CANADA'S LAWS GOING TO POT

[Virgil]

http://www.mapinc.org/newstcl/v08/n521/a13.html?176
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CANADA'S LAWS GOING TO POT

They fought the law and the ... law lost.

In fact, Canada's petty, nanny-state prohibition on simple marijuana possession has been repeatedly revealed as either non-existent or as murky as well --used bong water.

Except, you'd never know it as the charges continue to be laid and judicial resources go up in smoke.

Since the statute criminalizing possession was ruled constitutionally invalid after an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in 2000, a score of charges in that province, P.E.I., Nova Scotia and B.C. have been tossed out for lack of any clearly valid law.

Prosecutors' wrists have even been slapped by judges for pushing through charges that in other provinces have been deemed moot. Tens of thousands of the cases were dismissed in Ontario until and even after October 2003, when that province's appellate court supposedly reinstated the prohibition.

But there's doubt over the power of the court to re-validate a law that's been struck out of the legal system. And there's doubt about the validity of the medical marijuana regulations issued by the Privy Council, when this is the court-declared job of Parliament.

In the meantime, defendants using case law challenging its constitutional validity have since been winning in court, as recently as last month in Prince Rupert, B.C. A case was withdrawn in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., in February by a judge five months after a ruling in Oshawa stated "there is no offence known to law."

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