Please read this, not because I think any of you will find anything contained within particularly diasgreeable or shocking, but because it's a good summary of the stupidity of the whole War on Drugs and what's it's done to the United States and the various countries it has to blow up to finally and completely destroy the threat of a wide range of inanimate objects. What it doesn't mention though, which is what I wanted to briefly outline for the yanks among us, is how the War on Drugs is used as a big old bludgeon to by America to get Canada to do what it likes.
Misha Glenny, a journalist who occasionally writes for the Globe and Mail and specializes in Eastern European politics, recently wrote a book about globalized crime called McMafia. In it, there's a whole chapter devoted to the Canadian marijuana industry, and the way that it affects Canadian-US relations. Obviously, it's a very complicated topic and I have the book if anyone wants to take a look at it, but what I wanted to point out is that the War on Drugs has made it virtually impossible for us Canadians to decriminalise marijuana, even though the majority favour full legalisation. Because of the vast array of issues in which Canada is dependent on the United States, most frustrating of them being trade, the government is wary of doing anything that might make Washington mad, going so far as to allow American law enforcement into Canada to conduct raids on grow ops.
What's even stranger about all this is that even the police and the courts seem to think criminalising marijuana is counter-productive. My mom, back when we lived in Calgary, was a crown prosecutor (this is the equivalent to a district attorney in the states), and she, along with the various judges, detectives, and cops that she knew, thought that the only real way to deal with marijuana was to legalise it and then put taxes on it. Their main complaint was that the justice system was completely bogged down by tons and tons of marijuana cases, and so major resources and time had to be diverted from legitimate cases and problems (Calgary's growing gang problem, for example) to deal with them.
So the law don't like it, and the people don't like it, but America likes it, so Canada likes it.
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all I can do is bang my head against a wall
ReplyDeleteBased on my limited knowledge about this topic, it seems like this particular strand of the U.S.-Canada relationship gets played out fairly often within the United States, namely between municipal and county law enforcement officers on the one hand and state and federal bureaucrats on the other. I think its fairly easy to dictate policy on drugs when you don't have to take those resources out of your own budget. For instance, in both the places I grew up in California, Santa Barbara and San Francisco (admittedly poor representations of a state which is itself a poor representation of the country), both police departments have decided to tacitly stop enforcing marijuana laws. I'm sure there are countless towns and counties around the country that have adopted similar approaches. Police departments and D.A. offices can't simply refuse to enforce federal or state law, so they just turn a blind eye. These decisions obviously have nothing to do with any kind of philosophical support for drug use, save maybe a philosophy of not wanting to divert money and manpower away from problems that are actually killing people.
ReplyDeleteIf really dumb laws stay on the books for a really long time, I think this kind of thing is inevitable.