With Pot Laws Struck Down, What's Next?

On the sticky situation around medical marijuana and what the parties' justice policy wonks might be smoking.

The Globe and Mail's editorialists call for decriminalizing marijuana after an Ontario judge struck down laws against marijuana cultivation and possession. The judge, in effect, heeded the testimony of host medical marijuana users that getting their prescriptions filled is just about impossible: “The law was deemed unconstitutional because it obliges sick people to obtain a doctor’s approval for use, a procedure that doctors have largely boycotted, on the advice of their provincial associations and their insurer,” the Globe writes. “Rather than work with physicians to meet their concerns, Health Canada had absolved itself of responsibility.” Because the Tories intend to introduce mandatory minimum sentences for growing the plant, the Globe asks the leaders to seriously talk about the plant. But that's about as likely to happen as a headline about marijuana not resorting to puns.

Meanwhile, the staff at Torontoist compare how the U.S. – in particular California – and Canada dispense medical marijuana, with Canadians' tendency toward centralization being a prime reason ours is so maligned: “Patients [in California] don't need any kind of special dispensation from the state in order to use medical marijuana legally ... As a result, doctors are the final arbiters of who gets to smoke and who doesn't.” As it stands, the Canadian medical marijuana framework forces compassion societies into a legal grey area, a matter that our elected officials will have to contend with as the three-month deadline to appeal the Ontario ruling nears.

All the federal parties' current crime proposals, such as those mandatory minimums, should face such scrutiny, writes Dan Gardner in the Ottawa Citizen. “Prevention, rehabilitation, and punishment may be marginally useful in some circumstances, but they do not, and cannot, determine crime trends – just as health-care systems have only a marginal effect on how long we live,” says Gardner in dismissing all of the parties' platforms as entirely devoid of evidence of their efficacy. “A reality-based crime policy would put a priority on new research. It would commit to scrapping what doesn't work and expanding what does. It would stop fostering the illusion that the criminal justice system determines major crime trends.”