Home | Community | Message Board

MushroomCube.com
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Left Coast Kratom Kratom Powder For Sale   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
InvisibleSimplepowa
In Pursuit of Knowledge


Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 4,310
Canada's 100-year war on drugs
    #18676272 - 08/08/13 01:28 AM (10 years, 9 months ago)

As an astute political strategy, Liberal party Leader Justin Trudeau's recent declaration that he supports the legalization of marijuana makes sense -- sort of.

Such a policy definitely separates the Liberals from the Conservatives and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has stated a Conservative government will never decriminalize marijuana, let alone legalize it.

In the past six years, more than 400,000 arrests related to marijuana have been made by the police, an increase of 41 per cent.

Trudeau, too, has won favour with a majority of Canadians -- 65 per cent according to a November 2012 Forum Research poll -- who believe marijuana should be decriminalized or legalized.

But Trudeau's view that marijuana should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol has also raised the ire of medical professionals, legal officials and some pundits who have criticized him for being naive.

Legalizing marijuana, it is argued, would increase demand and use among young adults; lead to more driving infractions since getting behind the wheel stoned is as dangerous as being drunk; and, in general, cause more serious health problems. Various types of cancers, heart disease, long-term memory impairment and schizophrenia have all been connected to marijuana use by an assortment of medical studies.

Trudeau might, therefore, be playing with political fire.

At the same time, there is historical symmetry to his stand. For more than a century, the Liberal party has been embroiled in both the establishment of Canada's drug laws as well as the decriminalization of marijuana.

If anything, the Liberals have always prided themselves as a party that has reflected the values of the times. In the early 1900s, this meant protecting white Canadians from the dangers of Asian immigration.

On Sept. 7, 1907, the Asiatic Exclusion League of Vancouver went on a rampage though the city's Chinatown and Little Tokyo. No one was killed, but there was considerable property damage. The Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier sent William Lyon Mackenzie King, the country's first deputy minister of labour, to investigate.

Among the many individuals who submitted claims for restitution were several Chinese opium dealers, which prompted King to study the opium trade in Vancouver.

There were no laws then governing the use of opium or other drugs; and, in fact, during the 19th century, laudanum, a mixture of liquid opium and alcohol and highly addictive, was popular as a pain remedy.

King was stunned by what he learned about the corrupting influence of opium, connected as it was with widespread notions that Chinese men used opium to exploit and sexually assault white women.

Less than a year later, King's report was used as the basis for the Opium Act, which prohibited "the importation, manufacture and sale of opium for other than medicinal purposes." An analysis of the debate in the House of Commons demonstrates a clear link between the passage of the act and virulent anti-Chinese sentiments -- especially among B.C. MPs.

Canada was the first country in the Western world to enact such legislation.

Soon after, King was elected to Parliament and became the first minister of labour. He continued this inaugural "war on drugs" with the more comprehensive Opium and Narcotic Drug Act to prohibit the improper use of opium and other drugs. Tobacco and alcohol were notably excluded from this legislation.

Possession of opium was now a criminal offence. Police were given wide powers of search and seizure and immediately targeted Chinese immigrants, who were believed to be the main suppliers and users of the drugs.

For many years, as historian Stephanie Bangarth points out, convictions were listed in official reports into two columns, one for "Chinese," the second one for "Others."

That racist theme was given more credence by Emily Murphy in her bestselling and sensational book about drugs, The Black Candle, published in 1922.

Murphy was a police court magistrate in Edmonton (and the first female judge in the British Empire) and one of the celebrated "Famous Five" -- together with Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards -- who fought for women's rights in the Persons Case of 1929.

Yet like King, Murphy feared Canada would be ruined by non-white immigrants, primarily Chinese and black men.
"A visitor may be polite, patient, persevering," she wrote, "but if he carries poisoned lollypops in his pocket and feeds them to our children, it might seem wise to put him out."

She also targeted "Marahuana, a New Menace," a drug she suggested that could drive its users "completely insane." "Marahuana" and "hasheesh ("the weed of madness"), imports from Mexico, the Middle East and the Orient, were cast as destructive to Canadian morality.

Mackenzie King, now the prime minister, and his Liberal government were convinced. In 1923, a year after The Black Candle was given widespread publicity, marijuana was outlawed and the restrictive Chinese Immigration Act was passed, which banned "all Chinese from entering Canada except students, merchants, diplomats and Canadian-born returnees."

For the next five decades, Canada's drug laws were made more stringent and the penalties harsher. Then, the 1960s arrived and attitudes toward marijuana gradually changed -- at least among university-age students and their groovy professors.

The politician who catapulted to power in that era was, of course, Justin's father, Pierre Trudeau, who became leader of the Liberal party and prime minister in 1968. Hip and cool, or so was the persona he exuded, Trudeau soon appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Gerald Le Dain, the dean of the Osgoode Law School who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1984.

After an exhaustive investigation, Le Dain delivered his final report in 1973 and recommended the decriminalization of marijuana laws. Trudeau and many members of his cabinet, including his justice minister, John Turner, however, were opposed to Le Dain's radical reforms.

Turner did accept that lighter jail sentences for possessing small amounts of marijuana was a sound idea. "No one wants a society where we are going to send a generation to jail," he said.

Since then, a succession of Liberal and Conservative prime ministers has considered more drastic decriminalization of marijuana, though none has gone so far as calling for its legalization.

Justin Trudeau has taken a risk, and you can count on Conservative attack ads sometime soon portraying him as rash and out of touch with "ordinary" law-abiding Canadians. Maybe so, but even if this issue is not as clear-cut as Trudeau has advocated, you still have to admire his gumption.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.

August 03, 2013
Allan Levine | Winnipeg Free Press
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/canadas-100-year-war-on-drugs-218195622.html?story=Canada%27s%20100-year%20war%20on%20drugs


--------------------
Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

---

Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."

---

Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: PhytoExtractum Maeng Da Thai Kratom Leaf Powder   Left Coast Kratom Kratom Powder For Sale   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Americans turn to Canada for 'illegal' drugs motamanM 2,140 2 12/26/03 11:55 PM
by DailyPot
* Canada: Marijuana law to be loosened trendalM 3,878 4 01/08/03 12:13 PM
by resin
* Study: Marijuana leads to hard drugs TinMan 3,932 11 11/03/03 08:52 AM
by Seraph
* Marijuana possession: 15 grams, $100 fine motamanM 2,844 2 05/13/03 11:10 PM
by Hans_Moleman
* U.S. states, not Canada, led way in decriminalization motamanM 3,034 2 06/18/03 12:32 AM
by DailyPot
* The U.S. is addicted to war on drugs motamanM 2,907 5 05/21/03 05:17 PM
by Rono
* U.S. considers tighter borders if Canada eases drug penaltie motamanM 2,541 1 05/04/03 04:48 PM
by Anonymous
* The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke (lengthy but worthwhile read) Demiurge 5,412 2 08/14/03 06:17 AM
by TheHobbit

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
220 topic views. 0 members, 6 guests and 4 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.022 seconds spending 0.007 seconds on 13 queries.