High time for legal pot
Seventeen per cent. Let me say that again: 17 per cent. That’s one in every 6 Canadians who smoked pot last year.
It is shocking this relatively benign drug is still illegal in this country.
A recent Angus-Reid poll indicated fifty-five per cent of Canadians support legalization. In 2002, the Canadian Senate, made up of some of the most conservative politicos in the country, recommended legalization. Their 600-page report got watered down into a ridiculous Liberal decriminalization bill that was quashed by Stephen Harper when he narrowly grabbed the reins of power.
Even Barry McNight, chair of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police’s drug abuse committee, inadvertently made the case for legalization this morning in a CBC interview. McNight focussed on the well-accepted premise that marijuana use is a health and social issue.
Trying to control it through the criminal code is just downright stupid, a complete waste of police resources and an insult to the millions of productive citizens who like a toke now and then.
Normally, I would come up with an in-depth, coherent argument, but I’m just so fed up with the idiocy of this debate, I do not feel compelled to rehash what in my view can be relegated to simple common sense.
Canadians want to smoke pot.
The problem with weed is not weed, it is the crime associated with its production and distribution.
It is approved for medicinal use in this country.
Prohibition does not work.
It is high time to take the crime out of marijuana.
