Canadian senator urges legalization of soft drugs

By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA, June 15 (Reuters) - A Canadian senator who admits to having smoked pot called on Tuesday for the legalization of soft drugs, saying a committee should study the negative effects of Canada’s war on drugs.

"In the future we should have a much more lenient policy toward users of all drugs," Progressive Conservative Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, 48, told a news conference as he announced his appeal for the Senate study.

Canada’s Liberal government has become more tolerant of marijuana, seeking domestically grown pot to be tested as a pain reliever in medical trials and allowing sick individuals to grow and use marijuana.

The Senate is Parliament’s unelected chamber, but controversial policies that are introduced there sometimes make their way to the elected House of Commons.

Nolin said the study should examine hard-core situations. In Vancouver, for example, addicts die almost every day from overdoses and 25 to 35 percent of injection drug users are HIV-positive.

He lauded the example of Switzerland, which provides heroin to addicts who do not respond to other kinds of therapy—an approach that was roundly lambasted last year by U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey during a visit to Zurich.

"My personal opinion is that we should legalize the use of soft drugs," said Nolin, who added that he no longer smokes dope.

And he criticized as "unfortunate" the approach of Progressive Conservative Mike Harris, just re-elected as premier of Canada’s most populous province, Ontario.
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Harris has advocated mandatory treatment for welfare recipients who take drugs, and would deny them welfare if they refused tests.

"(Harris) is very strongly opposed to the legalization or even decriminalization of marijuana," Harris spokesman Wallace Pidgeon said from Toronto. "It would send the wrong signal, especially to our young people."

Nolin marshaled the help of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy, which has long advocated decriminalization.

"More guns, more police, more prisons won’t work," the foundation’s president, lawyer Eugene Oscapella, told Nolin’s news conference. He said the C$1.8-billion annual illegal drug trade could be smashed with more lenient policies. ($1=$1.46 Canadian)

But Member of Parliament Grant Hill, a doctor in the opposition Reform Party, said it would be a mistake to let up in the battle against drugs.
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He said he has treated many addicts, and while most people might be able to handle marijuana, about 10-15 percent of youth who use it become habituated. "It really does wreck their lives," he said.
(Marijuananews note: There is absolutely no basis for his statement that "about 10-15 percent of youth who use it become habituated." But the truth never seems to matter.)
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"You’ll seldom see a drug counselor or a physician who has treated drugs saying that we should go down that road and make drugs more available."
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The idea of using marijuana at least for medicinal purposes clearly has the support of Health Minister Allan Rock, who spent his formative years in the 1960s and who helped arrange for John Lennon to attend a peace conference in Ottawa in 1969.

Rock, who approved the clinical trials of marijuana, was asked if he had used the weed. He replied with a twinkle in his eye that he had not smoked it "for medical purposes."