The Tide Turns on Weed

I’m not a pot smoker but I have done it in the distant past and I did inhale and hold it.  It made me paranoid.  I remember sitting in the corner at a Halloween party long, long ago, convinced everyone there was talking about me! I’ve never been a big fan of huge house parties anyway but that one was possibly my worst experience. I don’t ever plan to get acquainted with a joint again.

a hand holding a lit joint
photo by Torben Bjorn Hansen

Marijuana is illegal but recent developments show it might not be within our lifetime.  Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau started the ball rolling in a serious way when he admitted he’d smoked pot since becoming an MP. Others couldn’t wait to jump on the bandwagon even if it could be reasonably assumed they knew how to smoke a joint.  Toronto Mayor Rob Ford made the least surprising admission that he’d smoked a lot.  London Mayor Joe Fontana admitted he smoked lots of it too saying “I was in rock bands in the 1960’s – what do you think I did?”  But Prime Minister Stephen Harper says, as a life-long asthmatic, he’s never smoked anything.  In fact he accuses Trudeau of being too immature and dangerous to run the country.  Canada’s Police Chiefs this summer passed a resolution to push for more options to deal with people who have small amounts of pot rather than putting them through the system. They’d rather issue a ticket, which is less time consuming, and spend their working hours chasing the real bad guys, the ones with guns, explosives and ill intent.

So who’s right? Is marijuana only as harmful, and perhaps less so, than alcohol?  Should it be legalized and regulated or left in the heap of drugs police are mandated to root out?  The Harper government seems to want so much control, let them control and tax this.  That deficit they’re so concerned about? GONE. That’s my take. Regulate, tax it and distribute it to those who qualify. Let the pot laws go up in smoke.

*This post also appears at BlackburnNews.com

4 thoughts on “The Tide Turns on Weed”

  1. Is weed as harmless as liquor? No, neither is harmless. Are there medical benefits to weed, no, it merely temporarily addresses symptoms masking the underlying cause. Should it be decriminalized, No, but the rules should be revised to offer a greater level of flexibility to enforcement. Is Harper a pompous, arrogant jack ass, need you ask? Is this topic ever going away, no, for if we likely had the chance to do it all over again, liquor and cigarettes would have never been legalized.

    And yes, I tried it once, which in of itself is surprising, for one of my neighbors use to grow it, so it was readily available, I just had to walk next door.

  2. Cannabis has been used medicinally for over 5000 years…..check Sanjay Guptas latest show on weed, (CNN) if you really want to determine if there is any medical benefit to cannabis.

    Legalizing weed takes the money away from the criminal organizations, frees up police for the pursuit of real crime, makes it more difficult for minors to obtain it, and could provide significant tax revenues.

    Recent polls show that approx. 57% of Canadians support legalization. Prohibition does not work, in fact Abraham Lincoln had this to say in December 1840:

    “Prohibition….goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

    As well, our Canadian government has concluded a number of exhaustive studies on the whole marijuana question, and one of the best to look at is “Senate special committee on illegal drugs”. In 2002, this report concluded that marijuana should be legalized and regulated in a system similar to alcohol.

    Makes you wonder why the laws haven’t changed yet….but with Mr.Harper and his merry bunch of clowns refusing to accept science, perhaps it isn’t hard to understand at all.

  3. I do not smoke or ingest marijuana (anymore) but the fact that marijuana is still illegal in Canada is testament to the ineptitude of our lawmakers. Anyone who still doubts the many benefits of marijuana for medical use is either grossly misinformed or in denial. Anyone who still thinks marijuana is dangerous, addictive, a health risk or even close to being as destructive to society as alcohol is truly living in the past and adhering to outdated and/or propagandic misinformation.
    Now that Health Canada has ended the program that allowed medical marijuana users to grow their own and is handing the reins over to our not-so-efficient-or-trustworthy government, we will see the price of medical marijuana skyrocket as our `leaders’ start seeing dollar signs from this new tax stream. A once natural, cheap, easy to obtain, helpful herb will soon come under the control of big pharma and illegal growers will start seeing their big profits again as prices increase.

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