DUDE! CHILL OUT OVER POT LAWS

Whoa! Chill out, Mr. Toews! Canada's new justice minister is being
anything but groovy with his refusal to relax Canada's rarely
enforced, overly harsh laws that prohibit tokers from using marijuana.

This past week, the justice minister and Manitoba MP put the brakes
on a proposal that would decriminalize cimple possession of
marijuana. The idea, one of the few brainchilds of the former Liberal
government that was worth supporting, would have relaxed the
penalties for possessing less than 15 grams of pot - roughly 20 joints.

"We have a law on the books, don't we?" Toews hurriedly told
reporters in Ottawa after a cabinet meeting last week. The same day,
his spokesman was equally as blunt when The Canadian Press asked if
the Conservatives would resurrect the Liberals' decriminalization efforts.

"It is a very short answer, and the answer is no," Mike Storeshaw
said. "We have no plans to bring any bill forward."

A Liberal bill to decriminalize weed would have given police the
power to issue fines between $100 and $400 if they caught smokers
with less than 15 grams of marijuana. It would have meant potheads
caught smoking up would not have a criminal record and wouldn't face
drug charges in court.

For the most part, we think the plans Toews and the Conservatives
have to hand out harsher sentences and get tougher on criminals are
far better than the soft-on-crime stuff peddled by the Liberals for
the past 13 years. But on the issue of loosening up pot laws, we
think Mr. Toews needs to seriously chill out from his stern stance.

Does the new justice minister think Canada is about to enter some
sort of reefer madness if he lets stoners smoke up without the fear
of getting a criminal record? We hope not. That's just silly, not to
mention old-fashioned.

There's a huge, huge difference between decriminalizing marijuana and
legalizing it -- as they do in the Netherlands, where people can buy
week and freely smoke it in certain sections of restaurants and bars.

The intent of the Liberals' decriminalization bill was to prevent
recreational marijuana users from ending up with a criminal record
just because the police happened to catch them smoking a reefer one
day. Surely, most Canadians would agree that it would be a far
better use of our law-enforcement resources, the courts and the
police, to go out and shut down grow-ops, meth labs and crack houses
- - which more often than not are tied to organized crime - than spend
their time chasing minor drug users.

Besides, if your goal is to prevent people from smoking marijuana,
what better way to do it than focus on busting the places where the
drugs are made or harvested? Reportedly, Westman's pot supply dried
up to a certain extent last summer after police shut down a huge
grow-op near Oak Lake. If you want to keep kids from smoking
marijuana, cut off their supply - don't send the police out to charge
them all with possession.

There are perhaps some other reasons for the Conservatives'
opposition to relaxing marijuana laws. It could be worries that more
and more people are driving under the influence of pot. Perhaps
they're worried they'll upset their friends in the White House, who
are just as ornery about marijuana and who the Tories likely want to
convince that Canada isn't a permissive socialist haven that lets gay
people get married and potheads run amok. (The former U.S.
ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, once suggested there could be
tie-ups at the border if Canada relaxes its pot laws).

Maybe the answer is all of the above, or perhaps it's something else
entirely. Whatever, man.

If you're reading this, Mr. Toews: Dude, get with the times, quit
fretting about a minor drug a growing percentage of the population
uses anyway and focus instead on stopping the real bad guys.