C-10 Hearings 2012 02 15 - Police and Drugs

C-10 Hearings 2012 02 15 –

Police Perspective and Drug Perspective

I expected this to be a dialogue between a police perspective of drugs must be kept illegal and a drug perspective that they should be legalized.  It was far different and more complex than that as I listened to the various witnesses. 

Supt. Eric Slinn represented the Drug Branch of the RCMP and Barry MacKnight, Police Chief in Fredericton, represented the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs. 

The Senators are mostly lawyers although there are a few coming from other perspectives.  They are extremely knowledgeable about the issues.  They all there all the time, listening carefully and respectfully to every witness.  They each ask 2 questions.  Unfortunately the Liberals sit on one side and the Conservatives on the other.  They go back and forth so it is very fair, and the chair, Senator Wallace (who is doing an extremely good job), is allowing some latitude in the discussion so that these deeply important societal questions are fully explored.  It is perfectly clear that they have been inundated with letters, and it is also clear that some of them come to find specific answers to specific questions because of the letters they receive.  Throughout the hearings, for example, the Senators ask each witness certain questions to find out their attitude about central questions. 

For example, they have been inundated with letters pointing out the unfairness of a minimum sentence longer for 6 pot plants than for a pedophile caught with child pornography.  Where is the justice in that people are asking?  Many witnesses have had brief dialogue with the Senators on this question.  They have asked the police how much pot that is and whether this is enough to constitute trafficking.  They have asked the lawyers how this should be weighed in law.  They have asked the Department of Public Safety what their criteria was to set these particular minimum sentences and how they came to those results.  Today we will also hear other perspectives on the drug side of the equation.

The RCMP told us that cannabis is still the biggest seller on the market but it is just over 50% of the street drugs used.  He told us that in the past decade many other substances have been added to the street marijuana being sold and that marijuana is much stronger.  He also told us that the average age of a person when they start smoking pot has gone down from 15 years to 9 years.

Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, Psychiatrist and Neroscientist at McGill University told us that they now have some longitudinal studies on the use of cannabis and its effect on youth who started smoking between the ages of 12 and 18.  (Adolescents.)  In the 1980’s I was teaching professionals about the difference between the effect of alcohol on the brains of children, adolescents, and adults.  We taught that an adult takes 10 years to be come physically addicted to alcohol.  A youth takes 10 months.  A child takes 10 weeks.  This is a time when the brain is under development.  The brain is not fully developed until a person is between 21 and 25.  Dr. Gobbi told us that both the emotional and the rational parts of the brain are still under development.  All drugs interfere with normal development.  Youth are more vulnerable to addiction.  Increasingly studies make the link between cannabis in adolescence and an increase in psychotic episodes, risk of depression, anti-social behaviour, and heavy use of other drugs.   Dr. Gobi said we have a moral imperative to educate our youth and all adults in society of the dangers of this drug for children and youth.

Gwendolyn Landolt from the Drug Prevention Network of Canada suggested strongly that  the current generation of judges do not take the distribution and use of marijuana seriously.  To them it is a very minor offence.  She calls it an ideology of permissiveness about drug use.  She challenges the statement that prohibition doesn’t work.  We have the largest percentage of our children in the world of any country smoking pot because it is too easy to get and the consequences for dealing it are non-existent.  She supports mandatory minimums. 

She also supports a huge expansion of the drug courts in Canada.  Bill C-10 allows an addict to take a detox and rehabilitation program instead of a mandatory minimum but this option is not available to the majority of Canadians.  We have only 6 drug courts in Canada.  The have thousands in the United States.  Many witnesses called for much greater availability of drug courts including right in First Nations Communities.

Rebecca Jesseman, Research and Policy Advisor for the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, and Heather Clark, youth advisor, told us they do not support mandatory minimums because they have not been able to find any evidence that they work.  The best practices among youth to prevent involvement in drug use are health and social interventions to build skills, improve family relationships, and build a sense of belonging in community.  These are both most effective and most cost-effective. C-10 needs to add health and social services to the budget.  Drug testing and zero tolerance have not proven to be effective strategies.

A panel from First Nations groups gave us their perspective.  Ron Evans, Chief of Norway House Cree Nation, spoke for Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, Inc. with Michael Anderson, his Natural Resources Secretariat, Research Director.  Scott Wheildon, Criminal Law Counsel, spoke for Legal Services Board of Nunavut. 

We have seen this picture painted before several times.  The country is vast and communities are small and isolated with few resources.  The whole court has to fly into the community and often it is cancelled for weather.  There is so much dysfunction in some of these communities that everyone is a victim and everyone is an offender.  They have issues relating to health, poverty, lack of educational opportunities, addictions, family violence, and sexual abuse and incest.  To try to use a tough on crime and mandatory minimum approach will simply clog up the system and throw the whole community into institutional settings, in the South – since there are no facilities in the North.

Chief Ron Evans told us we are committed to community safety.  To achieve this in our communities we need opportunities for reconciliation between the victim and the offender and the community as a whole because when one is harmed, all are harmed.  Sentencing circles and elder counseling are more effective than sending our children to jail in the South.  A Recividism study showed that out of 500 cases of people diverted into sentencing circles vs a control group who were not, less than half of the number who reoffended in the control group reoffended.  A 50% reduction in recividism.  We need to build on this success.  Chief Evans asked for a Gladue-style exemption for First Nations from the mandatory minimums so that they could continue this work.

There is terrible damage to the family and the community when they are separated.  More women and more youth and more aboriginals are incarcerated . This puts more children in foster care.  It would be much better to address the health, education, poverty and housing issues and less expensive.

Scott Wheildon, Nunavut Legal Aid, spoke passionately about the need for in-house addictions treatment and other preventive services.  In the communities he serves there is six time the crime rate of the national average.  It has doubled since Nunavut was created.  98% of inmates are Inuit.  Baffin Correctional Centre has inmates sleeping on the floor and the new 45 beds in Rankin will be full the day the door opens.  He said, “We are bracing for the impact of Bill C-10.”  There is a 33% vacancy rate for social workers.  Most are first year grads with no training for these circumstances and they hardly last a year.

Dr. Darryl Plecas, Director, Centre for Criminal Justice Research, University of the Fraser Valley, has done much research in the area of drugs.  He spoke to a subject which came up over and over – our 6 pot plants.  He sided with the police and the prosecutors that the police are far too busy to be bothered trying to find let alone prosecute for six pot plants.  Their focus is organized crime.  The size of the problem is huge.  The police can only investigate 3 % of the grow-ops out there.  He was very unhappy with the statistics that only 11 % of cases get charges laid and of those, only 20% go to prison. 

Organized crime is any group of people who purchase or produce enough of a banned substance to require to form a distribution network to distribute it.  Usually they are dealing with 100 plus pot plants.  Often the networks are international in scope, but the gangs live and operate here.  Some believe they do because of our lenient justice system.  Canada now has a large export industry in both Cannabis and chemical drugs like ecstasy.  We’re feeding the world these drugs.  Even the lowest guy on the totem poll is in a hierarchy in organized crime.  Organized crime is

The arguments:

Mandatory Minimums - Cons	Mandatory Minimums - Pros
Fear that non-violent first offenders or medical users will get caught in web. Teach youth to be criminals in jail.	Focused on putting people involved in organized crime in jail
Catches the low levels of the org. crime hierarchy	Might deter these early starters from continuing on that path.
Police are targeting organized crime and want the big guys, but if they strike out they charge the ones they do catch – Senator Baker pointed to cases where 12 people were each charged with passing one pill to an undercover officer.	Police don’t normally target such small users.  The focus on priority is to stop these drug wars and gang shootings going on in the streets of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and Toronto.  They need tools.
We would do better if we legalized drugs.  We could control availability, quality, and price and take source of income away from org. crime.  Use treatment courts instead. (I have not yet heard anyone present this case.)	We are doing something wrong.  Our drug problem is getting worse.  Our lenience is not working.  A recidivist with 15 charges still doesn’t get jail time. We have to stiffen the penalties even if a few go through the cracks.
In today’s world, once you have a criminal record you will live with it for the rest of your life.  The stigmatization may ensure a person is dysfunctional and non-contributing to society for life.	Because our culture is addicted to drugs, we need to create serious consequences in order to prevent more people from making those bad choices.

Police Chief MacKnight told us that the police believe that prevention is the most important strategy to deal with our problems.  It should be a regular part of every school curriculum.  There needs to be a balanced approach to these problems:  prevention, education, enforcement of order, counseling and other services, consequences for breaking the law, and rehabilitation and reintegration.  Approaches need to be both lawful and ethical, serve the needs of all, and find a balance between the rights and responsibilities of the individual and the needs of society for safety and security.  A society should be evidence based.  That is why their brief did not specifically support or not support mandatory minimums.  They will work with the law they are given by the politicians.

When asked whether these minimums would be a deterrent, he replied that while there is no statistical evidence they are, he could report anecdotally that people they talk to in the streets do fear going to jail and he believes that would act to avoid that if possible.

Conclusion

This bill C-10 is an attempt to put a finger in the dyke to stop the huge societal problem that we have with poverty, addictions, and mental health issues from swamping us as a society.  Although some aspects of it are likely necessary, it is no longer acceptable to simply throw people in jail who are the scapegoats for the problems in our society.  We must dramatically increase our funding and support for prevention and healing work, both in First Nations Communities and in our cities and southern rural communities.  The drug problem is everywhere. 

Each community must have some say in which approach is likely to be most effective in that community.  Leaders in all aspects of the community need to be educating themselves as to the full facts and issues involved, and be participating in developing a plan towards moving toward health in their own area.  Mandatory Minimums are too blunt an instrument and must be mitigated by judicial discretion through sentencing circles, drug courts and treatment options, and mental health courts with suitable treatment options. 

We need to set some concrete goals in Canada to reduce drug use of all types, and have widespread discussion on the best approach to doing that.  For every type of community the answers may be different.