POT GROWERS NO WORSE THAN MARTINI DRINKERS, JUDGE SAYS

One of B.C.'s most senior appeal court judges says she no longer believes
marijuana offences are serious crimes.

"While at one time I accepted the received wisdom that marijuana offences
were serious crimes, I now am of a different opinion," B.C. Court of Appeal
Justice Mary Southin said in a written judgment released Friday.

"In my years on the bench I have sat on over 40 cases which had something to
do with this substance, which appears to be of no greater danger to society
than alcohol," she said.

Her comments were contained in a unanimous written ruling by a three-judge
panel that overturned a lower court decision to convict a Vancouver couple
of operating a marijuana growing operation.

"I have not yet abandoned my conviction that Parliament has a constitutional
right to be hoodwinked, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s by the propaganda
against marijuana, and to remain hoodwinked," she said in the judgment.

"The growing, trafficking in, and possession of marijuana ... is the source
of much work, not only for peace officers but also for lawyers and judges.
Whether that work contributes to peace, order and good government is another
matter."

Southin said the marijuana laws in Canada and the U.S. have made "criminals
of those who are no better or worse, morally or physically, than people who
like a martini."

And she went on to cite the anti-marijuana propaganda in the 1936 American
film, Reefer Madness, which claimed that pot was "the new drug menace which
is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers."

She cited the foreword of the film, which claimed that marijuana is "The
Real Public Enemy Number One! Its first effect is sudden, violent,
uncontrollable laughter; then come dangerous hallucinations -- space expands
- -- time slows down, almost stands still...fixed ideas come next, conjuring
up monstrous extravagances, followed by emotional disturbances, the total
inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical
emotions...leading finally to acts of shocking violence...ending often in
incurable insanity."

Southin compared the marijuana law to the attempt to outlaw alcohol during
the prohibition era. "This whole sorry history reflects the sorry history of
prohibition in the United States," she wrote.

"History, unlike mathematics, is not essentially indisputable. I acknowledge
that there may be scholars who see no relationship between the attempt to
suppress the use of alcohol, rooted as I believe it to be in Proverbs 20:1,
and the attempt to suppress the use of marijuana which, so far as I know, is
not mentioned in either the Old or New Testament."

Southin also said she found it "curious that no attack has been made on the
inclusion of 'cannabis' in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act...on the
footing that the matter is beyond the reach of Parliament.

"Parliament having long since yielded to provincial legislatures the
regulation of alcohol, perhaps it might consider yielding the regulation of
marijuana."

Southin, known as one of the most outspoken judges on the appeal court
bench, made headlines earlier this year when it became public that she had
defied Workers Compensation Board rules by continuing to smoke cigarettes in
her office at the Vancouver Law Courts.