Mandatory minimums for marijuana possession in Canada passed by House of Commons
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 1:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
On June 8, the House of Commons passed a bill to institute mandatory minimum sentencing for marijuana and other drug crimes.
Bill C-15 seeks to impose mandatory minimum penalties for marijuana and other drug offences, including 6 months for 5 marijuana plants.
Marc Emery, the founder of the BC Marijuana Party and publisher of Cannabis [Culture], is currently facing extradition to the United States on charges of distribution of marijuana seeds.
Recently, Emery announced he intends to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for a reduced sentence, to be served in the United States.
“Stephen Harper hates the marijuana culture. First they went after me, now they’re renewing their attack on the overall culture,” said Emery in a press release from Cannabis Culture. “If marijuana people don’t stand up against C-15, they’ll find their freedom replaced with the bars of a jail cell.”
The bill has been widely criticized by criminal justice experts, who point to the total failure of mandatory minimum sentencing in the United States to deter or reduce the amount of drug crimes occurring.
But who listens to experts these days, anyway. So what if mandatory minimum sentencing has no effect on marijuana use, but a dramatically disastrous effect on our society and rates of incarceration? That’s not what Stephen Harper and conservatives of his ilk care about, anyway. It’s about votes. It’s about being “tough on crime”. It’s about culture war. It’s about hating “hippies”.
What Harper is about to discover, however, is that marijuana is no longer the third-rail redheaded-stepchild political-football issue it used to be. When only a quarter of the people supported legalization, when medical marijuana was still considered an oxymoron, and when few knew the difference between cannabis, coke, and crystal meth, you could beat the scary drug war drums and create a “tough on crime” aura around yourself. But now a majority of Canadians support legalization, medical marijuana is grown by the government, and most people know full well that pot ain’t crack.
Stephen Harper’s about to get a lesson Michael Phelps and Kellogg’s know too well: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore!
