I look forward to the five, Mr. Chair, and thank you for inviting us.
We are from Cannabis Culture, which has been an activist organization since 1994 that has been dedicated to overgrowing this government, which in our language is to legalize this government. I said “overgrow”, not “overthrow”.
With all due respect to the fact that this is the health committee, marijuana is one of the safest substances on earth. I walk down Sparks Street, and marijuana is safer than every product they're selling there. It's safer than candy. It's safer than eating at McDonald's. It's safer than prescription drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, all of which are commonly available on this street. It's safer than cheerleading in high school. It's safer than football in high school. It's safer than hockey in high school. You could rarely make a more safe choice than choosing to use cannabis for whatever reason.
That's why I think it's wholly unworthy of a parliament to spend a whole week discussing the health concerns of a substance that has not killed anybody while being supplied by the free market—some call it the black market—for the last 50 years. Imagine. Can you conceptualize any other product that hasn't killed anyone in 50 years? Cars kill people all the time. Alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, and foods kill people. Obesity kills people.
Of everything you do in society out there, exercising your own bodily autonomy, guaranteed to us by the Supreme Court in the Morgentaler case to control our own bodies, there are few things you could take that are not more harmful than cannabis. In fact, even government-approved water in Walkerton, Ontario killed eight people, so water is more dangerous than marijuana, realistically.
This should be at the justice committee. The reason is that I've been in 36 prisons and jails for pot. I was exiled by my own government for five years to the United States for selling seeds by mail. Can you imagine? This country was founded on agriculture and farming, yet I spent five years in jail, co-authorized by my own government, because I sent seeds to willing adults to plant plants. We've come to this. The justice committee should be looking at this because 2,400,000 Canadians have been criminalized with charges of cannabis offences since 1965.
There is nothing else in this country remotely close to 2.4 million people getting charged for doing something they love, which is growing, selling, or consuming marijuana and harming no one else. If we have organized crime in there, it's because you created it. Had you not criminalized marijuana, nobody would be handling marijuana except organized regular retailers in our usual business regime. So you're the problem. You're at fault. We've had prohibition for 93 years. I've never seen Parliament modernize or ameliorate those terrible things in any of that time.
I spent three months in Saskatoon Correctional Centre for passing one joint. I was sent to the United States for five years for sending seeds to Americans, and we have done every manner of disobedience. As I said, I've been arrested probably 27 or 28 times, and I've been jailed 36 times. I've been jailed in nine out of 10 provinces for my activism. I've seen prisons in this country. We need to get rid of this criminalization...and the legalization that everybody really wanted when we thought we were electing Mr. Trudeau and his platform...was simply the way it was brought in.
In 1923 the justice minister got up in Parliament and told the Speaker that they had added a new drug to the schedule, and that was it. There was no other discussion, nothing else. So you can legalize it in the exact same way, “Mr. Speaker, we've removed cannabis from the schedule.” That's the only legalization that's really permissible. It's the only one that's really legalization. Everything else is a recriminalization. In fact, I dare say, there are more criminal offences in the new cannabis act than there currently are in the existing legislation, so you're broadening it to include more people with more offences, and virtually everybody who needs to be legalized, all the growers in this country, all the sellers, and all the consumers, will still be criminalized under this cannabis act. Only licensed producers, a very small minority, are going to be allowed to grow marijuana. You can't possess marijuana that doesn't even come from a licensed producer or some Ontario government monopoly, Quebec government monopoly, or New Brunswick government monopoly.
Before at least we were only criminalized. Now we're going to be criminalized and exploited by our own governments. We're going to be used as a cash cow, have our own culture usurped from us and handed over to a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians who probably never smoked pot in their lives, don't understand anything about these people, and don't understand anything about us. It's a total insult to about five million Canadians who adore this plant, love this plant, use this plant, consume it, sell it, grow it, and have been involved their whole lives, like I have, in this plant, and to listen to this kind of discussion....
The government that has oppressed us is going to come and be our liberators and hand it to us and dole it out like we're children. Children. We're being condescended to in the worst possible way. We're adults. We make choices. If you're concerned about children, great. Deal with that, but for most of the country who smoke marijuana, they're 18 years old to 80 years old.
Thank you, Mr. Casey. That's five minutes. I'll let my wife continue. She's going to tell you how great marijuana is.