What’s the judge been smoking?

18 thoughts on “What’s the judge been smoking?”

1. There may be many arguments that could be used to legalize pot, but this one is ridiculous! There will always be a segment of the population that is sick or in pain that require medication that would otherwise be illegal. This argument could be extended to legalize all drugs for all people.

2. Wow, where to begin. I loved the crown’s comment about wanting to appeal “so that we can get it overturned”. In other words, make sure that we get a judge assigned to hear the appeal who is a rabid anti pot looney. All pot prohibition does (and I don’t use) is criminalize ordinary people, waste a ton of police resources, funnel money to criminal organizations and we still have 4 times as many pot users as the netherlands where pot use is legal. The big problem is that as long as the usa has drug laws that are insane, ours will at least have to be stupid. Alcohol prohibition only proved that prohibition doesn’t work, costs a fortune in enforcement and funds huge criminal organizations. In my time I have known a lot of drinkers and pot users. The drinkers tended to be violent, obnoxious, stupid louts. The pot users tended to be peaceful, cheerful people who would give you the shirt off their back if they had one.

3. I’m not against legalizing pot AND maybe a lawyer has to use arguments that will open the flood gates for future case precedence in order to win a case. Loki, I’m going to guess that in your line of work you probably came in contact with a much larger segment of drinkers and pot smokers than I have. I would certainly say that active heavy drinkers/alcoholics can be violent, moody, neglectful of their children/spouse and a general misery to be around. I only know one heavy pot smoker and if he was going to self-medicate the scars from his childhood I agree pot was a much better route to go as he was none of these things.

   One other negative side affects of illegal pot is grow-ups whereby some really nice homes in our area are so ridden with toxic mould it’s a major undertaking to restore them to the level where they can be inhabited again.

4. Of the thousands of people I represented in the criminal courts, I think that about 5 or 6 weren’t drunk at the time they committed the offence. I don’t recall a single instance where they were stoned on pot, and only one that was high on meth. I know that with the meth epidemic that things have probably changed a lot now. Debbie, I agree that pot grow ops are a major hazard. Besides the toxic mould and other damage to (usually) rented houses, the electric meter bypasses are often done by idiots and represent a real fire hazard, especially if (as there often are) there are children in the house. I saw a lot of search warrants that began….. the firemen went into the house to put out a fire and found a grow-op….. Also another real hazard that gets almost no press because the grow operators can’t call the police, comes from the grow rip operators who wander the back alleys at night looking for electric meters that are spinning rapidly, or where there are a bunch of fans running. They then break in and steal the pot and anything else that isn’t nailed down. Usually guns are involved on both sides. I am not in favour of pot use, and as you may have gathered, I really hate alcohol, but I am in favour of laws that have some connection to reality.

5. Gee if the grow rip operators can find the grow-op, shouldn’t it be a snap for the police? I guess my major concern is the substance abuse (alcohol/drugs) among teenagers and substance abuse that results in spousal/child neglect or worse. I have seen most of Jenn’s highschool friends de-railed by alcohol and drug use (crack, cocaine & Ex). They ended up dropping out of HS and never went on to secondary school. A lot of these kids came from homes where both parents were professionals, lived in affluent Kanata Lakes AND these kids certainly had a chance to live life above the poverty line. It wasn’t apparent that the parents were substance abusers to me, but many were definately too busy working on their careers to guide their children through the teenage years. One parent actually got annoyed with the principal for calling him at work to tell him his daughter didn’t show up at school for 3 days.
   I have to say I find it hard to draw lines in the sand so my stance as a parent was no drugs or alcohol.

6. Hey, no argument from me that drug and alcohol use is bad, and that parents have a responsibility to discourage their kids from using. And yes it is a snap for the police, but they have constraints like not being able to physically go onto the subject property, so have to stand down wind and sniff for pot, watch the electric meter with binoculars and do thermal imaging scans from across the street to gather enough evidence to convince a pudge (my abbreviation for Provincial court jUDGE) or a jp that they have reasonable and probable grounds to issue a search warrant. As a lawyer I saw so many people’s lives totally destroyed by alcohol that if I could trade all alcohol use for pot use I would. Allegra, apologies for using so much of your bandwidth.

7. It’s a subject of much passion. Considered dispassionately, alcohol causes much more harm than reefer…. and we already LARNED our LESSON that prohibition of any harmful substance causes a raft of unintended consequences which do not serve public order.

   http://www.cannabisfacts.ca/pdf/HowDoesCannabisCompare.pdf

   shows a graph stacking up the harm caused by various substances in various ways. In the end, parents have to tell their kids that all of these substances cause harm, and that however they make you FEEL, they don’t actually make your life (and those of your friends and family) a better place, and most high functioning people get by fine without them.

   Having said that, I’d like to find every person within 5 k of my house who makes a living selling either crack or crystal meth and hang them from a lamppost. I don’t give a shit about prohibition in that case; they are poisoners preying on weakminded teenagers who think they can weekend the stuff and end up slobbering addicts with brain damage and hep c. I can only thank a special mercy of providence that this scourge only touched my house with the tip of its tail.

8. Crikey, this again.
   The largest body behind the worldwide industry of hard drugs and pot is the US gummint. Has been for 50 years at least and no one has truly challenged them yet. The grow ops are just little guys trying to get a piece of the action.
   I say ban indoor growing, and give the job to real farmers. Shoot the hard drug perpetrators, the ones at the top, and the rest of them will go away because there won’t be any product. Without the CIA and the DEA these would be primarily non-issues in our society.
   Strangely I have met a # of effective(by our society’s standards), rich people who use hard drugs. Some of their kids are straight as arrows. I know a man who builds luxury retirement centres, is a multimillionaire, and smokes hash daily. Another who owns a national security firm does the same. These guys made their own fortunes, it did not come from family. Neither one would give you their shirt, but either might buy you your own.
   It’s the street level where things are a big mess, and that is mostly because of organized american crime spread worldwide.
   The US will never let us legalize pot; it will cut into their game.

9. I mean, it’s great that there is a new approach; but it’s like our electric power (the blackout of 2004 would never have happened in Canada were we not inextricably connected to the american grid because of NAFTA), and it is no secret that the US wants our water. To leave possession laws in limbo for some time may be useable, but legality will not be established until we can get that big american brother off our backs. Holding breath anyone?

10. I’m with Allegra and Chipper to deal with “every dealer in a 5km radius…” and “Shoot the hard drug perpetrators …”. The way we used to clean up a town in the times of the Wild West was effective in bringing law and order. I’m surprized the US hasn’t taken up a “War on Drugs”, but maybe as Chipper points out they just don’t want to. However, this wouldn’t help with the problem of alcohol abuse. As for 9/11, where are the bad guys and why aren’t they finding them. I’ve wondered since the beginning if the whole thing could have been orchestrated by the US government.

11. Debbie, what rock have you been hiding under? The US war on drugs has been going on for decades! US prisons are full of people convicted of possession crimes for holding mere grams of marijuana (some planted), under the tough american policy of 3 strikes and you are in for good, while Enron execs, Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld, to name just a few, are protected by US tax dollars? It’s a little like Barrabas…those who commit gun crimes are back on the street in short order, but pot smokers are locked up. Coincidence? I think not.
    If you want to know who is behind 9/11, have a look at the saga of Building 7. Who were the lease holders of a building that was ‘pulled’ after no plane flew into it? While we are at it, try to find the Boeing that flew into the Pentagon. Once you start connecting the dots it becomes quite obvious. Why was the NORAD instruction for scrambling in american airspace changed less than 2 months before the event? Why did Bush continue talking to a kindergarten class once an aide stepped up to let him know that the first tower had been hit? Why did he talk about camera footage of the first impact in his first address to the american public when there was no footage? Why were all the surveillance cameras ‘malfunctioning’ that day?
    The US Senate just voted to double the reward for Bin Laden to $50M last week. Gotta keep appearances up…

12. Having thought a little more about the US war on drugs, I think it was formally launched by Reagan. It was the war following the end of the Cold War.
    Of course, Reagan himself was a consumer of pharmaceuticals until the day of his demise. And we all know what a war is going on there, right?

13. Chipper, I agree with you but I don’t think the “War on Drugs” is working. …and if it isn’t working, then I surmise the US government isn’t really trying. I don’t see how locking up marijuana users is helping the cause. Maybe this is just to keep up appearances. While I see no harm in marijuana use in itself, the dealers are now lacing marijuana with harder drugs — there’s the purple and orange marijuana that was offered to my daughter in CA (wicked stuff). Actually, as far back as the late 70s, at least some dealers were adding hard drugs to the mix.

    As far as 9/11, I agree with you entirely that things just don’t add up. I’m so sick of looking at George Bush’s face, I either leave the room or turn off the TV when he steps onto the screen to spout off BS!

14. Did I mention I hate George Bush and that the sight of him actually sickens me?? Good Morning Chipper — I see we were typing our entries at the same time.

15. Hi Debbie
    There is something funny with the clock, because I actually wrote that at 2 am EST
    The point about the War on Drugs is it was just a prototype for the war on terror. The drug industry is driven mostly by covert american operations, to create a dynamic to remove people’s rights; unlawful search, profiling certain population groups, etc. Drugs used to be the main reason to refuse entry to the US, or to detain at borders.
    There are a lot of similarities between the way that your daughter is treated at border crossings, and the way ‘hippies’ used to be treated.
    The war on drugs is working big time. If you shift your perspective for what is supposed to be accomplished (it is not to stamp out drug use) you will see what I mean.
    The bigger better varieties of previously harmless substances is just the way of upping the ante. It’s similar to when practically pure heroin and cocaine hit the streets in the last decade. No street level dealer in his right mind would improve quality and reduce price. This is part of the ‘experiment’ of societal tolerance for messing around with people’s lives, and dividing the communities along racial and economic lines.
    Check a blog called ‘from the wilderness’. This guy is totally real. Mike Ruppert was an LAPD SWAT team dude, until he realized that it was all a setup. Now he is a moving target.

16. Yup, there is something weird about the time stamp. It is only 3 hours difference between here and Vancouver, and the time stamp is out by 4.

17. I love Mike Ruppert, but he is batshit crazy. He ended up having to flee the US when his office had been broken into and all his equipment smashed; then he found out that his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel in Venezuela and either he had a mental breakdown or he was poisoned (he didn’t claim to have been poisoned but it sure sounded like it) and ended up in Toronto briefly and last I heard he’s in hiding in the Northeast someplace. He’s spent 20 years of his life being harassed by the feds for asking nosy questions – he’s one of my favorite pains in the ass.

    The time stamp is out by an hour, I have no idea why and will try to fix it.

18. And I see that you have his blog listed under links. Crazy as batshit happens when people deny your reality/pressure you to be in denial like they are/gang up on you. It doesn’t mean that what you say doesn’t have validity. Higher IQs are notorious for being a little unstable by median and average standards.
    Beethoven was a synesthete. Now it is recognized that perhaps 5% of the international population is synesthete. That’s a higher % than red haired people. Being different isn’t bad or wrong, it is just different. Many messengers have been shot in the past. I don’t know that the human race has been the best at evolving OR paying attention to what is important.