Michael Scoles wrote:
My first reaction to this story was, "How is it possible to enforce the
sentence?" Then, the idea of prison came to mind. Has Canada's war on drugs caused
problems to the same degree that is seen in America?
Canada doesn't really have a "war on drugs." That was a Reagan policy
(continued by later administrations) that involved very harsh sentences
for comparatively minor offences, as well as political and military
intervention in countries producing drugs sold in the US. Canada, by
comparison, just has drug laws, which it enforces on a selective basis.
Some urban regions have experimented with "harm reduction" strategies
(like needle exchanges and safe-injection sites for addicts) that would
cause a furor in many parts of the US. As with many things, Canada is
somewhere between the US and Europe on these issues. There is occasional
talk about decriminalizing pot, but concern about how the US would
respond (viz., how difficult the border would be made in retaliation)
has prevented Canada from going there. Canadian news agencies like to
trumpet the discovery of suburban grow-ops and the recent growth of
crystal meth, and a few police organizations have attempted to whip up a
crisis mentality about these developments, but it really hasn't caught
on with the population, and so politicians haven't been able to use it
as a "wedge issue" as effectively as in the US
It is very difficult to tell whether the basic drug problem is really
much worse in US, or whether the difference actually lies in the level
of self-interested sensationalization of the problem by politicians, the
police, and the media. It is certainly true that large Canadian cities
are quite different from many large American cities -- the former did
not "hollow out" to the suburbs to the same extent in the 1970s and
1980s. They also did not lose their commercial downtowns to suburban
malls the way that many US cities did. As a result, the larger Canadian
cities -- Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver -- are still patchworks of
middle-class neighborhoods (just like Jane Jacobs said they should be,
just before permanently leaving New York for Toronto). Although Canadian
cities all have their "bad" neighborhoods, they do not have the large,
entrenched, terribly impoverished ghettos of many large US cities. The
reasons are pretty obvious, I think: social assistance in Canada is
better, education is cheaper and more accessible, racial and ethnic
relations are not as contentious. Canada is not a "wonderland" by any
means. It has all kinds of problems (mostly historically-based, with no
real equivalents in the US), but Canadians don't seem to be quite as
prone to either shoot or religiously "condemn" each other over their
differences. Instead, we set up governmental "commissions of inquiry." :-)
Regards,
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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