DRUG LAW A BUMMER

The federal Conservative government's law-and-order agenda took
another step forward this month with the passage of a bill that will
require minimum mandatory sentences for people convicted of
trafficking in even relatively small amounts of marijuana.

At least that is what the Tories and their allies in the Liberal party
appear to believe. Critics such as the federal NDP and Quebec's Bloc
Quebecois, as well as a good many other Canadians who believe the time
has come to be realistic, rather than hysterical, about illegal drugs
think differently.

While the get-tough-on-drugs movement does spring from a public
hysteria, it is driven by politics. Both the Conservatives and their
Liberal collaborators understand that in Toronto and Vancouver and, to
a lesser extent, in Montreal, law-and-order has become a panic issue
among the general population. Drugs, in the popular mind, are linked
to guns and guns are linked to serious crime which is linked to gangs
linked to murder and drugs. Any political party that appears to have
the answer to cleaning up the streets has a willing audience in these
vote-rich areas. But it's not an idea that works very well. In fact,
there is mounting evidence that in this day and age, mandatory minimum
sentences and provisions such as "three-strikes-and-you're-out" laws
don't do much except swell prison populations anyway.

The new legislation, if it passes the Senate, will deny judges the
discretion of jailing drug traffickers or not. Trafficking will
consist of possessing a mere five marijuana plants, or even of sharing
weed with your friends. If police enforce the law -- and police
usually do -- the jails and prisons will fill to bursting, as they are
with drug users and dealers in the U.S., but the Conservatives and
Liberals have no plans to expand prisons to accommodate these new criminals.

That will exacerbate conditions in overcrowded prisons, but since
marijuana burst on the popular scene in the 1960s, when possession of
a single joint could bring a life sentence in some American
jurisdictions and almost guaranteed a jail sentence in Canadian ones,
it has been proven over and over again that harsh marijuana laws do
nothing to prevent the control of the drug. It is widely popular
today, but because of the political cowardice of governments on every
level, it is uncontrolled and unregulated.

The sale of alcohol and tobacco is strictly legislated, but marijuana
is freely available to any child who has the money to buy it from any
criminal who chooses to sell it in back alleys or on school corners.
Laws like this do not fight or eliminate crime. They accomplish
nothing but to create criminals where they did not exist before.