Notes on Lecture: The History of Drug Policy and Prohibition in Canada

right well thanks everybody for coming on your afternoon um I want to thank KBC and Amanda for reaching out to me and for um Dr Paulie for introducing me it&#39;s always nice to collaborate with the center as well um so I&#39;ll just start um this is a a visual presentation and that&#39;s why I&#39;m in the dark over here so I apologize for that but it was just so that when we do get to some of the pictures and photos that you can see it a bit better than when the lights are on up here so drug policy though it&#39;s um influenced by International concerns it&#39;s also rooted in the national and local history as specific drugs are defined and framed differently over time and until the 19th century there was little distinction between medical and non-medical use of opiates and they were consumed by all classes of people opium alcohol and tobacco consumption were embedded in Social customs in Western Nations including um Canada however today drug consumption is quite different than in the 19th century and so too is drug control I&#39;m interested in drug prohibition because the crime rate in Canada has been it&#39;s at its lowest since 1969 right now but police reported crime rate um even though it&#39;s decreasing drug offenses have been steadily rising over the last 30 years and we can see that it&#39;s possession of cannabis that seems to be the drug that is most often regulated and that people are arrested for and in BC canab possession arrests have doubled between the years 2005 and 2011 so in Canada we adopted what we call a Prohibition approach to regulate the use possession and selling of cannabis and Other criminalized Drugs but we could have taken a different approach the probis approach is primarily a criminal justice approach in Canada and though today you may say oh well we have drug treatment we have other initiative that wasn&#39;t that&#39;s a fairly recent component of our drug policy but early on there were few controls of any of any controls at all and white settlers colonizers who arrived on the shores of what&#39;s Canada today brought their traditional plant-based medicines patent medicines with opium from the poppy plant was widely used for the relief of pain and for intestinal problems and Lum also became very popular it&#39;s an opium-based um medicine and prior to criminalization it was upper middle class white women were the um largest consumers of these opiate drugs and they were advertised freely um in magazines um and in stores and cannabis tonics became quite popular in the early um 1900s late 1800s and Physicians advertised and wrote articles about the benefits of um cannabis tonics for People&#39;s Health and the cocoa plant which we often think about it being widely used in South America for its nutritional healing and spiritual components became quite popular as well in patent medicines and alexir um and we find um Coca or cocaine a number of products that were available in Canada and other Western Nations so here&#39;s some cocaine toothache drop that were sold in stores and by mail order Coca-Cola of course originally had cocaine in it Vin marani was a wine um and it&#39;s just one of many wines and tonics that included cocaine and then we have Bayer&#39;s heroin and most of us are you know probably familiar with Bayer&#39;s aspirin but in fact they produced heroin and it&#39;s a what we call a semi synthetic drug it&#39;s made from morphine which is a compound found in opium um and the our ability to extract compounds from Plants occurred in the 1800s there we didn&#39;t have the scientific knowledge to do that beforehand hero was made from um or is a semisynthetic drug drawn from morphine this is the beginning of what we might consider our ever expanding pharmaceutical industry was that you know extracting compounds and then making um synthetic drugs as well as semi synthetic drugs but Herm was used for coughs pain other common elements and again advertised in medical journals stor fronts and maale Order and so here&#39;s a copy of two old U male order one Simpson and the other is from eatens and this is where people would go um to look at what plant-based drugs would be available for them in Canada we have to remember that early on Canada was a rural country and there was very few doctors there are few and far between and they were expensive we didn&#39;t have a federal Public Health Care system at that time and so people had to pay out of pocket for whatever Health needs they had and so in order to take care of a family&#39;s needs you would find an array of these plant-based medicines in their medicine cabinet there are also some early drug stores where people went to regular General stores for some of these drugs too if they live close by well can Canadians also had access to alcohol and tobacco um and we&#39;ve chosen mostly to legally regulate these drugs rather than criminalize them even though we know they&#39;re associated with some of the most um harmful health related problems and we have had some alcohol prohibition I&#39;ll only talk about that um a little bit today um because that would be a whole talk outside of this but until colonization what is now Canada was virtually alcohol-free the Jesuits missionaries Traders and white settlers introduce indigenous people and Nations to alcohol in North America and there is some use like ceremonial use of alcohol in the southern states um but literally it was Al alcohol free and the Hudson Bay Company and other Colonial Traders brought their drug of choice alcohol and their religions laws and disease and we know that the negative consequences that this had for indigenous peoples and Nations but in Canada and elsewhere the Christian Temperance Movement was becoming quite active and Christian white middleclass moral reformers regarded sobriety and self-control as a template for citizens ship in the new dominion and women were at the center of this Movement we should remember that they didn&#39;t have the vote yet so they put a lot of their energies into these sort of moral reform movements at the time and although we have um we had Federal alcohol provision um during World War I and other provinces also had alcohol provision basically it Federal prohibition didn&#39;t last very long and there are all these exemptions to it you could have alcohol if you had a medical prescription the industry still evolved during prohibition but what is different is that prohibition was imposed on First Nations people um for over a century so the first Indian Act in Canada was passed in 1868 and many of you might know that it regulated all aspects of life for those um indigenous people uh labeled St Indian by the Canadian government and the ACT is understood now as an instrument of cultural genocide that was imposed on indigenous peoples in Canada but we should keep in mind that the Dominion or Canada was envisioned as a white Nation by British colonists at this point and Indigenous people and later Chinese Japanese South Asian people were seen as Outsiders to White nation building so the 186 68 Indian Act included a provision that prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol to status Indians so to drink legally to vote um those you had to give up those rights to keep your status and alcohol prohibition lasted right up until the 1980s and for more than a century it created more harm than good it didn&#39;t stop some indigenous people from drinking instead it encouraged covert and dangerous drinking practices illegal consumption and selling and it discouraged social drinking and thousands of indigenous people were arrested and prisoned due to this law it was a punitive and racialized social control mechanism used by the Indian agents and the police and it also contributed to enduring stereotypes and legal discrimination and this was a notice just saying that there would be a $300 fine um in 6 months imprisonment for any indigenous person that was found intoxicated or if anyone had sold to an indigenous person in Canada well at the same time that the uh Christian Temperance Movement was gaining strength and Indigenous people were being stripped of their lands Chinese workers were invited to Canada to work on the National Railway and the railway in Canada was envisioned by the federal government as a project to unite the country and white settlements throughout this large land that that have been colonized well the rail was a dangerous job and Chinese men who came to work here on the railway were seen as very honest good laborers and they were paid less than the white laborers and they were given the most dangerous jobs on the CPR Railway and this is a CPR Work Camp in cantalo loops and so very rustic um settlements that they House people all along the railway line and it was completed in the late 1800s and at that time many of the laborers settled in Vancouver and in Victoria but attitudes against Chinese people became very extreme and racial discrimination increased and the famous head tax was imposed in Canada and limits to stop immigration from China and from families from um you know being unified in Canada and unfortunately there was an economic slump in the early 1900s and that led white workers and politicians to Rally against Chinese workers in Vancouver they felt that uh Chinese labors were competing with their jobs at that time even though there doesn&#39;t seem to be evidence of that and in 1907 there was a labor rally and it sort of wo through Vancouver and it ended up at City Hall which was at that time right by Maine and Hastings and it was a protest against the Chinese workers and a large number of white workers and people at the protest um split off from the rally and they marched into the area that was designated as the Chinese um center of town Chinese people weren&#39;t allowed to live in other parts of Canada so they could only be in this Chinese quarter and the workers went marching in there and they started to destroy businesses and homes and then they went on to the uh Japanese quarter as well where they were finally stopped by Japanese and Chinese residents but they did a lot of damage to the area and so McKenzie King he was the minister of labor at that time he was sent out to investigate and to possibly offer some federal compensation for the damages that had happened and on his second visit he met with some anti- opiate reformers um in uh Chinatown and he learned of the legal opium industry in Vancouver and there was quite an industry here in Victoria as well well he went back to Ottawa and he stated it&#39;s in the province newspaper he&#39;d get some good out of that Riot and he did he wrote a report and he recommended the criminalization of crude opium and the smoking of opium he didn&#39;t recommend that we criminalize the other forms of opium liquid patent medicines and alers that white settlers were using but this form of opium smoking um that Chinese people were um traditionally more involved in well the when you read the report you see that he draws on fears about Chinese men and opian den corrupting white moral Christian men and women and the opian Act was passed in 1908 with little debate and therefore our first narcotic law was aimed at Chinese men seen as racialized Outsiders to the white Christian Nation and the Act was strengthened in 1911 and we added um cocaine and morphine without a prescription and each year we added more and more drugs um to the drug schedule and the use of criminal sanctions to control drugs drug prohibition becomes Canada&#39;s primary drug strategy then and a new class of criminals emerge illegal drug users and people who sell newly criminalized drugs well in Canada like most countries international events also helped shape drug policy and the anti- opiate movement that was going on in Western Nations definitely impacted the coming together of the Shanghai International opium Commission in 1909 and McKenzie King went to that um meeting in hag and he saw himself as a Pioneer and a leader in drug control and in 1919 the division of of narcotic control was set up in um Canada and Colonel Sharman he&#39;s the one on your left there he became the one of the first Chiefs in our um division of narcotic control and he held that position for more than 30 years and then after following that he held quite a few International positions at the UN and elsewhere in relation to um drug control and the international control system the man in the middle is Harry anslinger and Harry anslinger was the drug Zar of the uh US Federal Bureau of Narcotics and he&#39;s famous or inFAMOUS as being sort of the producer of propaganda and misinformation especially about marijuana and instrumental in having marijuana criminalized in the United States but the two of them worked very closely together and when you see their the records on them in the archives you&#39;re quite amazed Canada was sort of seen as leading the way in drug prob even by the you know Harry anslinger you know who most people would agree was probably one of the most prohibitionist Warriors that there has been ever has been drug prohibition was also aided by media you know through film and magazines um there&#39;s a lot of conjuring up a fear of white moral women this close proximity of men of color you know was thought it would lead to their corruption addiction and abandon and of the family and then ultimately the nation because women were seen as sort of the moral um center of the nation or at least white middle and upper class women one of our most famous um moral reformers in Canada was Emily Murphy and some of you might know her as a suffragette and also she was one of the first women judges in Canada but she was also a real advocate of prohibition and educated Canadians about newly criminalized drugs if you have to remember Canadians do nothing about marijuana um you know very little about opium dens um or anything um to do with these newly criminalized drugs but Emily Murphy wrote um a bunch of Articles three in McLean&#39;s magazine which was our national magazine at that time and then it was published as a book the Black Candle in the early 1920s and here we see a picture from the book and basically this was you know what she thought would happen is you know she acquires a habit um and then later she doesn&#39;t even care what happens to her you know abandons everything that might have been held sacred before she argued for harsher laws but um I wanted to just give an example of uh her writing it&#39;s very racist when you read the book but her writing about marijuana is quite interesting marijuana acts become raving Maniacs liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons and it sort of goes on in that vein about most of the drugs but she really had a thing for marijuana and partially that was because it wasn&#39;t criminalized yet in Canada but following the uh articles and the book we criminalized marijuana with no discussion in Ottawa um and I wouldn&#39;t say it&#39;s totally because of Emily morphy but for sure she was a big proponent of criminalization so the RCMP becomes our militarized federal police force and they are the enforcement arm of these new drugs at that time and they&#39;re granted special powers and we also set up uh special Federal prosecutors who were established to work with the division of narcotic control and right up until the 1960s punitive criminal sanctions became the Bedrock of Canadian drug policy following criminalization we didn&#39;t set up publicly funded drug treatment or narcotic substitution programs for people who might be addicted to drugs instead um we adopted a term the criminal addict and this was used by the um narcotic division but it was also used by social workers and health professionals at that time and what the criminal addict meant was that these people were criminals first and addict second and so even if we gave them drug substitution or treatment programs they would still be a threat to society they would still be criminals so why bother absence was the favored response to criminal addicts um and there is a belief that there shouldn&#39;t be any type of public support for treatment for them and so basically the prison cell becomes the place where people withdraw from drugs poor people and workingclass people as well we um enacted legislation that made it illegal for doctors to prescribe drugs for non-medical use or for addiction of uh for treatment of addiction and in fact the maximum penalty was 5 years right up until the late 1950s and this is quite different than what happened in other countries even the United States early on after they um created their First Federal legislation around criminalization of drugs they set up what we call narcotic clinics it was interesting these clinics that they provided free narcotic prescriptions but they weren&#39;t looking for a cure they just wanted to prevent suffering they&#39;re quite unique and the history around them is interesting they did get shut down um because sort of the prohibitionist punitive movement you know um unfolded more strongly but in in the UK doctors maintain the right to prescribe heroin for addiction purposes and for other pain relief and in 1967 they had to be um licensed by the home office but that wasn&#39;t that difficult and so even today um it remains an option a legal option in the UK and again in Canada from 1920 until 1970 the division of narcotic kept files on every known addict in Canada it was a very small population they had files for what they called criminal addicts a file for um traffickers and a file for professional addicts so professional addicts would be doctors uh pharmacists or nurses and those files are still um impossible they won&#39;t allow researchers to take a look at them but some have looked at the attic files and in those files you&#39;ll see that the um the RCMP and the local police kept track of every personal issue related to that person every court appearance they wrote doc they wrote letters to their doctors they kept they kept track of what uh prescriptions that they were using they&#39;re very comprehensive and what we saw in Canada was following the arrest and imprisonment and deportation of Chinese residents um who used opium smoking form that drug practices shifted in Canada and the new user population was poor and working class white people and they were using heroin and morphine and cocaine and they were injecting their drugs and not smoking them and this small population of heroin users who was based in Vancouver and in Montreal and a bit in Toronto but not as much and there are very well known to law enforcement so this high level of surveillance of this very small group of people um led to them being in prisoned for most of their life you know they&#39;d go in prison they&#39;d come out a couple years later back in prison three months later just back and forth um in prison and for some very long prison terms and women were seen as especially problematic when you look at the literature the few times that they did to women in their research they&#39;re labeled as criminal addicts but unlike their male counterparts they&#39;re seen as being promiscuous and immoral as working in the sex trade um and their drug use is sexualized in the studies as it is today um unfortunately and illicit drug use was seen as incompatible with female gender norms and with mothering and child apprehension became the norm for women who used illegal drugs in Canada and this is a magazine from 1937 the truth about marijuana sex crazing um drug Menace but there was change in the air after World War II and later on in the 1950s there was opposition to drug prohibition and Ernest winch was a BC MLA in the late uh 1940s and he started demanding that we establish narcotic substitution treat M and that people addicted to narcotics should not be sent to prison and he led the way for a drug treatment movement in Vancouver and the city formed the community chess it was a narcotic committee that came together in 1952 and they also recommended that um people addicted to drugs that it was a health issue and not a criminal matter and they wanted to see a Narcotics substitution program set up for people addicted to narcotics but un unfortunately at that time the federal government um and the RCMP rejected their demands and instead they enacted probably one of the harshest drug laws in Western Nations our 1961 narcotic Control Act where we had maximum life sentence for trafficking which we still have today so we haven&#39;t reduced that uh penalty at all but change was in the air and the first four bed facility um a publicly funded treatment facility was established in Vancouver in 1958 by the narcotic addiction Foundation of BC and they started to experiment with using methadon a synthetic drug that some people use as a substitution when they&#39;ve been addicted to heroin or other um narcotics for withdrawal purposes at the uh at their clinic in Vancouver meanwhile while this was going on while we had our you know one of our most um prohibitionist laws enacted in Saskatchewan at the Saskatchewan mental hospital in wayburn there were doctors and psychiatrists experimenting with using lstd for therapeutic purposes and these um this therapy and experimentation went on for almost 15 to 20 years there and Dr abon Hofer and Dr Osman Humphries began these experiments with people who were schizophrenic and people who were alcoholics and they found great success um in their treatment program as well in BC the Hollywood Hospital which was a private institution um opened up well it had been there but it shifted their practices to start treating people with LSD as well but unfortunately as the 60s approached there was a lot of um confusion about LSD and worry about the use of the drug and LSD was criminalized in 1968 and doctors weren&#39;t allowed to experiment with therapeutic use of it anymore at that time and so what that did was it ended medical research but it also created a new black market of for LSD um to be sold and bought well what we saw in the 60s was a huge shift in the way Canadians thought about drugs and the way that they started to consume drugs had a youth movement and not so youthful experimenting with criminalized drugs like marijuana cannabis LSD and Other Drugs but as soon as white middle class you started to be arrested there was a backlash and parents were quite upset about this um you know drug arrest just escalated in Canada and there were calls to decriminalize or create a you know a legal regular system for marijuana and this was uh the Georgia Straight it used to be such a political paper when I was in the uh Library going to The Archives of the Georgia trade I had forgotten just how political it was in the in its early years unlike today but anyway um here was a 1969 issue where they were calling for the idea that anyone who has possession of marijuana or uses it should never end end up in prison or have criminal sanctions it&#39;s difficult to see I apologize um it&#39;s not coming up so well on the on the slide but they ran a bunch of different um covers and back covers and articles about police brutality in Vancouver at that time the mayor in Vancouver um talked about youth or with you know hippies at that time as trash and they wanted to clean the trash up out of Vancouver and get them to leave town basically so they started uh undercover uh operation called dustpan and in response to all of these arrests in a couple of week um period people organized a gas Town smoke in a street jamere and the purpose of that Jamboree it was peaceful and it was to call for the uh legalization of cannabis and an end to police brutality and that was in 1971 in August and so people went down there peacefully and most of us know this as the gas Town Riot today but in fact it was this jambe um there was a inquiry later into the riot and it was um concluded that the police had created the riot pushing into this peaceful crowd with their horses their dogs and their patons well responding to all of these events the in 1969 the federal government decided to do a commission into the inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs um and it was due to the concern of this expanding drug use but also the increase in arrests but they didn&#39;t look at legal drugs such as prescription drugs or tobacco and alcohol and as unfortunate actually and so the Dane commission at the end they put out a few reports but they basically recommended that we have more publicly funded drug treatment that we have methadon treatment and less penalties for cannabis and that people should not be criminalized for possession of drugs they are very critical of law enforcement um and in 1970 the federal Health and Welfare Minister claimed that the government would legalize marijuana well we know this didn&#39;t happen but um law enforcement resisted these recommendations and drug treatment what we did have it expanded a bit but it remained absonant base and so people who couldn&#39;t comply for whatever reason were thrown out of the program there was very little um there was really no services for them in that case it&#39;s unfortunate that though the D commission um didn&#39;t include prescribed drugs and tobacco and alcohol because we see by the early 1970s more and more prescribed drugs um being produced and advertised and being used also in ways that you might not recommend or a doctor might not recommend and today we have more than 10,000 prescribed drugs and over 3,000 over-the-counter drugs where in the early 1960s we only had 300 prescription drugs so that&#39;s a huge cultural change you know the world that we live in today and the world that people lived in 50 years ago many of these drugs are life affirming so I don&#39;t want to say like oh my God all those prescription drugs are bad um but others cause more problems than we initially suspected and I think my point here is that drugs aren&#39;t going to go away um we have new synthetic drugs being produced daily but what we could think about is better ways to um educate people about drugs um and to regulate the pharmaceutical industry well due to police profile and this lack of more diverse services for people who use criminalized drug drugs at all levels of uh government vanue a drug user Union emerged in Vancouver to advocate for the human rights and the health needs of people who use criminalized drugs and to counter the outcome of punitive policies and part of their the emergence of vanue had to do with an epidemic in the downtown east side um an epidemic of hepatitis C HIV AIDS and overdose deaths these were preventable deaths that were directly Rel related to our policies at that time the lack of um needle exchange or even needle distribution the lack of other types of what we call harm reduction um programs and now there&#39;s drug user Union solid in uh Victoria and you know throughout Canada and the world but Scholars point to the difference between refined or synthetic drugs and a plant drug um and under our n our uh International conventions and even in our uh Federal Drug law in Canada we don&#39;t make a distinction between the cocoa leaf and refined coca powder and I put this up here because I wanted to make the point that for the cocoa Leaf the amount of cocaine in the coca leaf is like Z it&#39;s 05 the amount of cocaine in refined um cocaine can be up to 100% you know usually it isn&#39;t because people cut their drugs to make more of it um but you&#39;re dealing with a very different substance when it&#39;s a refined drug and people have a more difficult time establishing um you know sort of stable relations over long periods of time with refined drugs so this is vanue in Victoria on the steps of the BC legislature and speaking out about the epidemic and the need for other services um for people to end that epidemic and one of the famous demonstrations in the Vancouver the Thousand crosses and here bud osbor with um and Livingston were the founders of andu and Bud was uh Central in having a public health emergency declared in the downtown east side um and led the way for this social justice movement that emerged at that time demanding harm reduction and so the city did get involved the mayor and uh Donald mcferson was um brought on to be the first drug policy coordinator and he he spearheaded this report a four-pillar approach to drug problems in Vancouver and even though we&#39;ve kind of used to enforcement you know there&#39;s more emphasis on prevention and treatment but there&#39;s a huge emphasis in the report on harm reduction and so I&#39;ll just say that um most of you probably know what harm reduction is but it&#39;s a philosophy and a practice that um that has been adopted to reduce the harms related to both legal and illegal drug use to meet the needs of people where they&#39;re at to create practical non-judgmental Services um for people and to include the people most infected people who are using criminalized drugs or legal drugs um should be at the table making that policy and the initiatives possible so the report called for diverse services better housing safer injection sites herin assistent treatment and less criminal sanctions but it took to 2003 and many unofficial safer injection sites all through Vancouver um before the official site Insight was opened um and across Canada you can see amazing harm reduction initiatives you know starting off Grassroots supported by the municipalities that they live in and it&#39;s been a very difficult time the last 10 years because the um conservative party was very opposed to harm reduction uh initiatives at the same time that we saw um drug user unions and the social movement in the downtown east side emerg we also saw um compassion clubs opening throughout Canada and in 2001 due to some Court challenges we had our first Federal Medical Marijuana Program in Canada but most people didn&#39;t use it they felt like the Cannabis wasn&#39;t good quality it was expensive and they continue to use their compassion clubs or medical dispensaries there was a linking of um cannabis and Growers to violence and organized crime and so you might have seen some cartoons like this is from the globe in mail and this constant barrage of imagery about organized crime being um The Growers for cannabis and infiltrating the medical marijuana industry as well but this was interesting because through a Freedom of Information Act request um we got a hold of a federal justice department study that was done in 2011 which showed very clearly that there wasn&#39;t this direct link between marijuana growing and organized crime of the cases that they studied over 5 year period they could only say that less than 5% had any connection to organized crime and the other 95% of The Growers didn&#39;t and it&#39;s not to say that organized crime isn&#39;t involved I&#39;m not making that kind of claim I&#39;m just saying that the speculation about how much they&#39;re involved I think is a fabrication but this study was never released because it didn&#39;t fit with the sort of Law and Order um Mantra that was emanating from the federal government so what this did was we um then enacted after many years of this kind of reporting the safe streets and Community act in 2012 and was the first time around drug laws that we created mandatory minimum sentencing and that means that the judge has no discretion they can&#39;t lower your sentence so interestingly when we enacted this act in Colorado that same year they decided to end cannabis Prohibition in Washington too but in Colorado they um allowed adults to grow up to five plants so we could see the huge gap between Canadian policy and what was going on in the United States and so we had a lot of these types of Flyers going on where which is about punish these drug uh pushers you know junkies need to go to prison if they can&#39;t obstain which is completely contrary to harm reduction philosophy which is about social inclusion to keep people part of families and Society so it&#39;s very difficult to work with this type of propaganda over the last 10 years and just as a reminder um we&#39;re not arresting highlevel traffickers as law enforcement and some media and politicians tell us when you go visit the prisons it is poor people it is Street dealers it&#39;s people who are addicted to the drugs themselves who are spending time in prison and Dr Liz Elliot she was a restorative justice um scholar argued that rituals of punishment weaken societies and do terrible harm now I would say our current drug policies are no exception um I&#39;m not going to go into this because I just saw the time but we do see that there&#39;s some federal and City struggles going on with these popup marijuana dispensaries and interesting enough the city of Vancouver decided to regulate them which was contrary to Fed Federal they&#39;re all legal by the way um but they&#39;ve decided to regulate them and created bylaws and so as Victoria is on board for that as well um and you could say that this is just um you know stems from our fail drug policy people want the drug they see what&#39;s going on internationally so we&#39;ve had a huge change as you know um Justin Trudeau uh campaigned a liberal party campaign that they would legally regulate cannabis once if they got into power and they won the election and so we may see a change you know um I&#39;m waiting to see we&#39;ve come to that place a few times historically especially in the 1970s you know when we thought ah something&#39;s going to happen it didn&#39;t though so these are very entrenched ideas that we&#39;re dealing with you know for over a century and many Miss and misconceptions about who people are who use drugs um and people who sell and produce them but there&#39;s drug reform going on around the world and it looks like Canada may join them um I want to just end with saying that people feel that prohibition you know Scholars and uh researchers around the world has said that A Century of prohibition globally has worsened the health and well-being of drug users to increased imprisonment violence especially in countries like Colombia and Mexico that feel firsthand the the violence of drug prohibition it&#39;s increased violation of Human Rights it discourages harm reduction and research that you know might be useful for Canadians and others it&#39;s expensive ineffective it wastes our tax dollars and increases stigma discrimination and harms to individual families communities and to democracies themselves and so as we move forward I&#39;ll just end with you know I hope this is just a sketch and you know you could write a book about each incident and there&#39;s many things that I didn&#39;t talk about but that let&#39;s keep some of the myths and our failure to sort of see people as human beings and to believe that punishment Works in mind because we don&#39;t want to create new forms of social exclusion you know as we may create uh legal regulation for cannabis we may have the urge to then say well then we&#39;ll really you know punish those other drug traffickers you know outside of the system let&#39;s see if we can temper that response as we move forward and try to find an alternative way to deal with this issue thank [Applause] you

right well thanks everybody for coming on your afternoon um I want to thank KBC and Amanda for reaching out to me and for um Dr Paulie for introducing me it&amp;#39;s always nice to collaborate with the center as well um so I&amp;#39;ll just start um this is a a visual presentation and that&amp;#39;s why I&amp;#39;m in the dark over here so I apologize for that but it was just so that when we do get to some of the pictures and photos that you can see it a bit better than when the lights are on up here so drug policy though it&amp;#39;s um influenced by International concerns it&amp;#39;s also rooted in the national and local history as specific drugs are defined and framed differently over time and until the 19th century there was little distinction between medical and non-medical use of opiates and they were consumed by all classes of people opium alcohol and tobacco consumption were embedded in Social customs in Western Nations including um Canada however today drug consumption is quite different than in the 19th century and so too is drug control I&amp;#39;m interested in drug prohibition because the crime rate in Canada has been it&amp;#39;s at its lowest since 1969 right now but police reported crime rate um even though it&amp;#39;s decreasing drug offenses have been steadily rising over the last 30 years and we can see that it&amp;#39;s possession of cannabis that seems to be the drug that is most often regulated and that people are arrested for and in BC canab possession arrests have doubled between the years 2005 and 2011 so in Canada we adopted what we call a Prohibition approach to regulate the use possession and selling of cannabis and Other criminalized Drugs but we could have taken a different approach the probis approach is primarily a criminal justice approach in Canada and though today you may say oh well we have drug treatment we have other initiative that wasn&amp;#39;t that&amp;#39;s a fairly recent component of our drug policy but early on there were few controls of any of any controls at all and white settlers colonizers who arrived on the shores of what&amp;#39;s Canada today brought their traditional plant-based medicines patent medicines with opium from the poppy plant was widely used for the relief of pain and for intestinal problems and Lum also became very popular it&amp;#39;s an opium-based um medicine and prior to criminalization it was upper middle class white women were the um largest consumers of these opiate drugs and they were advertised freely um in magazines um and in stores and cannabis tonics became quite popular in the early um 1900s late 1800s and Physicians advertised and wrote articles about the benefits of um cannabis tonics for People&amp;#39;s Health and the cocoa plant which we often think about it being widely used in South America for its nutritional healing and spiritual components became quite popular as well in patent medicines and alexir um and we find um Coca or cocaine a number of products that were available in Canada and other Western Nations so here&amp;#39;s some cocaine toothache drop that were sold in stores and by mail order Coca-Cola of course originally had cocaine in it Vin marani was a wine um and it&amp;#39;s just one of many wines and tonics that included cocaine and then we have Bayer&amp;#39;s heroin and most of us are you know probably familiar with Bayer&amp;#39;s aspirin but in fact they produced heroin and it&amp;#39;s a what we call a semi synthetic drug it&amp;#39;s made from morphine which is a compound found in opium um and the our ability to extract compounds from Plants occurred in the 1800s there we didn&amp;#39;t have the scientific knowledge to do that beforehand hero was made from um or is a semisynthetic drug drawn from morphine this is the beginning of what we might consider our ever expanding pharmaceutical industry was that you know extracting compounds and then making um synthetic drugs as well as semi synthetic drugs but Herm was used for coughs pain other common elements and again advertised in medical journals stor fronts and maale Order and so here&amp;#39;s a copy of two old U male order one Simpson and the other is from eatens and this is where people would go um to look at what plant-based drugs would be available for them in Canada we have to remember that early on Canada was a rural country and there was very few doctors there are few and far between and they were expensive we didn&amp;#39;t have a federal Public Health Care system at that time and so people had to pay out of pocket for whatever Health needs they had and so in order to take care of a family&amp;#39;s needs you would find an array of these plant-based medicines in their medicine cabinet there are also some early drug stores where people went to regular General stores for some of these drugs too if they live close by well can Canadians also had access to alcohol and tobacco um and we&amp;#39;ve chosen mostly to legally regulate these drugs rather than criminalize them even though we know they&amp;#39;re associated with some of the most um harmful health related problems and we have had some alcohol prohibition I&amp;#39;ll only talk about that um a little bit today um because that would be a whole talk outside of this but until colonization what is now Canada was virtually alcohol-free the Jesuits missionaries Traders and white settlers introduce indigenous people and Nations to alcohol in North America and there is some use like ceremonial use of alcohol in the southern states um but literally it was Al alcohol free and the Hudson Bay Company and other Colonial Traders brought their drug of choice alcohol and their religions laws and disease and we know that the negative consequences that this had for indigenous peoples and Nations but in Canada and elsewhere the Christian Temperance Movement was becoming quite active and Christian white middleclass moral reformers regarded sobriety and self-control as a template for citizens ship in the new dominion and women were at the center of this Movement we should remember that they didn&amp;#39;t have the vote yet so they put a lot of their energies into these sort of moral reform movements at the time and although we have um we had Federal alcohol provision um during World War I and other provinces also had alcohol provision basically it Federal prohibition didn&amp;#39;t last very long and there are all these exemptions to it you could have alcohol if you had a medical prescription the industry still evolved during prohibition but what is different is that prohibition was imposed on First Nations people um for over a century so the first Indian Act in Canada was passed in 1868 and many of you might know that it regulated all aspects of life for those um indigenous people uh labeled St Indian by the Canadian government and the ACT is understood now as an instrument of cultural genocide that was imposed on indigenous peoples in Canada but we should keep in mind that the Dominion or Canada was envisioned as a white Nation by British colonists at this point and Indigenous people and later Chinese Japanese South Asian people were seen as Outsiders to White nation building so the 186 68 Indian Act included a provision that prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol to status Indians so to drink legally to vote um those you had to give up those rights to keep your status and alcohol prohibition lasted right up until the 1980s and for more than a century it created more harm than good it didn&amp;#39;t stop some indigenous people from drinking instead it encouraged covert and dangerous drinking practices illegal consumption and selling and it discouraged social drinking and thousands of indigenous people were arrested and prisoned due to this law it was a punitive and racialized social control mechanism used by the Indian agents and the police and it also contributed to enduring stereotypes and legal discrimination and this was a notice just saying that there would be a $300 fine um in 6 months imprisonment for any indigenous person that was found intoxicated or if anyone had sold to an indigenous person in Canada well at the same time that the uh Christian Temperance Movement was gaining strength and Indigenous people were being stripped of their lands Chinese workers were invited to Canada to work on the National Railway and the railway in Canada was envisioned by the federal government as a project to unite the country and white settlements throughout this large land that that have been colonized well the rail was a dangerous job and Chinese men who came to work here on the railway were seen as very honest good laborers and they were paid less than the white laborers and they were given the most dangerous jobs on the CPR Railway and this is a CPR Work Camp in cantalo loops and so very rustic um settlements that they House people all along the railway line and it was completed in the late 1800s and at that time many of the laborers settled in Vancouver and in Victoria but attitudes against Chinese people became very extreme and racial discrimination increased and the famous head tax was imposed in Canada and limits to stop immigration from China and from families from um you know being unified in Canada and unfortunately there was an economic slump in the early 1900s and that led white workers and politicians to Rally against Chinese workers in Vancouver they felt that uh Chinese labors were competing with their jobs at that time even though there doesn&amp;#39;t seem to be evidence of that and in 1907 there was a labor rally and it sort of wo through Vancouver and it ended up at City Hall which was at that time right by Maine and Hastings and it was a protest against the Chinese workers and a large number of white workers and people at the protest um split off from the rally and they marched into the area that was designated as the Chinese um center of town Chinese people weren&amp;#39;t allowed to live in other parts of Canada so they could only be in this Chinese quarter and the workers went marching in there and they started to destroy businesses and homes and then they went on to the uh Japanese quarter as well where they were finally stopped by Japanese and Chinese residents but they did a lot of damage to the area and so McKenzie King he was the minister of labor at that time he was sent out to investigate and to possibly offer some federal compensation for the damages that had happened and on his second visit he met with some anti- opiate reformers um in uh Chinatown and he learned of the legal opium industry in Vancouver and there was quite an industry here in Victoria as well well he went back to Ottawa and he stated it&amp;#39;s in the province newspaper he&amp;#39;d get some good out of that Riot and he did he wrote a report and he recommended the criminalization of crude opium and the smoking of opium he didn&amp;#39;t recommend that we criminalize the other forms of opium liquid patent medicines and alers that white settlers were using but this form of opium smoking um that Chinese people were um traditionally more involved in well the when you read the report you see that he draws on fears about Chinese men and opian den corrupting white moral Christian men and women and the opian Act was passed in 1908 with little debate and therefore our first narcotic law was aimed at Chinese men seen as racialized Outsiders to the white Christian Nation and the Act was strengthened in 1911 and we added um cocaine and morphine without a prescription and each year we added more and more drugs um to the drug schedule and the use of criminal sanctions to control drugs drug prohibition becomes Canada&amp;#39;s primary drug strategy then and a new class of criminals emerge illegal drug users and people who sell newly criminalized drugs well in Canada like most countries international events also helped shape drug policy and the anti- opiate movement that was going on in Western Nations definitely impacted the coming together of the Shanghai International opium Commission in 1909 and McKenzie King went to that um meeting in hag and he saw himself as a Pioneer and a leader in drug control and in 1919 the division of of narcotic control was set up in um Canada and Colonel Sharman he&amp;#39;s the one on your left there he became the one of the first Chiefs in our um division of narcotic control and he held that position for more than 30 years and then after following that he held quite a few International positions at the UN and elsewhere in relation to um drug control and the international control system the man in the middle is Harry anslinger and Harry anslinger was the drug Zar of the uh US Federal Bureau of Narcotics and he&amp;#39;s famous or inFAMOUS as being sort of the producer of propaganda and misinformation especially about marijuana and instrumental in having marijuana criminalized in the United States but the two of them worked very closely together and when you see their the records on them in the archives you&amp;#39;re quite amazed Canada was sort of seen as leading the way in drug prob even by the you know Harry anslinger you know who most people would agree was probably one of the most prohibitionist Warriors that there has been ever has been drug prohibition was also aided by media you know through film and magazines um there&amp;#39;s a lot of conjuring up a fear of white moral women this close proximity of men of color you know was thought it would lead to their corruption addiction and abandon and of the family and then ultimately the nation because women were seen as sort of the moral um center of the nation or at least white middle and upper class women one of our most famous um moral reformers in Canada was Emily Murphy and some of you might know her as a suffragette and also she was one of the first women judges in Canada but she was also a real advocate of prohibition and educated Canadians about newly criminalized drugs if you have to remember Canadians do nothing about marijuana um you know very little about opium dens um or anything um to do with these newly criminalized drugs but Emily Murphy wrote um a bunch of Articles three in McLean&amp;#39;s magazine which was our national magazine at that time and then it was published as a book the Black Candle in the early 1920s and here we see a picture from the book and basically this was you know what she thought would happen is you know she acquires a habit um and then later she doesn&amp;#39;t even care what happens to her you know abandons everything that might have been held sacred before she argued for harsher laws but um I wanted to just give an example of uh her writing it&amp;#39;s very racist when you read the book but her writing about marijuana is quite interesting marijuana acts become raving Maniacs liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons and it sort of goes on in that vein about most of the drugs but she really had a thing for marijuana and partially that was because it wasn&amp;#39;t criminalized yet in Canada but following the uh articles and the book we criminalized marijuana with no discussion in Ottawa um and I wouldn&amp;#39;t say it&amp;#39;s totally because of Emily morphy but for sure she was a big proponent of criminalization so the RCMP becomes our militarized federal police force and they are the enforcement arm of these new drugs at that time and they&amp;#39;re granted special powers and we also set up uh special Federal prosecutors who were established to work with the division of narcotic control and right up until the 1960s punitive criminal sanctions became the Bedrock of Canadian drug policy following criminalization we didn&amp;#39;t set up publicly funded drug treatment or narcotic substitution programs for people who might be addicted to drugs instead um we adopted a term the criminal addict and this was used by the um narcotic division but it was also used by social workers and health professionals at that time and what the criminal addict meant was that these people were criminals first and addict second and so even if we gave them drug substitution or treatment programs they would still be a threat to society they would still be criminals so why bother absence was the favored response to criminal addicts um and there is a belief that there shouldn&amp;#39;t be any type of public support for treatment for them and so basically the prison cell becomes the place where people withdraw from drugs poor people and workingclass people as well we um enacted legislation that made it illegal for doctors to prescribe drugs for non-medical use or for addiction of uh for treatment of addiction and in fact the maximum penalty was 5 years right up until the late 1950s and this is quite different than what happened in other countries even the United States early on after they um created their First Federal legislation around criminalization of drugs they set up what we call narcotic clinics it was interesting these clinics that they provided free narcotic prescriptions but they weren&amp;#39;t looking for a cure they just wanted to prevent suffering they&amp;#39;re quite unique and the history around them is interesting they did get shut down um because sort of the prohibitionist punitive movement you know um unfolded more strongly but in in the UK doctors maintain the right to prescribe heroin for addiction purposes and for other pain relief and in 1967 they had to be um licensed by the home office but that wasn&amp;#39;t that difficult and so even today um it remains an option a legal option in the UK and again in Canada from 1920 until 1970 the division of narcotic kept files on every known addict in Canada it was a very small population they had files for what they called criminal addicts a file for um traffickers and a file for professional addicts so professional addicts would be doctors uh pharmacists or nurses and those files are still um impossible they won&amp;#39;t allow researchers to take a look at them but some have looked at the attic files and in those files you&amp;#39;ll see that the um the RCMP and the local police kept track of every personal issue related to that person every court appearance they wrote doc they wrote letters to their doctors they kept they kept track of what uh prescriptions that they were using they&amp;#39;re very comprehensive and what we saw in Canada was following the arrest and imprisonment and deportation of Chinese residents um who used opium smoking form that drug practices shifted in Canada and the new user population was poor and working class white people and they were using heroin and morphine and cocaine and they were injecting their drugs and not smoking them and this small population of heroin users who was based in Vancouver and in Montreal and a bit in Toronto but not as much and there are very well known to law enforcement so this high level of surveillance of this very small group of people um led to them being in prisoned for most of their life you know they&amp;#39;d go in prison they&amp;#39;d come out a couple years later back in prison three months later just back and forth um in prison and for some very long prison terms and women were seen as especially problematic when you look at the literature the few times that they did to women in their research they&amp;#39;re labeled as criminal addicts but unlike their male counterparts they&amp;#39;re seen as being promiscuous and immoral as working in the sex trade um and their drug use is sexualized in the studies as it is today um unfortunately and illicit drug use was seen as incompatible with female gender norms and with mothering and child apprehension became the norm for women who used illegal drugs in Canada and this is a magazine from 1937 the truth about marijuana sex crazing um drug Menace but there was change in the air after World War II and later on in the 1950s there was opposition to drug prohibition and Ernest winch was a BC MLA in the late uh 1940s and he started demanding that we establish narcotic substitution treat M and that people addicted to narcotics should not be sent to prison and he led the way for a drug treatment movement in Vancouver and the city formed the community chess it was a narcotic committee that came together in 1952 and they also recommended that um people addicted to drugs that it was a health issue and not a criminal matter and they wanted to see a Narcotics substitution program set up for people addicted to narcotics but un unfortunately at that time the federal government um and the RCMP rejected their demands and instead they enacted probably one of the harshest drug laws in Western Nations our 1961 narcotic Control Act where we had maximum life sentence for trafficking which we still have today so we haven&amp;#39;t reduced that uh penalty at all but change was in the air and the first four bed facility um a publicly funded treatment facility was established in Vancouver in 1958 by the narcotic addiction Foundation of BC and they started to experiment with using methadon a synthetic drug that some people use as a substitution when they&amp;#39;ve been addicted to heroin or other um narcotics for withdrawal purposes at the uh at their clinic in Vancouver meanwhile while this was going on while we had our you know one of our most um prohibitionist laws enacted in Saskatchewan at the Saskatchewan mental hospital in wayburn there were doctors and psychiatrists experimenting with using lstd for therapeutic purposes and these um this therapy and experimentation went on for almost 15 to 20 years there and Dr abon Hofer and Dr Osman Humphries began these experiments with people who were schizophrenic and people who were alcoholics and they found great success um in their treatment program as well in BC the Hollywood Hospital which was a private institution um opened up well it had been there but it shifted their practices to start treating people with LSD as well but unfortunately as the 60s approached there was a lot of um confusion about LSD and worry about the use of the drug and LSD was criminalized in 1968 and doctors weren&amp;#39;t allowed to experiment with therapeutic use of it anymore at that time and so what that did was it ended medical research but it also created a new black market of for LSD um to be sold and bought well what we saw in the 60s was a huge shift in the way Canadians thought about drugs and the way that they started to consume drugs had a youth movement and not so youthful experimenting with criminalized drugs like marijuana cannabis LSD and Other Drugs but as soon as white middle class you started to be arrested there was a backlash and parents were quite upset about this um you know drug arrest just escalated in Canada and there were calls to decriminalize or create a you know a legal regular system for marijuana and this was uh the Georgia Straight it used to be such a political paper when I was in the uh Library going to The Archives of the Georgia trade I had forgotten just how political it was in the in its early years unlike today but anyway um here was a 1969 issue where they were calling for the idea that anyone who has possession of marijuana or uses it should never end end up in prison or have criminal sanctions it&amp;#39;s difficult to see I apologize um it&amp;#39;s not coming up so well on the on the slide but they ran a bunch of different um covers and back covers and articles about police brutality in Vancouver at that time the mayor in Vancouver um talked about youth or with you know hippies at that time as trash and they wanted to clean the trash up out of Vancouver and get them to leave town basically so they started uh undercover uh operation called dustpan and in response to all of these arrests in a couple of week um period people organized a gas Town smoke in a street jamere and the purpose of that Jamboree it was peaceful and it was to call for the uh legalization of cannabis and an end to police brutality and that was in 1971 in August and so people went down there peacefully and most of us know this as the gas Town Riot today but in fact it was this jambe um there was a inquiry later into the riot and it was um concluded that the police had created the riot pushing into this peaceful crowd with their horses their dogs and their patons well responding to all of these events the in 1969 the federal government decided to do a commission into the inquiry into the non-medical use of drugs um and it was due to the concern of this expanding drug use but also the increase in arrests but they didn&amp;#39;t look at legal drugs such as prescription drugs or tobacco and alcohol and as unfortunate actually and so the Dane commission at the end they put out a few reports but they basically recommended that we have more publicly funded drug treatment that we have methadon treatment and less penalties for cannabis and that people should not be criminalized for possession of drugs they are very critical of law enforcement um and in 1970 the federal Health and Welfare Minister claimed that the government would legalize marijuana well we know this didn&amp;#39;t happen but um law enforcement resisted these recommendations and drug treatment what we did have it expanded a bit but it remained absonant base and so people who couldn&amp;#39;t comply for whatever reason were thrown out of the program there was very little um there was really no services for them in that case it&amp;#39;s unfortunate that though the D commission um didn&amp;#39;t include prescribed drugs and tobacco and alcohol because we see by the early 1970s more and more prescribed drugs um being produced and advertised and being used also in ways that you might not recommend or a doctor might not recommend and today we have more than 10,000 prescribed drugs and over 3,000 over-the-counter drugs where in the early 1960s we only had 300 prescription drugs so that&amp;#39;s a huge cultural change you know the world that we live in today and the world that people lived in 50 years ago many of these drugs are life affirming so I don&amp;#39;t want to say like oh my God all those prescription drugs are bad um but others cause more problems than we initially suspected and I think my point here is that drugs aren&amp;#39;t going to go away um we have new synthetic drugs being produced daily but what we could think about is better ways to um educate people about drugs um and to regulate the pharmaceutical industry well due to police profile and this lack of more diverse services for people who use criminalized drug drugs at all levels of uh government vanue a drug user Union emerged in Vancouver to advocate for the human rights and the health needs of people who use criminalized drugs and to counter the outcome of punitive policies and part of their the emergence of vanue had to do with an epidemic in the downtown east side um an epidemic of hepatitis C HIV AIDS and overdose deaths these were preventable deaths that were directly Rel related to our policies at that time the lack of um needle exchange or even needle distribution the lack of other types of what we call harm reduction um programs and now there&amp;#39;s drug user Union solid in uh Victoria and you know throughout Canada and the world but Scholars point to the difference between refined or synthetic drugs and a plant drug um and under our n our uh International conventions and even in our uh Federal Drug law in Canada we don&amp;#39;t make a distinction between the cocoa leaf and refined coca powder and I put this up here because I wanted to make the point that for the cocoa Leaf the amount of cocaine in the coca leaf is like Z it&amp;#39;s 05 the amount of cocaine in refined um cocaine can be up to 100% you know usually it isn&amp;#39;t because people cut their drugs to make more of it um but you&amp;#39;re dealing with a very different substance when it&amp;#39;s a refined drug and people have a more difficult time establishing um you know sort of stable relations over long periods of time with refined drugs so this is vanue in Victoria on the steps of the BC legislature and speaking out about the epidemic and the need for other services um for people to end that epidemic and one of the famous demonstrations in the Vancouver the Thousand crosses and here bud osbor with um and Livingston were the founders of andu and Bud was uh Central in having a public health emergency declared in the downtown east side um and led the way for this social justice movement that emerged at that time demanding harm reduction and so the city did get involved the mayor and uh Donald mcferson was um brought on to be the first drug policy coordinator and he he spearheaded this report a four-pillar approach to drug problems in Vancouver and even though we&amp;#39;ve kind of used to enforcement you know there&amp;#39;s more emphasis on prevention and treatment but there&amp;#39;s a huge emphasis in the report on harm reduction and so I&amp;#39;ll just say that um most of you probably know what harm reduction is but it&amp;#39;s a philosophy and a practice that um that has been adopted to reduce the harms related to both legal and illegal drug use to meet the needs of people where they&amp;#39;re at to create practical non-judgmental Services um for people and to include the people most infected people who are using criminalized drugs or legal drugs um should be at the table making that policy and the initiatives possible so the report called for diverse services better housing safer injection sites herin assistent treatment and less criminal sanctions but it took to 2003 and many unofficial safer injection sites all through Vancouver um before the official site Insight was opened um and across Canada you can see amazing harm reduction initiatives you know starting off Grassroots supported by the municipalities that they live in and it&amp;#39;s been a very difficult time the last 10 years because the um conservative party was very opposed to harm reduction uh initiatives at the same time that we saw um drug user unions and the social movement in the downtown east side emerg we also saw um compassion clubs opening throughout Canada and in 2001 due to some Court challenges we had our first Federal Medical Marijuana Program in Canada but most people didn&amp;#39;t use it they felt like the Cannabis wasn&amp;#39;t good quality it was expensive and they continue to use their compassion clubs or medical dispensaries there was a linking of um cannabis and Growers to violence and organized crime and so you might have seen some cartoons like this is from the globe in mail and this constant barrage of imagery about organized crime being um The Growers for cannabis and infiltrating the medical marijuana industry as well but this was interesting because through a Freedom of Information Act request um we got a hold of a federal justice department study that was done in 2011 which showed very clearly that there wasn&amp;#39;t this direct link between marijuana growing and organized crime of the cases that they studied over 5 year period they could only say that less than 5% had any connection to organized crime and the other 95% of The Growers didn&amp;#39;t and it&amp;#39;s not to say that organized crime isn&amp;#39;t involved I&amp;#39;m not making that kind of claim I&amp;#39;m just saying that the speculation about how much they&amp;#39;re involved I think is a fabrication but this study was never released because it didn&amp;#39;t fit with the sort of Law and Order um Mantra that was emanating from the federal government so what this did was we um then enacted after many years of this kind of reporting the safe streets and Community act in 2012 and was the first time around drug laws that we created mandatory minimum sentencing and that means that the judge has no discretion they can&amp;#39;t lower your sentence so interestingly when we enacted this act in Colorado that same year they decided to end cannabis Prohibition in Washington too but in Colorado they um allowed adults to grow up to five plants so we could see the huge gap between Canadian policy and what was going on in the United States and so we had a lot of these types of Flyers going on where which is about punish these drug uh pushers you know junkies need to go to prison if they can&amp;#39;t obstain which is completely contrary to harm reduction philosophy which is about social inclusion to keep people part of families and Society so it&amp;#39;s very difficult to work with this type of propaganda over the last 10 years and just as a reminder um we&amp;#39;re not arresting highlevel traffickers as law enforcement and some media and politicians tell us when you go visit the prisons it is poor people it is Street dealers it&amp;#39;s people who are addicted to the drugs themselves who are spending time in prison and Dr Liz Elliot she was a restorative justice um scholar argued that rituals of punishment weaken societies and do terrible harm now I would say our current drug policies are no exception um I&amp;#39;m not going to go into this because I just saw the time but we do see that there&amp;#39;s some federal and City struggles going on with these popup marijuana dispensaries and interesting enough the city of Vancouver decided to regulate them which was contrary to Fed Federal they&amp;#39;re all legal by the way um but they&amp;#39;ve decided to regulate them and created bylaws and so as Victoria is on board for that as well um and you could say that this is just um you know stems from our fail drug policy people want the drug they see what&amp;#39;s going on internationally so we&amp;#39;ve had a huge change as you know um Justin Trudeau uh campaigned a liberal party campaign that they would legally regulate cannabis once if they got into power and they won the election and so we may see a change you know um I&amp;#39;m waiting to see we&amp;#39;ve come to that place a few times historically especially in the 1970s you know when we thought ah something&amp;#39;s going to happen it didn&amp;#39;t though so these are very entrenched ideas that we&amp;#39;re dealing with you know for over a century and many Miss and misconceptions about who people are who use drugs um and people who sell and produce them but there&amp;#39;s drug reform going on around the world and it looks like Canada may join them um I want to just end with saying that people feel that prohibition you know Scholars and uh researchers around the world has said that A Century of prohibition globally has worsened the health and well-being of drug users to increased imprisonment violence especially in countries like Colombia and Mexico that feel firsthand the the violence of drug prohibition it&amp;#39;s increased violation of Human Rights it discourages harm reduction and research that you know might be useful for Canadians and others it&amp;#39;s expensive ineffective it wastes our tax dollars and increases stigma discrimination and harms to individual families communities and to democracies themselves and so as we move forward I&amp;#39;ll just end with you know I hope this is just a sketch and you know you could write a book about each incident and there&amp;#39;s many things that I didn&amp;#39;t talk about but that let&amp;#39;s keep some of the myths and our failure to sort of see people as human beings and to believe that punishment Works in mind because we don&amp;#39;t want to create new forms of social exclusion you know as we may create uh legal regulation for cannabis we may have the urge to then say well then we&amp;#39;ll really you know punish those other drug traffickers you know outside of the system let&amp;#39;s see if we can temper that response as we move forward and try to find an alternative way to deal with this issue thank [Applause] you

Transcript for:Notes on Lecture: The History of Drug Policy and Prohibition in Canada

Transcript for:
Notes on Lecture: The History of Drug Policy and Prohibition in Canada