Should this really be a crime punishable with mandatory minimum sentences? American law enforcement officials say no.
On Wednesday, 28 current and former American law enforcement officials wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and members of the Canadian Senate urging the decriminalization of marijuana and warning against the effects of harsh mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.
Before anyone gets up-in-arms about Americans sticking their noses into our business, consider that many of these people have been directly involved in crafting and enforcing America’s war on drugs. They all belong to the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which includes a number of Canadian board members.
One of the signatories to the letter is Eric E. Sterling, who helped U.S. politicians write minimum sentencing laws in the 1980s, in his role as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. “Imposing long jail terms for minor drug offences has been a mistake in the United States, and won’t work in Canada,” Mr. Sterling told the CBC.
And he should know, as the tough-on-crime laws developed in the 1980s and ‘90s led directly to America’s out of control prison population. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, incarceration rates in the United States between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 inmates per 100,000 people. After 1980, that number began to skyrocket: Increasing to 753 by 2008. In comparison, Canada’s rate remained fairly steady between 2006 and 2010, at about 140 prisoners for every 100,000 people, according to Statistics Canada.
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Nothing new here – and IIRC there are different states that have engaged in the practices being contemplated by our current government who have discovered the same thing.
That won’t change anything here though – in the world of politics ideology always trumps everything.
Geez, sl what a negative Nellie. It might take awhile but the decriminalization of marijuana is coming to a country near you. Law enforcement IMHO generally do not support the current penalties. Neither did the front line police support the long gun registery. It took awhile but (again IMO) that lack of support doomed that idiotic legislation from the beginning. Same thing here, colour the criminalization of simple possession as good as gone. Be patient.
Agreed.
Completely off topic but something I came across the other day which visitors should be aware of.
http://www.hushmail.com/
Apparently it has been around for quite sometime but I hadn’t heard of it until I picked up on a “side story” somewhere and “tweeted” it. It may be worth a look for those who wish to secure their e-mail.
Another thing I came up with today (and “tweeted”) is a way to remove your “net tracks” from Google. Not certain how well it works but those concerned can give it a spin.
You do realize that you’ve joined the insurgency don’t you Jack? ….. actively coaching folks on how to escape government scrutiny
My suggestions include using any non-Canadian web mail service – throwing an international roadblock in the way of the first place they’ll look is never a bad plan.
Google is not necessarily an issue unless you use Chrome – it’s a major tattletale and runs home and tells the mothership everytime you go somewhere or look at something.
Those interested in making sure that it’s not easy to follow them on the web should use the ToR browser and investigate I2P.
It remains unfortunate that ordinary Canadians seeking a bit of privacy are placed in the position of using these tools – but there ya go.
Chrome is a beautiful browser and very fast but they do have an issue with issue sharing. Also, there is no way to automatically clean your cache on closing.
There is no browser that can be totally blocked from phoning home to some extent but you can effectively prevent government bugs (to say nothing of malware, viruses, etc) by running sandboxie
http://www.sandboxie.com/
This is a forced sandbox that launches your browser on top of it. NOTHING gets out of the sandbox (to probe your machine)