I never thought I’d see this in the National Post

For non-Canadians, here’s just a little bit of context about our “also ran” national newspaper, in the form of a few quotes from from the Wikipedia article on it:

The Post was founded in 1998 by Conrad Black to combat what he believed was an “over-liberalizing” of editorial policy in Canadian newspapers

Its editorial page featured the opinions of well-known neo-conservatives

When the Post launched, it had a stridently conservative editorial stance by Canadian standards.

Politically, the Post has retained a conservative editorial stance under the Aspers’ ownership

Having established that, imagine my surprise to read an editorial about the need for Canada to legalize drugsSince the National Post uses a stupid subscriber paywall, at some point that article will disappear unless you have a subscriber login. Of course, you could get a login from BugMeNot (or from the plugin if you use Firefox), but since this is a paid service that would be more ethically questionable than using those tools usually is. I won’t mind if you do it, since I’m all for sticking it to what is essentially still a neocon rag. in the paper. And more than that, a sensibly-writtenWell, actually there’s a some racist subtext that’s a little disturbing, but it’s hard to find discussions of the street business in drugs that doesn’t have that. It’s tricky to talk about things that are highly correlated class and social background, when both of those things are correlated with race, etc. Still I wish he hadn’t said “homies”. editorial that hits all the “well-known” legalization points, and lays the smack-down on the War on Proper Nouns approach? Shocking.

I think all you should need to hear in order to support legalizing at least marijuana are the following points:

1. Even with the laws in place today millionsSee the article for a citation for this: Health Canada and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse in their March, 2005 Canadian Addiction Survey. of Canadians still buy weed. Any law that is broken by millions of people needs looking at, especially when the crime in question is essentially victimless.
2. As a consequence of that demand and illegality, keeping weed illegal feeds a whole lot of dollars to criminal organizations. Making it legal (and regulated and taxed) would dry up that income stream.
3. Also as a consequence of that demand, not taxing grass sales loses the government very substantial revenues. How ironic would it be if legalizing weed both depleted criminal coffers and made more money available for things like health care, education, or even policing the harder drugs more seriously. (And that last is without considering the police time that would be freed by no longer needing to deal with marijuana cases).
4. Any argument you could make against grass itself as an individual or societal threat applies more to alcohol.

None of those points are anything you haven’t heard before if you’ve thought for even a minute about legalization, but I just want to point them out.

Most of those points don’t just apply to marijuana, and as far as I can see there’s a good basis for legalizing a whole swathe of currently illegal “soft drugs”.

The editorial does hit most of those points, but even more it outlines the flaws with the typical counter argument. That argument is essentially “Well, if the demand is that high in spite of the risks associated with the illegality, the correct action isn’t to legitimize that demand, but rather to increase the penalties (and thus the risks) until the demand drops off. Let’s declare War!”. I don’t think I need to spend time debunking that position, since in addition to being philosophically wrong it has been proven empirically wrong by the last couple of decades of US drug policy. And that’s where the article really hits:

The street gang and associated drug trade problem in Canada won’t be solved by a get-tough, criminal-justice-system response, nor should we expect young homies to just say no. Look to the United States for proof of this. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has employed the most aggressive and expensive anti-drug and -gang measures ever conceived. In the process, 800,000 street gangsters under the age of 21 have been created. Moreover, more than two million Americans now call prison home, the majority of which are young black and Hispanic men. About half of them are serving time for relatively minor drug offences. Today, things are so bad that the FBI has made street gangs and the underlying drug trade their number one priority, even over domestic terrorism. The failure in this campaign is a testament to the abject failure of the U.S. war on drugs and gangs.

Why do I hear that so often, and mostly from Americans, and yet there’s no serious discussion about changing the US policies?

Anyway, I figure if even the right wing rag is calling the question, maybe we’re at the point where we’re ready to actually deal with some of this as a society.