Bill C-15 has become bill S-10 – and it’s pretty bad if you’re on the side of banishing prohibition. Which I am. Make it all legal across the board.
Crazy, you say? Nope, the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Prohibition against alcohol didn’t work in the 1900s, and it’s pretty clear that the "drug war" is a losing battle. And here our government is, proposing to get "tough on crime." If you’ll humour me, I will lay out why this is ridiculous.
The term "controlled substances" took its moniker from Orwell’s 1984 and double speak. By making pot, cocaine, etc illegal, they are anything but controlled. Or rather, the control lies in the hands of the criminal element. So cops bust someone with a joint, get the person to "roll" on their dealer, who they get to rat out their supplier and so on until they MAYBE reach the top of the chain. Let’s consider what a waste of police resources this is (and courts – the Elk Valley can’t even try the cocaine dealers these days). If you look at drugs like Oxycodone, morphine, metahdone – these are prescribed by doctors. Yes, folks and doctors abuse the system, and some of these drugs end up on the street, but the cops already know who sits on the top of the chain – the doctors. I would think that it is a lot easier to monitor pharmacies and doctors then trying to figure out who the leader of gang is AND tying him/her to the drugs. It is also much harder to get your hands on drugs that aren’t "street drugs". When I was a teenager, I had NO difficulty finding LSD, pot, cocaine. A six-pack of beer? Not impossible, much, much harder.
Mandatory minimums don’t work. The US penal system has pretty much proved that. Mandatory minimums don’t allow for context. Should the person who has 6 plants (the lowest amount requiring a minimum of 6 to 9 months) to treat a friend’s cancer pain get the same punishment as a Hell’s Angels operation of 200 plants? Should the person baking a batch of hash brownies (12 – 18 months) get MORE time than the Hell’s Angels grow-op?
Mandatory minimums also tie up precious police resources. If the cops can close cases and look good with pretty much guaranteed convictions, they will focus on these cases instead of violent crime. There is no mandatory minimum for manslaughter.
Mandatory minimums criminalize addiction, and unfairly target the downtrodden. Instead of getting help, the "criminal" goes to jail. Mandatory minimums tie up finite rehab services. Facing a mandatory sentence, a person with a recreational cocaine habit and the ability to pay a good lawyer will bargain rehab (which they don’t really need) for jail time – potentially taking space from someone who really wants and needs it.
Mandatory minimums strengthen the criminal element. A gang member gets arrested, and he rolls on a rival gang member – knowing that person will be put away for a set length of time – roll on enough rival gang members and you eviscerate the gang for a time, making your own gang stronger. This already happens, but mandatory minimums have the potential to entrench this behaviour even further … which is quite the opposite of what is intended by this ludicrous legislation. Stronger penalties also means more prosperous business for gangs. The bigger the risk, the more their product costs, the more money they make … the more at stake, the more violence.
Some people argue that if all of these street drugs were legal, there would be a lot more abuse. I disagree. There may be an initial spike, but ask yourself, if crystal meth was legal, would you do it? If heroin was legal, would you do it? Oxycondone is legal – do you do it? Some people would answer yes to these questions, but most of us answer no.
By doing away with prohibition, the government takes real control. If the government passes S-10, we’re going to see a lot of growth in the wrong industries – more lawyers, more police, more prisons.
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