The Globe and Mail on Cannabis Legalization
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/25
The Federal Liberal government has made it past the second reading in the Senate. One Tory senator argued that the marijuana legalization bill “doesn’t protect people.”
The Globe and Mail editorial continued that the ethical implications of the “wrongness” in criminalization of cannabis is no more harmful than alcohol. Prime Minister Trudeau disagreed with the Tory consideration, where the focus is on the protection of the people.
Trudeau focused on the outcome of alcohol prohibition and state coercion in the prohibition of cannabis as well. With legalization, he argues, this can prevent illicit forms of the substance, uncontrolled and unregulated types, from entering the hands, mouths, and bodies of children and adolescents.
“The political appeal of this message is obvious. It’s a savvy way to get nervous parents and cops on board,” The Globe and Mail opined, “And squeezing money out of organized crime is a happy side-effect of legalization that the government has every right to tout.”
The editorial talked about the narrow focus on harm reduction as potentially risking incoherence with legalization magically reducing the consumption of cannabis as potentially successful or worse as making a wish on a penny and throwing it in a fountain at the local park.
One Deloitte study reported that 17% more adult Canadians would use pot once if legalized. They pose a tacit question: How can we be sure kids and adolescents will not do the same? Children and adolescents should not use cannabis. What will stop them? The black market could still be extant post-legalization.
The restriction of the sale of pot to “austere government-run stores” may not work based on a proposal described by the editorial coming from the province of Ontario. “Premier Kathleen Wynne tells us, that parents don’t want weed sold next to candy bars in corner stores (unlike, say, cigarettes?),” the editorial opines.
The main critique is around narrow focus on safety and harm reduction and how this may impede the progress and potential success of the federal Liberal government of Trudeau et al.
“This kind of scare-mongering rhetoric is enabled by a federal position that has made a fetish of safety and restricted access, even as it legalizes the sale and use of a popular drug. No wonder it’s stumbling.”
References
The Globe and Mail. (2018, March 25). Globe editorial: Federal pot law pushes harm reduction at the expense of coherence. Retrieved from
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-globe-editorial-federal-pot-law pushes-harm-reduction-at-the-expense/.
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