Madam Speaker, it has been long recognized by public policy that prohibitionist laws continue to fuel organized crime and other violent organizations in our society and that prohibiting drugs creates a black market that greatly inflates the value of those drugs and the profits to be made by selling them.
Governments and police agencies claim that organized crime in Canada obtains most of its funds from the illegal trade in drugs, a trade that interests organized crime only because our laws prohibiting certain drugs have created an enormously lucrative black market. Yet those same governments and police bodies refuse to acknowledge the role that prohibition plays in creating that black market.
Canada needs to look beyond its closest neighbour and come up with a comprehensive and safe marijuana policy. The U.S.-driven war on drugs is not a made in Canada solution and Canada should not be intimidated by the U.S. record. Canada should look instead to the United States as an example of a country with a disastrously failed drug policy, a policy that has failed because of its perennial reliance on prohibition.