COTLER BLEW POT BILL

The justice minister had a chance to improve his flawed bill to
decriminalize marijuana, but he chose to do nothing

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler laid an egg by resurrecting the old
Liberal government's marijuana decriminalization bill.

This legislation will do the opposite of what Cotler claims.

It will increase enforcement by bringing in a ticketing regime for
small amounts of marijuana akin to the current collection racket run
by traffic cops.

It will increase policing and jailing costs and the human cost will be
staggering.

Imagine: 14 years in prison if you are caught growing more than four plants.

That's on par with our murder laws and if that doesn't constitute
cruel and unusual punishment for the crime of horticulture, what does?

Worse than Cotler's laziness in not dealing with these issues (they
were pointed out the last time around) is that the government
continues to ignore the real issue of medical marijuana and court
orders to get its house in order. The Office of Cannabis Medical
Access, which co-ordinates initiatives related to providing a reliable
Canadian source of medical pot, is a monumental failure by any
measurable standard save futility.

The program to register medical users is in such chaos, is so
expensive and is so inefficient, compassion clubs called earlier this
year on the auditor-general to investigate malfeasance and bumbling,
as with the gun registry.

Believe it or not, only 800 Canadians have managed to get an exemption
issued by the office after nearly five years of operation!

These are AIDS and chemo-therapy patients who find marijuana relieves
their pain, nausea and other symptoms. I've had three friends go
through the chemo and each found pharmaceutical anti-nausea drugs did
not do the job that a toke would.

When my mother went through the regime last year, a bag of B.C. Bud
was the first thing on my shopping list for her.

There are 7,000 people across the country currently getting their
medicine through compassion clubs because Ottawa is failing them.
Vancouver's compassion club, for example, has a membership of roughly
2,000 people.

But in all those communities where there are no such organizations,
well, I guess the government is driving them into the arms of Mom
Boucher's boys.

Research indicates there are more than a million medical users across
the country, 290,000 in B.C. alone. Even if a much higher number of
these people could negotiate the bureaucracy and get registered for an
exemption, the government marijuana is so bad many people can't smoke
it.

Grown on a $5.7-million contract in a mine shaft, the pot initially
had too little THC to be effective and now that the company has fixed
that problem, it's too badly ground up to smoke.

Of the roughly 100 exemptees who have received government pot ($57,000
for each of them), as of March 31, 2004, roughly 30 per cent had
returned it due to its poor quality. One patient said it "wasn't fit
for human consumption."

Despite allocating $7.5 million to medical marijuana research in 1999,
the feds saw to it that only two proposals were accepted - one in
Toronto that has gone defunct after $800,000 vanished, and the second
in Montreal still in the recruiting stage.

Meanwhile, all of these Canadians are forced into the black market at
a time when the government wants to make the penalties for getting
caught there draconian.

Under the new law, anyone growing a patch of pot for the sick and the
dying will now face a longer term of imprisonment than violent house
invaders and many killers.

That's nuts.

Simon Fraser University economics professor Stephen Easton, who has
researched the booming growth of the marijuana industry for the Fraser
Institute, believes politicians are making the same mistake today they
did in the Roaring Twenties by trying to maintain Prohibition. He says
it's time to legalize pot and tax it:

"Alcohol prohibition in the U.S.expanded organized crime in North
America. Removing alcohol prohibition generated many problems, but
none like those afflicting society in the days of Al Capone and his
ilk. Removing the prohibition on marijuana production would permit
society to replace today's gift of revenue to organized crime with (at
the very least) an additional source of revenue for government coffers."

The criminal law is no longer an appropriate or useful tool for
regulating marijuana in our society.

There are better ways, there are more economical ways and there are
more compassionate ways than this bill.

Cotler and cabinet should go back to the drafting table and deal with
the real issues here.