three of the four national parties have spoken out in favour of decriminalizing the recreational drug.

Federal election could be going to pot
By DAVE MABELL
Sep 5, 2008, 04:22

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Legalizing the use of marijuana will be an election issue if proponents across Canada listen to Neil Magnuson.
In Lethbridge as part of the “2008 Freedom Tour” on Thursday, the long-time activist said three of the four national parties have spoken out in favour of decriminalizing the recreational drug.
For the Green Party, he said, it’s one of the key issues.
“If Elizabeth May is allowed to take part in the debate, she’ll talk about it.”
May, the party’s leader, is battling the reigning Conservatives’ efforts to keep her out of the televised debates. Magnuson, in Alberta as part of the movement’s annual trek to the House of Commons in Ottawa, said he’ll be urging legalization advocates to take full part in the upcoming election.
Pro-pot websites, Facebook and other vehicles will be used to urge advocates to speak up during the campaign and then vote for candidates who support their cause.
Many Liberal and New Democratic Party candidates are also expected to back legalization, he pointed out, though it may not be a platform plank as it is for the nation’s Greens. Not many Conservatives are in favour, he conceded.
“They’re in the pockets of the United States,” a nation where marijuana use is heavily proscribed.
But in Canada today, Magnuson said most adults see the prohibition on marijuana as no more effective as the nation’s generations-ago ban on alcohol.
“I think people across Canada are fairly aware of this issue,” he said. “But they feel helpless about changing the law,” especially when a Tory government is promoting longer jail terms for people caught selling pot.
“Very few Canadians think we should use criminal law against it.”
By refusing to regulate and tax the product — just as provinces do with alcohol — he said the federal government is putting that revenue in the hands of organized crime, just as in Al Capone’s era. So criminal gangs recruit young people to sell their product and run the risk of arrest.
“For youth who are living in poverty, they can’t resist the lure of easy money.”
Magnuson said a Canadian Senate report pegged the costs of policing, prosecuting and jailing those young people at $1 billion or more every year. Because marijuana is so widely grown and used, he added, about 1.5 million Canadians have a drug-related conviction on their court record.
A 25-year activist in metro Vancouver, Magnuson said experience there refutes opponents’ suggestions that using pot becomes a “gateway” to using dangerous “hard drugs.” What researchers there have found, he said, is marijuana’s role in helping addicts quit those narcotics and get on with their lives.
SOURCE: Lethbridge Herald.com