Let's begin with a worst-case scenario hypothetical. A young woman attending last weekend's Evolve Music Festival - Antigonish's three-day "celebration of music, culture and social awareness" - decides she wants to alter her mind with some mind-altering substance. She asks around, discovers a guy selling what she thinks she wants to buy. She buys. She takes. But the drug isn't what she thought. She collapses. She's rushed to hospital. She dies. That horrific hypothetical isn't all that hypothetical. [continues 296 words]
Is There Anybody Left Who Doesn't Want To Decriminalize Pot? How is it that one baby step on the long and winding road from reefer madness to some semblance of soft-drug sanity has been transformed into a giant leap for all mankind? It has been nearly 80 years since Canada first banned the sale and consumption of marijuana under the 1923 Opium and Drug Act and nearly 30 since a royal commission revisited the issue and recommended reversing that decision. [continues 447 words]
Cops, Lawyers, Judges And Columnists Have All Smoked Up Canada's police chiefs say it's past time for Ottawa to decriminalize the simple possession of marijuana. A federal Senate committee came to the same logical conclusion not that many years ago. Now, The Globe and Mail's editorial board has weighed in on the issue, this week declaring itself "increasingly convinced that we are wasting significant resources in steering occasional dabblers and harmless potheads through the criminal justice system." And yet, we continue to charge people - more and more of them each year - with drug-related offences. The majority of people who end up with drug-related criminal records are young, and their "crime" is most often the victimless non-crime of having a joint or two in their pocket or purse at the wrong time and place. [continues 416 words]
Jane Purves told the truth, and deserves our respect for it The story of how Education Minister Jane Purves's brave, blunt acknowledgement of her long-past intravenous-drug abuse got into the public prints this week could serve as a case study in dealing with difficult issues, not only for aspiring politicians but also for would-be journalists. The rumours that Purves, 50, had once been addicted to heroin have been circulating in political, social and media circles for months. I heard them second-hand during this summer's provincial-election campaign from one of her former colleagues at The Herald. Other reporters picked up on the buzz of the political gossip mill, and still others from the tight little circle of Halifax's south-end cocktail party circuit, where Purves's addiction had been accepted as fact for years. [continues 917 words]
... or the voters about drug use in the past? The recent media fooforah about U.S. presidential wannabe George W. Bush's supposedly long ago, supposedly irresponsible, supposed "experiments" with drugs of a recreational if illegal nature has touched off yet another round of that peculiar brand of forelock-tugging, knicker-twisting angst common to aging boomer-parent punditi. Oh, God, they ask plaintively, what-oh-what should we tell the kids? The question, of course, has to do with The Terrible Truth that once, long ago and far away - before we all became respectable, responsible, God-fearing, too-much taxpaying teachers and preachers and business executives and janitors and police officers and judges and doctors and newspaper columnists - a few of us might have smoked the occasional joint. And, worse, maybe even enjoyed it. Before, of course, we woke up to The Terrible Truth that all drugs are not only equally bad for us but that all of them will also inevitably and inexorably suck haplessly helpless indulgers into a cesspool of wasted, wasteful lives of crime, sin and degradation (our own current sun-dappled, clean-living suburban existences excepted, of course). [continues 759 words]
One in 50 otherwise good citizens has a criminal record Do you know that Statistics Canada reported this week more than 70 per cent of all drug charges filed in Canada in 1997 were marijuana-related? Do you know two-thirds of the 42,000 people charged with pot offences that year were, in fact, chewing up great gobs of expensive cop and court time, resources and budget for nothing more sinister than simply possessing a recreational drug most of the rest of us have at least tried - and many of us have even enjoyed from time to time - and that is clearly no more harmful or addictive (and probably less so) than alcohol? [continues 255 words]
