B.C. Professor Claims Marijuana Facts Skewed By Police, Media For Years

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University of Victoria professor Susan Boyd, PhD, believes Canadians have received inaccurate information on marijuana policy for many years. Her findings will be revealed in an upcoming book.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Dr. Boyd, a professor at UVic’s Faculty of Human and Social Development, linked Canada’s harsh marijuana laws to skewed messages presented by the media and police about those who supply the underground market.

“We can see from our drug-use statistics that Canadians use marijuana and a small percentage of people use it regularly. So one way to continue with the drug enforcement law-and-order mandate is to talk about the dangerousness of the growers, and that seems to have created some headway.”

In her forthcoming book, called ‘Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media and Justice,’ the professor reviews 2,500 articles published by four major newspapers in British Columbia between 1995 and 2009.

The book highlights the inaccuracies and exaggerations made by the media about the underground industry, grow-ops and connections to gangs.

Dr. Boyd claims that politicians and police were complicit in the misrepresentation of facts. In some cases, studies were withheld by the government, including a 2011 Justice Department study that found only 5% of grow-ops had links to organized crime.

“This study wasn’t released by our federal government, and you could see why.”

Canada, which has long been thought of as a liberal-minded country, revised its marijuana laws in 2012 to increase penalties for growers and traffickers, a move that Dr. Boyd sees as contrary to the rest of the world.

“This new law and our revived war on drugs in Canada is so contrary to what’s going on around the world. It seemed like Canada was veering towards a very punitive model while the rest of the world was taking a closer look at mandatory minimums and abandoning them.”

Under a controversial bill (Bill C-10) that came into effect November 2012, the federal government introduced mandatory minimums for those caught growing as few as six plants.

During Senate hearings, opponents argued that the sentences were unduly harsh on drug offenders. Bill C-10, they pointed out, assigns longer mandatory sentences to someone caught growing 201 marijuana plants than someone who sexually assaults a toddler.

Now, with the government retracting the right to cultivate medical marijuana at home, come April, Canadians with medical marijuana prescriptions could face mandatory jail time for continuing to produce their own plants.

Source Leaf Science