BRAVO JUSTICE SOUTHIN FOR NAILING THE FOLLY OF POT PROHIBITION

Madame Justice Mary Southin has set tongues a wagging with her splendid take
on Canada's Dumb and Dumber prohibition on marijuana.

In a devastating sidebar to the B.C. Court of Appeal's rapping of Vancouver
police knuckles for a bungled grow-op raid, the 71-year-old Southin skewered
the absurdity of government anti-pot paranoia.

Naturally this raised the dander of Alliance MP Randy White and other
anti-pot crusaders who fret about so-called "judicial activism" when they
don't like a ruling.

Let them fret. Southin's comments about the hopelessness of pot prohibition
and the historical jiggery-pokery that led to it make more sense than
anything coming out of Parliament these days.

A 15-year veteran of B.C.'s highest court, Southin has judged over 40 cases
involving pot, "which appears to be of no greater danger to society than
alcohol."

Heresy to the crusaders, no doubt, but an observation backed up by the
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. In fact, the centre says booze causes
far worse problems and thousands of deaths every year.

When's the last time you heard of someone dying from a pot overdose? Indeed,
Southin observes that marijuana smokers "are no better or worse, morally or
physically, than people who like a martini."

Or maybe more than one martini, and many glasses of wine, and then get
behind the wheel of a car drunk. As Premier Gordon Campbell did in Hawaii,
and tens of thousands do across Canada every year.

Southin notes marijuana-busting "is the source of much work" for police and
courts, but whether that "contributes to peace, order and good government is
another matter."

"This whole sorry history," she continues, "reflects the sorry history of
prohibition in the United States," where anti-pot mania falsely lumped the
relatively benign hallucinogen in with brutal narcotics like heroin.

Parliament, she suggests, was "hoodwinked" in the 1920s and 1930s "by the
propaganda" against pot also cited in last year's Senate committee report
calling for legalization of the weed.

That report terms 1908 to 1960 a "period of hysteria" when drug laws were
"largely based on moral panic, racist sentiment and a notorious absence of
debate."

We've got more debate now, but much of it replays the tired old falsehoods.
Bravo, Madame Justice Southin.