The long war over legalization of marijuana
By 1971, marijuana’s scent hung over much of Canada. Some 1.5 million folks had taken at least one drag on a joint. Hundreds of thousands were regularly f i ring up, grooving to Three Dog Night and learning from the leaked Pentagon Papers that the U. S. administration had lied about the Vietnam War.
Convictions for simple pot possession exploded: from 431 in 1967 to 5,399 in 1970 and 8,389 in 1971. More than half were against otherwise lawabiding baby boomers under 21 who would now carry criminal records along with their university degrees.
In May 1972, a federal commission of inquiry into the non- medical use of drugs handed an audacious recommendation to the government of then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose flower- child bride, Margaret, was smoking weed behind the backs of her RCMP bodyguards.
After two years of public hearings, including testimony from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Le Dain commission said laws against simple pos- session of marijuana and hashish should be abolished in the face of a blossoming social attitude among a growing minority of people that grass was relatively harmless. It stopped short of saying the stuff should be made legally available and consumed.
The heavy- handed use of criminal law to suppress the youthful pursuit of a buzz that offended many people’s sense of justice and threatened to erode the moral authority of the law, the commission said.
“There can be no doubt that the law on the books is at extreme variance with the facts. It is simply not a feasible policy in the long run.”
Forty-three years later, recognition of pot’s reality has arrived. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government will do what his father’s would not by legitimizing simple possession of recreational marijuana and regulating its sale.
In t he meantime, t he 426- page Cannabis Report of the Le Dain commission, headed by Gerald Le Dain, then- dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, remains an insightful guide, even if some of its psychedelic language is démodé. (“Cannabis” denotes both marijuana and hashish.)
The chief question back then was whether there was a well- founded social concern about cannabis’s non-medical use, and if so, how that concern should express itself in social policy. The issue turned on the question of whether marijuana was harmful.
Le Dain and his four fellow commissioners concluded the developing brains of adolescents could be damaged by cannabis and singled that out as the most serious issue in the legalization debate.
The inquiry found no evidence to support the decades of “reefer madness” sensationalism that followed Canada’s criminalization of marijuana in 1923 without any apparent public debate, scientific basis or real social urgency.
The growing costs for police, prosecutors and the courts was another concern, as was the hit-and-miss prosecutorial assault on recreational dopers.
The law, the commission revealed, was catching less than one per cent of a conservative estimate of the total number of users.
“A law which can only be enforced in a haphazard and accidental manner is an unjust law,” it proclaimed.
It recommended laws against trafficking and distribution be softened but kept on the books to restrict availability. And it called for what became a new law against the cultivation of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.
Reaction to t he report split along predictable lines: Church and social groups approved. Police, justice officials and many politicians did not.
A law which can only be enforced in a haphazard and accidental manner is an unjust law.
— Le Dain commission