Pubdate: Wed, 09 Dec 2015
Source: Japan Today (Japan)
Contact:  2015, Japan Today
Website: http://www.japantoday.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2264

CANADA LEADS WAY IN LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows when he admitted to having dabbled in 
marijuana while a member of parliament, but his pledge as prime 
minister to legalize pot has been broadly cheered.

He said in a policy speech on Friday that his Liberal government 
would introduce legislation as early as 2016 to legalize marijuana, 
making Canada the first in the G7 bloc of industrialized nations to 
do so, although precise details remain sketchy.

Two in three Canadians support decriminalizing possession and use of 
the mind-altering weed, according to a recent Ipsos poll.

Support is widespread and at its highest level in three decades, it 
said, even though cannabis use has fallen off.

Details of the Liberal plan haven't yet been released. However, it is 
expected to go much further by not only legalizing marijuana but also 
creating a regulated market for it, as Uruguay and a few U.S. states have done.

An estimated one million out of Canada's 35 million people regularly 
smoke marijuana, according to the latest survey taken in 2014.

Trudeau admitted in 2013 to having smoked pot five or six times in 
his life, including at a dinner party with friends since being 
elected to parliament.

He has also said that his late brother Michel was facing marijuana 
possession charges for a "tiny amount"  of pot before his death in an 
avalanche in 1998, and that this influenced his decision to propose 
legalizing cannabis.

"I'm not someone who is particularly interested in altered states, 
but I certainly won't judge someone else for it,"  Trudeau said. "I 
think that the prohibition that is currently on marijuana is unjustified."

In 2014, there were just under 104,000 police-reported drug incidents 
in Canada. Of these, 66% were related to cannabis, primarily for 
possession, according to the official Statistics Canada.

Police chiefs have urged legislative change allowing them to hand out 
fines for small amounts of pot possession instead of laying criminal 
charges to reduce policing and court costs, and to do away with such 
convictions affecting Canadians' travel, employment and citizenship.

"This isn't about making cannabis more available to smoke, it's about 
dealing with a bad prohibitionist model that has led to global 
carnage,"  University of Ottawa criminologist Eugene Oscapella told 
AFP, citing drug-cartel killings as an extreme example.

Legalizing pot will "destroy the illegal market,"  he said, adding 
that "the new regime should be based on public health to maximize 
benefits and minimize harms."

Once Ottawa takes marijuana off its list of controlled drugs, 
regulating it will likely fall on Canada's provinces, the same way 
alcohol distribution is managed.

"It's conceivable but unlikely that you will be able to go to a 
(corner store) in Quebec where you can now buy alcohol in order to 
buy marijuana,"  Oscapella said.

He said he would be watching for a possible backlash from allies 
abroad that take a stiffer line on drugs and impacts on international 
treaties, as well as who will be allowed to produce pot and how it 
will be sold.

"There are a lot of niggly little details that need to be worked 
out,"  said Oscapella. "The attorney general can stop prosecutions of 
drug possessions immediately, but distribution and other matters will 
take longer to sort out."

The use of marijuana for medicinal purposes was effectively legalized 
in Canada in 1999, but subsequent efforts to soften Canada's pot laws 
went up in smoke with the election of Stephen Harper in 2006.

Harper took a hard line against what he called a Beatles-era drug 
culture, saying cannabis was more dangerous for health than tobacco.

His former health minister Rona Ambrose, who succeeded Harper as Tory 
leader, warned that judicial rulings had chipped away at the 1923 
cannabis prohibition before the drug could be shown in clinical 
trials to be safe to use.

In June, she said she was "outraged"  that the Supreme Court had 
expanded the definition of medical marijuana to allow users to bake 
it into cookies or brew pot leaves for tea instead of only smoking it.

The morning after the Liberals swept to power in October, pot stocks 
doubled in price as investors bet on firms already producing 
marijuana for medical use being able to quickly scale up to serve 
recreational pot users too.

Only six firms were initially licensed by Health Canada to grow and 
sell medical marijuana in 2014. The number of licensees has since shot up to 26.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom