By Frank Touby –
Let’s say you’re walking down Yonge Street with your backpack (or your briefcase or whatever) and a cop thinks (or claims to think) there’s a smell of pot coming from it.
The cop uses that superior sense of smell as probable cause to search your backpack. You can’t resist or you’ll find yourself in handcuffs, maybe Tasered, certainly brutalized to some degree and hauled off to 51 or 52 Division.
Inside the backpack the cop finds no pot, but does discover you’re carrying a box of small baggies you picked up at the dollar store. The backpack also contains your iPod, your laptop and thick pile of about $1,000 in small bills wrapped in a rubber band.
Plainly they’re the proceeds of crime. It’s clear to any official with a paranoid (or greedy) bone in his or her body that baggies are illegally used to package marijuana for sale and that the money, the electronics and any other luxury items you have in that backpack were acquired through the unlawful sale of pot.
Now you didn’t have any pot on you and, if after police search your residence—as they have a right to do under the probable-cause doctrine—they still don’t find any pot, you’re not out of the woods.
You won’t be charged with a crime because there’s no evidence that would hold up in court against you.
However, you can beat the rap but not the ride. They have a right to confiscate whatever they find that might have been bought with money from sales of pot that are inferred from the fact you have a box of baggies you planned to use to wrap your sandwiches.
They’ll grab from your backpack that stack of bills that you’ve been saving for months in a box. You wrapped them in a rubber band because it was too thick to put in your wallet and you planned to deposit the cash in the bank that day.
Maybe they’ll find other things in your residence that should be taken from you as well because they could reasonably be inferred as the fruits of an illegal activity you haven’t even been charged with.
Baggies, cash, luxury items and a cop’s purported sensitive nose are all it takes for the police state to rob you of your belongings.
That’s been happening for years in the U.S., making it a police state in that sense even before the W. Bush regime cranked up the Orwellian-named Patriot Act after the Twin Towers catastrophe.
There it’s called Civil Forfeiture. It turns all levels of police into potential treasure hunters for their departments, which get a piece of the take, and their superior levels of government. Many police departments wallow in wealth funded by their money-grabbing civil forfeiture activities.
Just Google “abuses of civil forfeiture” to see the overwhelming numbers of atrocities it causes in the U.S.
Now the Supreme Court of Canada has given the provinces a green light to launch into these treasure hunts. It ruled that an Ontario law passed under the nasty regime of Mike Harris in 2001, the Civil Remedies Act (CRA), isn’t a bone-headed villain’s assault on the righteous concept of punishment only with proof of crime, but a great way to compensate all levels of government for their expenses in upholding the law.
It’s a tax on the guilty, the unlucky and the unpopular.
What a shame that Dalton McGuinty permitted the appeal of that CRA to continue. It’s clearly open to such horrid abuses as occur routinely in the U.S. Even though it’s deemed constitutional by Canada’s high court, it’s still evil and wrong.
Certainly no progressive (“liberal”) premier would permit such a law in Ontario. But McGuinty is a neocon. Likewise Stephen Harper, whose government recently called for stepped-up penalties against the Killer Weed, otherwise known as the largely harmless weed marijuana.
Neocons are lackeys of big business and enemies of the increasing poor class and of the diminishing middle class. Marijuana prohibition is the paragon of corporate abuse of the public good for selfish profit. Likewise alcohol.
Pot’s prohibition started with U.S. newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. He owned thousands of acres of pulpwood forests that couldn’t compete with hemp (marijuana’s other name) to make newsprint. Hemp is cheap, readily renewable and makes a superior paper product.
He funded the Reefer Madness furor in the federal government to outlaw hemp and fatten his bottom line. Newsprint sacrificed trees from then on.
Alcohol has a similar story. The culprit this time was J. D. Rockefeller, the U.S. oil mogul who saw Henry Ford making Model T automobiles that ran on alcohol. Alcohol is clean burning, has more octane than gasoline, doesn’t have to be refined in costly and polluting facilities, and doesn’t explode. But most threatening to a big-time oilman: Alcohol can be produced profitably and cheaply by many small operations. It’s a perfect fuel for cars.
Rocky gave what was then a monumental $4 million to the Women’s Christian Temperance League. The rest is the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition.
The marijuana prohibition continues to this day for several reasons, the least of which is its moderate to minimal effects on human health and psyche:
1. Marijuana is a profit-centre for governments strictly because it’s contraband. It’s a weed. If it weren’t illegal, it would be practically free. It accounts for the lion’s share of thieving civil forfeitures in the U.S. and was the test case that validated forfeiture in Canada.
2. Marijuana sales by government operatives fund covert activities by the U.S. The Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan years is an example.
3. Some major corporations would suffer profit declines if hemp and pot arent’ illegal.
They gain by the pain prohibition causes almost everyone.
These are benefits created by decriminalizing marijuana:
1. Those with medical conditions that benefit from pot use would have better access to their palliative.
2. Harmful grow operations would no longer be profitable and would simply disappear.
3. Smuggling of pot would end and marijuana would cease to be a profit centre for organized crime.
4. Law enforcement would pursue more worthy duties.
The hazards of decriminalization are:
1. As with anything from booze to gambling, some will blow their brains out on pot and become problems to themselves and others.
2. Some will drive while under the influence. But they’re likely less of a hazard than drunk drivers.
3. As with alcohol, children will see that marijuana is socially sanctioned in certain situations and environments.
If a huge number of backyards, patios and sunny windows have marijuana plants growing, the price of pot will be minimal. The novelty of forbidden fruit will have vanished and a fruitless prohibition that only enriches some huge corporations and bureaucrats will probably diminish the use of the Killer Weed.