Toronto is safe to puff

[CyberHippie]

“Due to this uncertain and unsatisfactory state of affairs, I have recommended that our officers exercise their discretion regarding situations which involve simple possession of marihuana. Police will continue to investigate and enforce the law regarding marihuana according to established procedures, but will not lay charges of simple possession.”

http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Story/20030605-017/page.asp

[bouche]

I guess Ottawa's chief will have to follow suit shortly....go CHIEFS!

[Chewie]

Police-Marijuana-Update (adds Toronto chief reaction)

INDEX: Justice, Health, Social

TORONTO -- Ontario police are being advised not to lay charges for simple possession of under 30 grams of marijuana.

The directive comes from the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.

It echoes what Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino has told his officers.

They're the first major police force and provincial association to take such a stand.

Fantino says he's frustrated by the lack of direction on the issue.

He says police are left without a clear direction on how to enforce the recent legislation tabled by government.

Officers are being told to process people found in possession of marijuana, then keep the incident on record.

Charges could be laid later when the law is clarified by either the courts or the federal government.

(CP, CFRB-s)

---

JMG

[stoned free]

nice! good for fantino

[SteeltownSon]

I think that this is a very mature stand that Cheif Fantino along with the cheifs association is taking. For once the police force is taking the side of the population as opposed to bending to the will of the government. This stand by the cheifs could be the last little hurdle this legislation needs to put it over the top and into law.

Kudos Cheif Fantino

[stoned free]

fantino jus wants to get high like the rest of us!

[SteeltownSon]

Hey if he wants to smoke then let him smoke lol. The better for the rest of us.

[Fuckholes]

Indeed.

[MarcO]

Rex Murphy..... you gotta love Rex Murphy...

Pot PR goes up in smoke

By REX MURPHY

Saturday, May 31, 2003 - Page A21

It's ancient history -- possibly before the Cheers era, definitely before Friends -- but there was a time, and it lasted for a long while, when Kraft Dinner was 17 cents a package. And cigarettes were 40 cents for a deck of 20. Kraft Dinner and smokes for little more than half a buck. If we'd had good weather, and of course we didn't -- I summon these reveries from long ago Newfoundland -- it would have been paradise. A good, fat, fresh codfish could be had from the boat for a dime, but I digress.

Those times are no more. Cigarettes now are almost as expensive as a similar volume of platinum, and of the two I am not certain which is more acceptable to smoke. And Kraft Dinner can be bought at certain convenience stores in the city of Toronto for a princely $1.50, a price nearly nine times the earlier one.

Kraft Dinner has maintained its cachet. Packaged pasta has prevailed, where nicotine and its sibling tars, so rancorously and at such cost to the Canadian social fabric, have gone the way of anathema.

In fact, Kraft Dinner revolves in that all but unobtainable orbit of the Tim Horton doughnut and the A & W Teen Burger. It is one of that great trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian cultural icons. Hamburgers, macaroni and doughnuts -- Canada, this is your nation.

In passing I must note that it is my personal view that the Kraft Dinner we get nowadays, despite the urgent assurances on the package, is not the "classic" of old. The pasta is smaller, and the powdered cheddar in a sack (which, when blended with butter and milk is used to pave over the macaroni), is less thick, less intimate with the little elbows than it used to be. A definite fall-off in my view.

I've summoned these reveries, not out of cloying nostalgia, or in obedience to the dread mantra that hails everything from "the good old days" as infallibly superior to an ever-specious present. Not at all.

Rather, it was all the talk of pot on Parliament Hill, all that murky doublespeak of "decriminalizing," while insisting pot was still illegal. The weary contortions of the Liberals trying to look really liberal -- going soft on weed is the very amaranth of liberalism -- while not surrendering their equally precious commitment to the nation's health, and of course the well-being of the children.

The doublespeak didn't greatly antagonize. Put reefer and Parliament in the same sentence, and linguistic contortions cannot be far behind. Nor did the hypocrisy of a government that has been fundamentalist on one mode of inhaling seeking to add parliamentary respectability to another mode, at least equally obnoxious, twice as smelly, and real hell on the carpet. What really focused my attention during the pot debate, if focus may be allowed on such a topic, wasn't the justice side of the argument, but its health corollary. It was the announcement by Health Minister Anne McLellan that her department was allocating $245-million -- please stare at that figure -- to advertise the dangers of smoking the pot that her colleagues were by implication proclaiming innocuous.

There was a time when $1-million was thought to be an immense amount of money. But here is a government, on one of its off days, proposing as a side bar, as a mere sputtering afterthought, to toss 245 million dollars, 245 million, to blunt the portended impact of some of its own most progressive legislation. A quarter of a billion dollars. Enough for 24½ Rolling Stones SARS-relief concerts.

When did money cease to mean anything? When did expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars, merely to deflect the impact of another government program, become so insanely trivial that the amount at stake barely crawled into some newscasts? When did they, meaning the politicians, or the citizenry, become so numb, dare I say narcotized, to such vast expenditures?

Was it the estimated price of almost one billion dollars, one thousand million, to construct a useless list of the country's firearms? Was it the other billion dollars that went sluicing through Human Resources and Development Canada? The rhetorical question that screams to be asked is: What are they smoking?

I forebear to explore beyond to ask the other blatant question: Does anyone, anyone at all, anywhere, believe that money spent by the government in pursuit of "public service messaging" ever rattled the opinion of anyone whose sentience was greater than a stone's?

Hear that sound: It's a quarter of a billion dollars whistling its way to nullity. And so I thought of the days when even 17 cents could supply nourishment and comfort, and those ever-so-long-ago days when a pittance was really a pittance, instead of, as now, a stack of bullion that would make Croesus drool.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.

[1979]

This could be another tactik to hold down people. Police will have it on record and use that instance or instances to track you down and find out what you are doing a month later - Whatch out folks - Or as a drunk frenchman would say - Ohn guarde! Oh sir I see that you had three other cases prior to this check up - Please step out of the car - You don't mind if we take a look in do ya -

RIGHTT!

[secondtube]

sorry keysman, they still can't change our rights....

If someone says to me, i see you were busted with a pill of E on July 6, 2000, pleez step out of your car, I'll say NO, my father in law is an attorny, and has told me he would ring my neck if I needlessly give away my rights in which our forfathers faught for....

Usually that will have the cop think for a second....

NEVER GIVE UP YOUR RIGHTS......NEVER!!

[paisley]

I guess I'll finally try some of that pot stuff

[1979]

RIGHT ON