hardly the free-for-all that opponents have been howling about. With such deterrents and trafficking penalties jacked up, we fail to see how Canada has declared a pot-smoking holiday or issued an open invitation for youth to get tokin'. While pot smokers may quibble with the threshold - they say 15 grams is too low and 30 grams doesn't make you a trafficker - the line had to be drawn somewhere. What's important is folks will be spared criminal records for a relatively harmless indulgence - a mark of Cain that can dog them for the rest of their lives. Authorities are also being spared the expense of prosecuting such cases, of which there are too many, and of jailing offenders. What this bill does not address is the problem of the uneven application of the law. Urban police have traditionally been more lenient towards pot smokers, letting them off with a warning, and their rural counterparts less so. With these reforms, police are given an enormous amount of discretion, not only over the severity of the fine, but over whether criminal charges should be laid. It's not just the urban/rural dichotomy which is a concern here, but class divisions. "History tells us that the disadvantaged and minorities will disproportionately suffer under a regime of that nature," York University professor Alan Young told the Globe and Mail recently, and he's right. The government has also proven a bit wobbly on the prevention side of things. To counteract its softer line towards small-time cannabis afficionados, it's pouring $245 million over five years into programs aimed at education, research and rehabilitation. It had promised to spend twice as much. Which goes to show that when governments relax social controls - whether it's on gambling or drug use - their initial enthusiasm for prevention and assistance programs quickly wanes in the face of budgetary pressures. As time wears on, addicts increasingly get left to their own devices. But on balance, Mr. Cauchon's package is a good one. By giving users more leeway, it addresses the domestic reality that one-third of Canadians have smoked pot, and that making criminals out of them is futile and unfair. But by jacking up the penalties for traffickers, it also sends a message to the zero-tolerance Americans, who could make life miserable for us, that we're serious about nailing the real criminals: grow-ops that export billions in potent weed across our shared border. Source: Halifax Herald (CN NS)Published: Friday, May 30, 2003Copyright: 2003 The Halifax Herald LimitedContact letters herald.ns.caWebsite: http://www.herald.ns.ca/Related Articles:Lighter Penalties for Minors in Pot Bill http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16309.shtmlNew Pot Plan Just Token Effort http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16308.shtmlStop The Reefer Madness http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16301.shtml
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