This past Saturday night, I had the pleasure of spending a few hours amongst the shouting drunkards, the thrown ’bows, and the anonymous, groping fingers that make up so much of the Aberdeen crowd. Surrounded by approximately 250 Kingston, Toronto and OPP police officers, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people openly taunted the law by drinking alcohol in public or smoking weed. And yet the general feeling then, and in much of the coverage that followed, was that something was missing.
Sure, a vehicle was flipped, says the Whig-Standard, but, “even then, it was only a 12-foot sailboat.” The heart seems to have gone out of Homecoming at Aberdeen; for me, that heart was the visibility of one Don Rogers.
For those who don’t recognize the name, Don Rogers is a former Kingston city councillor, a member of the Canadian Action Party, and the man who, at the Aberdeen Street party last year, carried a sign admonishing police to “enforce our liquor laws.” Rogers made an appearance in the Ghetto on Saturday night, sans sign, but I didn’t see him and missed last year’s zeal.
It’s easy to laugh at the impracticality of his message, but I have to sympathise with the sentiment behind it. The police on Aberdeen are put in an impossible situation: there are too many people drinking in public for them all to be written up, and there are far more pressing matters anyway. What results is a seemingly arbitrary and ineffectual enforcement of the law that is deeply corrosive to the general respect of our legal institutions.
This is the situation Canada is currently facing with regard to the prohibition against marijuana, and unlike the situation on Aberdeen Street, it’s getting worse each year. 4.5 million Canadians used marijuana in 2004, according to Statistics Canada—roughly 14 per cent of the population, and up from 3 million in 2002. The number of people involved in growing operations in B.C. alone has been estimated at over 150,000.
What effect does the criminalization of so many Canadians have for law and order in Canada? Legislatively, it has little impact, as pot smoking in this country is an open secret. Its real harm comes from the vain attempts to enforce the law, which leave many Canadians behind bars and scratching their heads. Though pot-smokers tend to justify their habit by claiming it’s less harmful than alcohol, its stigma pits smokers against authority by forcing them to lie. The hypocrisy of the situation is well known: how many students have lied to their parents about smoking pot, only to later discover their parents did it too?
I doubt Don Rogers will join me in the park for a glass of wine or a joint, but all the same, I’ll be toasting him and the spirit of law and order.
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