LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION

The Crazy Years

You've had a long, hard day, and you're sitting at a bus stop, waiting for
the bus to come to take you home. A stranger sits down beside you -- not a
bum or a weirdo, just a guy -- and leans over and murmurs, "You look like
you could use a little pick-me-up, friend." You look at him suspiciously,
and with a furtive glance to either side he surreptitiously shows you a fat
bag full of marijuana joints. Even through the plastic, the pungent smell
reaches you. "Finest B.C. hydro," he says. "Dollar a joint."

Perhaps you smoked pot in your youth, but it's been years since you even
knew anyone who had any -- and now all of a sudden you find yourself
feeling nostalgic for the sixties. Perhaps you've never smoked pot in your
life, and this is the first time you've been offered any -- and all of a
sudden you find your curious. Perhaps you know someone else who you think
will be pleased by a surprise gift. For whatever reason, you decide to
accept the man's offer and slip him a loonie.

And he puts the cuffs on you.

Spider, your science-fiction background is showing again. That's a
ridiculous scenario. Law-enforcement officers aren't allowed to solicit
drug purchase offers to break the law -- everybody knows that.

Wrong. In Canada they are.

But surely a cop can't tempt you into committing a crime, and then arrest
you if you succemb. That's entrapment, isn't it?

Yes, it is. And it's perfectly legal... in Canada. As of May 1997, police
in this country are specifically permitted to grow, manufacture, traffic in
and/or sell illegal drugs in the course of conducting a criminal
investigation -- of a crime that would not have existed without them. In
(undefined) "extreme cases," they need not even ask their senior officers
for permission first.

But surely you would have noticed the passage of such a startling law.
There would have been intense controversy, vigorous parliamentary and
public debate, international publicity, threatened court challenges... Such
a fundamental reversal of the most basic principles of legal ethics and
human rights simply couldn't have been accomplished in a free country
without anyone noticing, could it?

Not if it had been done fair and square, no. But it wasn't. It was done
covertly, surreptitiously: not by law but by regulation.

As Chad Skelton reported in the Oct. 6 Vancouver Sun, regulations "are a
necessary but poorly understood part of the legislative process....Laws
usually set out the broad explanation of what is and is not permitted...and
delegate the fine-tuning of those rules -- by means of regulations -- to
government departments.... While new laws are usually the subject of fierce
parlimentary debate and press coverage, regulations are passed quietly
every day in Ottawa with few taking notice."

You were informed of the new regulation permitting police to break the law
at will. It was "published for public comment" -- twice! -- in the Canada
Gazette, a government publication with only 9,000 subscribers. Few members
of the public have ever seen a copy, and Mr. Skelton quotes John McIntyre,
director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, as saying, "Lawyers
wouldn't even read it on a regular basis."

The first time the regulation was published there, in May 1994, it was
written in legalese, incomprehensible to the average layman. The second
time it ran, accompanied by a "plain English" explanation, was the month it
went into effect: May, 1997. Even Mr. McIntyre had never heard of it, until
a few weeks ago when the Vancouver RCMP offered 50 kilos of cocaine for
sale, busted three men who agreed to buy it, and confiscated the
$1.23-million they had offered. (A similar "reverse sting" last April in
Montreal also went unremarked, perhaps because the cops only grossed
$140,000 then.)

Nor is the power to break the law afforded only to the RCMP; it can be
given to any police force a provincial attorney-general designates. It is
currently held by 12 different police forces in British Columbia, and 65
nation-wide, with more doubtless to come. the April Montreal sting was
carried out by local police. The federal Solictor-General's office did not,
of course, promulgate this stunning new regulation without consultation.
No, sir. It solicited input from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of
Police, provincial governments and Crown prosecutors. Somehow it did not
get around to seeking the opinions of civil-liberties groups, defence
lawyers or the public during the three-year approval process. As author
Robert Anton Wilson said of the controversy over medical marijuana use in
California, "the people cannot be allowed to meddle in their own affairs."

Mr Skelton quotes a spokesman for the B.C. Trial Lawyers' Association, Ian
Donaldson: "The idea that police are above the law...is something I would
have thought would be [worthy of] public debate as opposed to being snuck
through by regulation."

Mr. Skelton also spoke with Michel Perron, a senior advisor to the federal
Solicitor-General and the bureaucrat who shepherded the new regulation
through the approval process. Mr. Perron "said fears of entrapment are
exaggerated....However, asked if the new rules could be used to investigate
an individual suspected of using marijuana, Perron said, 'There is no
distinction in the regulation to the amount or type of drug.'"

Will the regulation stand up under court challenge? Opinions differ
sharply; we won't know for sure until some years after the first cases work
their way through the legal system.

Meanwhile, Canada -- a country where people care so much about human rights
that some of them will risk pepper spray in the eyes merely to protest
against the presence of a visiting politician from a land without such
rights -- is now the only nominally civilized nation on Earth in which
police are allowed to tempt people into criminal activity and then arrest
them for it. Just as the public is finally noticing that the War On Drugs
has been a disaster, it has been deemed sufficient excuse to suspend civil
liberties here.

My thanks to Mr. Skelton, one of the last real investigative reporters in
captivity. Without his efforts, even I would not have suspected how deep we
are into the Crazy Years.

- -- Award-winning science-fiction writer Spider Robinson is scheduled to
appear on The Pamela Wallin Show on Oct. 22 (CBC Newsworld -- 10:00P.M.
EDT) and Oct. 23 (CBC).

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski