HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html
Pubdate: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Copyright: 2000, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Forum: http://forums.theglobeandmail.com/ Author: William Johnson COURTING MARY JANE IS NO CRIME The "war on drugs" reminds me of the Vietnam War. In both wars, all you read in the newspapers was about the latest victory. During the Vietnam War, it was the daily body count. The Americans counted their victories by the number of Viet Cong reported killed. They won every day until the final defeat. In the war on drugs, you read recurrently about police raids, drugs seized, people charged, convicted, sentenced, imprisoned. Each story presents a victory over an underground army of criminals, enemies of the people, many of them bikers and many foreigners. Last week, for example, the Ottawa-Carleton Police Service announced "the largest and most successful undercover drug investigation in its history." It was called Project CAPE, and it took 16 months of undercover investigation that culminated early last Thursday morning when 170 police officers carried out raids in residences from Montreal to Hamilton. They arrested 70 suspects, seized a reported $600,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine and crack cocaine, cash, stolen property and 27 firearms. Big deal. This is the cloak-and-dagger war on drugs depicted in the news media. It's the stuff of movies. And it's utterly misleading. The real war on drugs, if you look at the statistics, is a war against marijuana, a substance less harmful than tobacco or alcohol. It takes up an immense amount of police time, court and lawyers' costs, the costs of incarceration. Its true targets are ordinary citizens and especially the young. And all that costly panoply is as futile as declaring war on coffee. Let me come clean. Yes, I smoked marijuana and hashish and I inhaled, when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s. But I was never more than a casual social smoker -- perhaps a total of 40 joints in a lifetime. The last time was 15 years ago, so I'm not pleading for a personal foible. What makes me really proud is that I kicked my addiction to cigarettes in 1967, and haven't touched tobacco since. Now, let's look at the evidence. Statistics Canada released last week its report, Crime Statistics in Canada, 1999. It is based on police reports of infractions to the Criminal Code across the country. The good news was that, for the eighth straight year, crime rates had dropped in Canada. "Over these eight years, the crime rate has decreased by an average of 4 per cent per year, resulting in the 1999 rate being the lowest since 1979," according to the report from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, which collects the data. Ah, but there is an exception: The police reported a substantial rise in criminal incidents related to cannabis, or hemp, which provides marijuana and hashish. "Fuelled by a large increase in cannabis-related offences ([up] 16 per cent) the rate of drug offences increased by 12 per cent in 1999." Isn't it odd that, when every form of crime is on a long-term decline - -- murder, assault, abduction, robbery, use of firearms to commit a crime, breaking and entering, car thefts, fraud, possession of stolen goods -- only "crimes" related to marijuana are on the upswing? A more detailed publication released this year by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Illicit Drugs and Crime in Canada, reported: "The rate of cocaine offences has dropped by 36 per cent since 1989. The rate of heroin offences, peaking in 1993, then [fell] 25 per cent over the last four years." So the war on drugs is really about marijuana, as last week's crime-statistics report indicated. And its targets are those who possess marijuana much more than the wicked traffickers: "Cannabis offences accounted for three-quarters of all drug-related incidents reported in 1999, of which 66 per cent were for possession, 17 per cent for trafficking, 15 per cent for cultivation, and 2 per cent for importation." The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics reported in its Adult Criminal Court Survey that, in 1998-99, a total of 40,056 persons were charged with drug-related offences. Unfortunately, it does not distinguish between cannabis and other drugs, but more than half of those charged were charged with possession rather than trafficking. And while 6,833 were found guilty of trafficking, a much larger number - -- 11,480 -- were convicted for simple possession. That's the real war on drugs. In a judgment rendered by the British Columbia Court of Appeal on June 2 (R. v. Malmo-Levine), two out of the three judges refused to overturn a conviction for possession of marijuana, on the grounds that it was up to Parliament, not the courts, to amend the law. But the majority report had some interesting observations, including this one: "Every year thousands of Canadians are branded with a criminal record for a remarkably benign activity, such as smoking marijuana." In next week's column, I'll demonstrate why Parliament must act to decriminalize possession of marijuana. To do otherwise would be criminal. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek