Bill S-10 is bad for your health

Minimum mandatory sentences and victimless crime sentences have flooded the US prison system with horrible results. Pot smokers have been thrown in prison alongside violent criminals, at times freeing prisoners with violent pasts to make way for dopers unlucky enough to have been caught smoking or growing as little as a single plant or joint. While things have slowly become more enlightened since Reagan, imprisonment for victimless crimes in the US is still among the highest in the world.

With Harper pushing to duplicate the US’s reckless and tragic mandatory minimum sentences for growing marijuana, it’s heartening to see that 500 health professionals have come out for sanity by sending a letter protesting archaic Bill S-10.

The physicians, scientists and researchers, led by the Urban Health Research Initiative, a program of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, and the Canadian Public Health Association argue that the measures included in Bill S-10 are both ineffective and expensive.

“We, the undersigned, are concerned that the federal government is pursuing significant amendments to federal drug legislation, through Bill S-10, which are not scientifically grounded and which research demonstrates may actually contribute to health and social harms in our communities,” the health professionals say in the letter.

They say there is no evidence that mandatory minimum sentences will reduce drug use or deter crime, that the sentences would have a disproportionately negative impact on young people and members of Canada’s aboriginal communities, and that they would have a negative impact on public health and HIV rates.

This is why Harper wants to build new prisons. It’s not because of ‘unreported crimes’. It is because ‘victimless crimes’ are about to become big business for Conservatives.

UPDATE: Dan Gardner points out that drug use actually substantially increased after mandatory minimum sentences were introduced.