Justin Trudeau's political party wants to decriminalize ALL THE DRUGS

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/18/justin-trudeaus-political-pa.html

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Alas, this comes too late for Rob Ford, but I’m sure he would have been happy.

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decriminalize ALL THE DRUGS

Canada is looking pretty dam good these days.

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Evidence-based, common sense drug reform. Who would’a thunk it? (Unfortunate answer: NOT USAMERICANS.)

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Interesting TED talk out today on this topic.

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Well I’m glad that Seamus is so confident that all the legal hurdles still to come with Bill-45, the pot legalization law in question, will get squared away before the summer, since the timeline keeps slipping, and the Senate came (somewhat) close to throwing a wrench in the whole thing last month.

Before we Canadians pat ourselves on the back too much, or get too excited about the prospect of broader drug reforms, let’s maybe just wait until this common-sense, widely supported law actually gets royal assent.

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I think there is starting to be a public appetite to discuss these ideas in Canada. I would be quite surprised however (though happy) if the Liberal party adopts this particular policy.

The liberals take a pretty conservative (read cynical) approach to policy and I think they will only adopt this particular stance if it becomes clear that it is a political winner.

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There’s still all pot details at the local level to be worked out. In the Toronto Star this morning, they showed on a map that most places in Toronto 450m from a school are industrial, park, or the Bridal Path area (street where the Riches live, kept purposely in bad condition to discourage through traffic.) Aaahahaha, the thought of a pot store there made me smile!

Didn’t know they applied that 450 meter standard for beer or liquor stores…

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But someone, somewhere, might have fun. There’s a significant minority of the human race that is therefore opposed to this idea, and figures that no matter how many people get hurt by prohibitionism, it’s ok because they deserved it.

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Uh-huh, sure. Just like the party was going to respect first nations’ wishes.

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Did something happen to Rob Ford?

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For a little bit, I was tangentially involved with a group that was testing pills at raves back in the '90s. The number of people buying pills of dubious provenance was scary.

I think a lot of people, including me, would like to experiment with MDMA and LSD and would definitely do so if they could buy trusted drugs legally.

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Clearly they need to shrink that exclusion zone a bit for this to be feasible.

How about 420 m?

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Yep. He died of cancer in 2016.

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Should we make a post about it?

*running gag alert

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Until Manitoba (my home province) gets a new government (PC is in power), I can see them stalling this super hard. They’re stalling and fucking up marijuana legalization, and just today rejected funding or allowing safe injection sites for Winnipeg (claiming they have expert evidence to back it up, but refuse to cite their experts). They cited research saying that folks who overdose on opioids do so at home, forgetting about street effected users, and refused to cite their expert. The PC party, official federal opposition, will NEVER go for this. NDP will love it. I want this so bad but I don’t know when or if it will actually happen.

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Here in Ontario we have liberals, and they are managing to fuck it up with ease.

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There was a recent story that Sandoz wanted to be involved in the legal marijuana business. Was it because they felt it was an affiliated business, or hoping to bet their foot in the door? Surely the patent on LSD ran out a long time ago.

The Le Daine Commission on drugs was big in Canada almost fifty years ago. I was too young to pay attention, but was it only about marijuana like wikipedia says, or did it deal with other “non-medical drugs”? The results were ignored back then but might provide some insight now that the main results been listened to by Trudeau Jr.

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Erg. I walked into that one.

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I “liked” because I understand. The Liberal Party in 204 ain’t much better.