Justin
Trudeau raised eyebrows when he admitted to having dabbled in marijuana
while a member of parliament, but his pledge as prime minister to
legalize pot has been broadly cheered.
He said in a policy speech on Friday that his
Liberal government would introduce legislation as early as 2016 to
legalize marijuana, making Canada the first in the G7 bloc of
industrialized nations to do so, although precise details remain
sketchy.
Two in three Canadians support decriminalizing possession and use of the mind-altering weed, according to a recent Ipsos poll.
Support is widespread and at its highest level in three decades, it said, even though cannabis use has fallen off.
Details of the Liberal plan haven't yet been
released. However, it is expected to go much further by not only
legalizing marijuana but also creating a regulated market for it, as
Uruguay and a few US states have done.
An estimated one million out of Canada's 35 million
people regularly smoke marijuana, according to the latest survey taken
in 2014.
Trudeau admitted in 2013 to having smoked pot five
or six times in his life, including at a dinner party with friends since
being elected to parliament.
He has also said that his late brother Michel was
facing marijuana possession charges for a "tiny amount" of pot before
his death in an avalanche in 1998, and that this influenced his decision
to propose legalizing cannabis.
"I'm not someone who is particularly interested in
altered states, but I certainly won't judge someone else for it,"
Trudeau said. "I think that the prohibition that is currently on
marijuana is unjustified."
In 2014, there were just under 104,000
police-reported drug incidents in Canada. Of these, 66 percent were
related to cannabis, primarily for possession, according to the official
Statistics Canada.
Police chiefs have urged legislative change allowing
them to hand out fines for small amounts of pot possession instead of
laying criminal charges to reduce policing and court costs, and to do
away with such convictions affecting Canadians' travel, employment and
citizenship.
"This isn't about making cannabis more available to
smoke, it's about dealing with a bad prohibitionist model that has led
to global carnage," University of Ottawa criminologist Eugene Oscapella
told AFP, citing drug cartel killings as an extreme example.
Legalizing pot will "destroy the illegal market," he
said, adding that "the new regime should be based on public health to
maximize benefits and minimize harms."
Once Ottawa takes marijuana off its list of
controlled drugs, regulating it will likely fall on Canada's provinces,
the same way alcohol distribution is managed.
"It's conceivable but unlikely that you will be able
to go to a (corner store) in Quebec where you can now buy alcohol, in
order to buy marijuana," Oscapella said.
He said he would be watching for a possible backlash
from allies abroad that take a stiffer line on drugs and impacts on
international treaties, as well as who will be allowed to produce pot
and how it will be sold.
"There are a lot of niggly little details that need
to be worked out," said Oscapella. "The attorney general can stop
prosecutions of drug possessions immediately but distribution and other
matters will take longer to sort out."
The use of marijuana for medicinal purposes was
effectively legalized in Canada in 1999, but subsequent efforts to
soften Canada's pot laws went up in smoke with the election of Stephen
Harper in 2006.
Harper took a hard line against what he called a
Beatles-era drug culture, saying cannabis was more dangerous for health
than tobacco.
His former health minister Rona Ambrose, who
succeeded Harper as Tory leader, warned that judicial rulings had
chipped away at the 1923 cannabis prohibition before the drug could be
shown in clinical trials to be safe to use.
In June, she said she was "outraged" that the
Supreme Court had expanded the definition of medical marijuana to allow
users to bake it into cookies or brew pot leaves for tea instead of only
smoking it.
The morning after the Liberals swept to power in
October, pot stocks doubled in price as investors bet on firms already
producing marijuana for medical use being able to quickly scale up to
serve recreational pot users too.
Only six firms were initially licensed by Health
Canada to grow and sell medical marijuana in 2014. The number of
licensees has since shot up to 26.
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