Harper's Faith-Based Drug War

We should not pretend that Bill S-10 has anything to do with evidence – or with making our country a safer place in which to live.

The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, the bill seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.

It’s not that marijuana is benign. For some people and in some circumstances it can be a problematic drug, as can most other psychoactive substances that are widely circulated in our culture – tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, maybe even chocolate. What’s initially much more puzzling is the extent to which the Harper Conservatives are ignoring all relevant evidence regarding the utility of mandatory minimum terms for drug offences. We know that mandatory minimums are the leading cause of the massive explosion in U.S. prison populations, imposing extraordinary costs without any demonstrable benefits – the percentage of Americans who use cannabis and other illegal drugs has not been impacted by this massive project of imprisonment, and today most American legislators of both the political left (Barack Obama) and the right (Newt Gingrich) are trying to figure out how to make the criminal justice system less reliant on imprisonment and more effective. Perhaps even more oddly, the percentage of both Canadians and Americans who used cannabis in the last year sits at 10 per cent, about 50 per cent higher per capita than the percentage of citizens who used cannabis in Holland – a country in which the drug can be bought without prosecution, at any number of so-called coffee shops.

The mistake we make is to believe that the Harper Conservative agenda is based on fact, data relevant to public health, or the best available empirical evidence. That’s not what they care about. Stephen Harper is an ideologue, publicly committed to increasing imprisonment for a greater range of criminal offences and personally in favour of the death penalty. His publicly stated positions on marriage and abortion – “I don’t believe the party should have a position on abortion,” for example – are carefully crafted to avoid characterization of Harper as an extremist but nonetheless imply the moral superiority of the “traditional definition of marriage” and a lack of respect for the reproductive rights of women.

Bill S-10 is about a belief in a particular world view – one that is hostile and emotionally driven in its intent, having more in common with George Bush’s Texas than our longstanding Canadian values of tolerance and compassion. We should not pretend that this legislation has anything to do with evidence – or with making our country a safer place in which to live.