Moncton Forum

By Jeremy Hainsworth
VANCOUVER (CP) — A B.C. Liberal senator says the federal government should decriminalize marijuana and ”tax the hell out of it,” with the revenue going to public services such as health care.

Senator Larry Campbell says too much time and effort is being wasted with criminal prosecutions for minor amounts of the drug while organized crime reaps massive profits from the drug’s cultivation.

And, he says, a lot of police officers are looking the other way when it comes to busting people for having marijuana.

He said Wednesday it’s a drain on officers’ time to spend five hours producing paperwork for marijuana charges.

The drug should be treated the same way alcohol is with its production controlled and sales regulated, Campbell said.
“This is not a drug that causes criminality,” he said. “People are getting criminal records for essentially nothing.”

A new study shows Canadians surpass Americans and even the Dutch when it comes to trying marijuana, but drug policy experts say it’s not a cause for concern.

The UN’s 2007 World Drug Report found 16.8 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 64 used pot in 2004 — the highest rate among developed nations.

The report studied the prevalence of marijuana use in 2005 or the latest year for which data was available.
By comparison, 12.6 per cent of American respondents said they have tried pot.
Britain, France, Germany and Japan all reported much lower rates than Canada.

However, despite the rise in the social acceptance of marijuana, the number of people arrested for smoking pot rose dramatically in several Canadian cities last year.

The spike in arrests came after the Conservatives took office and killed a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.
Several police officials say the trend is linked directly to that move.

National statistics will be released next week but preliminary figures compiled by The Canadian Press suggest the number of arrests jumped by more than one-third in several Canadian cities.
Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Halifax all reported increases of between 20 and 50 per cent in 2006 from the previous year.

Montreal and Calgary had their arrest numbers dip slightly.
As a result, thousands of people were charged with a criminal offence that just recently was within a whisker of extinction.

In 2002, 26,882 people were charged with marijuana offences.
As the issue worked its way through Parliament prior to falling off the order paper as the election arrived in 2006, the numbers of those charged plunged and held steady below the 19,000 mark.
The head of one police association said many forces simply stopped laying charges after the Liberals first introduced a decriminalization bill under Jean Chretien in 2003.

“There were several police jurisdictions not laying the simple … possession charges,” said Terry McLaren, president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.

“Everybody was waiting for what was going to happen. ... There’d be no use clogging up the court system with that decriminalization bill there. ”
“’When that was defeated, I’d say it was business as usual.”

Campbell couldn’t say how marijuana would be produced and if it could be the federal government that would grow the plants.
”I don’t know how that would work,” he said. ”if you wanted to grow a plant in your backyard, so what,” he said. ”It’s like me going and making plonk at the wine store.”

== Senator Larry Campbell can be reached at

   info@larrycampbell.ca

I sent him the following e-mail

    Dear Senator Campbell

   I read your comments about  decriminalizing marijuana and strongly disagree. As someone who has been deeply involved with such groups as Toughlove Canada and others, I feel you are greatly misinformed about its effects and dangers.

 I'm enclosing a copy of a recent article that I think you may have missed.

XXXXXXXX

Moncton,NB

When the kid was roused from bed, Mr. Smyth saw he was severely addicted. "He showed all the physical signs - agitation, restlessness, aggression - that I used to see in people withdrawing from cocaine." But the drug wasn't cocaine. It was marijuana.

Last week, people reacted with outrage over the story of Kieran King, the 15-year-old Saskatchewan student whose school came down on him like a sledgehammer because he dared to argue that marijuana is relatively benign. 

 The vast majority of the marijuana inhaled today is not the mellow weed you and I remember from our youth. It is many times more powerful. In fact, the United Nations now classifies Canadian-grown marijuana as a hard drug whose destructive power puts it in the same league as cocaine.

Today's harder, meaner cannabis is a scourge in many of Canada's poorer neighbourhoods. It is a spreading affliction on native reserves and, in the cities, is intimately linked with the deadly duo of guns and gangs. It has an especially devastating effect among certain ethnic minorities. "These kids get outcomes from today's stimulant marijuana that are very hard to describe to someone who's only familiar with pot," Mr. Smyth says.

How did such a nice drug turn so nasty? Blame a revolution in greenhouse technology, along with genetic engineering and the cross-breeding of seed stock from Asia and the Middle East. This potent stuff now dominates the market. The UN says it is "distinct enough in appearance and potency to be considered a separate drug." The evidence shows that it can be highly addictive, especially for kids who suffer from depression, behavioural problems or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

 It causes paranoia, aggressiveness and psychosis, and it sharply elevates the risk of schizophrenia. It is very bad, indeed, for people with asthma or multiple sclerosis.

A decade ago, The Independent, a major British daily, led the campaign to decriminalize marijuana. In March, it ran a front-page editorial under the headline "Cannabis: An Apology." It changed its stand "because of the growing weight of evidence that cannabis contributes to mental illness."

Griffith Edwards, founder of Britain's National Addiction Centre, has also done an about-face. "Thirty or forty years ago, I was writing that cannabis was a drug without harm and dependence, but I've had to eat my hat."

This month, the BBC has been running a series of confessional stories about mental-health problems and soaring addiction rates caused by today's cannabis. Meantime, in the Netherlands, the formerly tolerant Dutch are closing dozens of "coffee houses" where you could once toke up to your heart's content.

Unfortunately, you won't learn any of this if you live in Canada, where the people who run the media and make drug policy are stuck back in the groovy 1960s. In fact, we're rather proud of our enlightened cannabis policies - so different from those of the backward Americans - and our world-class B.C. bud. We treat pot activists such as Marc Emery as folk heroes. Even our health authorities - the ones who are demanding zero tolerance for cigarettes and trans fats - continue to promote the view that cannabis is harmless. Health Canada has decreed that it's medically "effective" for people with various chronic conditions, a position that could come back to haunt the government when the lawsuits begin to fly.

"In the real world, marijuana today is no longer about the children of our elites headed for higher education," Mr. Smyth says. "It is very much about future hope and opportunities for non-academic kids." He's haunted by the young lives he's seen destroyed. And he's waiting for the day when our enlightened leaders will start to smarten up.

The reply came from one of his assiatants

From..

campbell-assist2@SEN.PARL.GC.CA

Dear Mr. XXXXXXX,

I am writing on behalf of Senator Campbell, regarding your correspondence from earlier today.

Senator Campbell understands and appreciates your point that marijuana itself has changed throughout the years, as the article you sent along points out. However, the Senator believes that the toxicity levels of marijuana could be regulated, if only marijuana (like tobacco) was government-regulated and checked for quality control.

Senator Campbell does not seek to increase availability of marijuana or to encourage use. Rather, he hopes that if marijuana were legalized by the federal government and put under its control (as alcohol and tobacco are), youths would be restricted and therefore have less access to marijuana than they do today, with marijuana dealing in the control of an uncaring criminal element. As well, the government could make a profit by taxing an industry that effectively already exists, and put that money into health care and treatment for those who are addicted to harsher drugs.

If you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact our office.

Sincerely,

Madeline Knickerbocker

Madeline Knickerbocker
Special  Assistant to
Senator Larry W. Campbell
The Senate of Canada
Room 708, Victoria Building
Ottawa, On  K1A 0A4
TEL: (613) 995-4050
FAX: (613) 995-4056
TOLL FREE : 1-800-267-7362

===

I really think that Senator Campbell should  get a few more  like e-mails.