Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. With respect, I do not support the NDP amendment.
Mr. Speaker, I wonder what your earliest memory is. I asked my colleagues and their memories were of eating ice cream for the first time, playing in a sandbox and reaching for the sky while swinging. Mine is of a dark, wet night, hitting my head on the back of a red Valiant seat, a police officer rolling down the window and then touching my forehead, an x-ray machine, a bandage, and my mother crying. I was four and we had been in a drunk-driving accident.
Today, most Canadians understand that impaired driving threatens the lives of innocent road users and that it is a criminal offence that carries significant penalties. However, what about drivers who are under the influence of cannabis or other drugs? Stoned drivers are not safe drivers as drug use affects both perception and responses. Therefore, before I tackle the main thrust of this bill, namely, stronger drug laws to reduce gang violence, I want to address drug-impaired driving and why penalties for drug dealing with violence, running a large grow-op or trafficking are important.
A British medical journal study of over 10,000 fatal car crashes showed that drivers who tested positive for marijuana were more than three times as likely to be responsible for a deadly accident. A New Zealand study showed that habitual marijuana users were nine and a half times more likely to be involved in car accidents, showing that both acute and chronic drug use can alter perception in crashes. The World Health Organization reports that cannabis impairs cognitive development and psychomotor performance in a wide variety of tasks, including divided attention, motor coordination and operative tasks of many types.
Human performance on complex machinery can be impaired for as long as 24 hours after smoking as little as 20 milligrams of THC in cannabis. Drug-impaired driving, like drunk driving, shows a woeful disregard for human life. Data provided by Mothers Against Drunk Driving showed that in 2006 impaired driving in Canada by drugs other than alcohol resulted in over 1,200 fatalities.
In 2000 Canadian police departments reported a total of almost 88,000 drug offences. Drug use is widespread in our society and so is the practice of hotboxing or smoking marijuana in an enclosed space such as a car or small room in order to maximize the effect. Youths to professionals hotbox on the way to school and to the office. What would happen if cannabis penalties were reduced? One research study showed that 2.5% of fatal crashes were attributable to marijuana compared to nearly 29% attributable to the legal drug of alcohol.
There is also a relationship among alcohol, drugs and violence. A joint Canada-U.S. study, DAVI or drugs, alcohol and violence international, provides important evidence about the relationship in Montreal and Toronto. Over 900 male students from grades 9 to 12, who were school dropouts and young offenders, were interviewed. Almost 19% of boys in Montreal and 15% in Toronto had brought a gun to school.
This relationship between drugs and violence continues beyond school days. Gangs employ violence to control and expand drug distribution activities and use violence to ensure that members adhere to the gangs' codes of conduct. In November 2004 a 19-year-old gang member from Fort Worth, Texas, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for fatally shooting a childhood friend who wanted to leave the gang.
Increased gang violence in Vancouver and other Canadians cities has direct ties to the drug cartel wars of Mexico where more than 7,000 have died in the last two years. Almost all cocaine comes via Mexico, the centre for South American producers. Canadian-based organized crime groups buy the drug either directly from the cartels in Mexico or from middlemen in American cities. When the supply of cocaine is affected by crackdowns in Mexico or the United States, the price goes up. There is competition for the remaining drugs in Canada.
A 2009 Angus Reid Strategies poll shows that Canadians are supportive of introducing tougher laws to deal with an apparent surge in gang activity. The survey showed that 45% of Canadian adults say that their country has a national gang problem. At least 76% support tougher legislation to deal with gang-related crime and 76% support a proposal to send marijuana growers and dealers to jail.
This is the important part. However, almost 90% endorse a national drug prevention campaign. Only 50% support legalizing marijuana and 51% want to keep harm reduction programs such as supervised injection sights.
Even tolerant Holland is considering stiffer drug penalties to reduce gang violence. The nation's 700-plus coffee shops where customers can buy cannabis or hashish without fear of arrest attract tourists who pay more than $300 million Euros in tax annually. Police believe some coffee shops are fronts for organized crime. The worst of the violence, however, takes place in the cannabis growing industry where gangs prey on novices who think they can make easy money by growing marijuana. Since there is so much money and violence involved, Holland's police commissioner responsible for cannabis calls it a danger to Dutch society.
I believe that strong drug laws are part of what is needed to fight gang violence, but crime prevention initiatives and the proper funding of law enforcement agencies are equally important and this is where the government is failing Canadians. I believe that we need to carefully look at the evidence of what has and has not worked in the United States as well as other jurisdictions. We must ask ourselves whether we want to turn Canadian correctional institutions and penitentiaries into U.S.-style inmate warehouses and whether longer sentences will have the desired deterrent effect, or whether those given longer sentences will be more likely to go back to crime.
A strength of the bill is the initiative with regard to drug treatment courts. They are part of the solution. Evaluations consistently show that drug treatment courts effectively reduce recidivism and underlying addiction problems of offenders. The courts provide closer comprehensive supervision and more frequent drug testing and monitoring during the program than other forms of community supervision. It costs about $8,000 per year to provide substance abuse treatment to a Toronto drug treatment court participant and $45,000 to incarcerate the same individual for one year.
Canada has always implemented and must continue to implement a national strategy that aims to strike a balance between reducing the black market supply of illegal drugs and reducing demand. The first component emphasizes the fight against drug crimes by the criminal justice system while the second focuses on prevention and public awareness of the negative effects of drug use.
In closing, I want to draw attention to the fact that youth at risk of joining gangs tend to be from groups, that suffer from the greatest inequality, who are using drugs and who are already involved in serious crime. Bill C-15 addresses deterrence and punishment. When might we see legislation targeted at prevention? Public Safety Canada itself recommends targeted, integrated and evidence-based community solutions to reduce and prevent the proliferation of gangs, drugs and gun violence.