Posted on 06/03/2003 6:50:15 AM PDT by doc30
Last Jan. 18, police in New Glasgow, N.S., made a major bust. They managed to infiltrate Dooly's Billiard Room, where they observed several patrons committing illegal acts. Among those charged were barmaid Candace Mason, 21, and manager Terra MacLean, who were permitting customers to flagrantly violate the law.
In court, one of the constables told the judge that he had seen four people in the act of smoking cigarettes. He saw two other people sitting at a table with a lit cigarette resting in an ashtray. Not only that, there were ashtrays on every table, indicating a clear intent to flout the law. And even though the two women clearly had knowledge of illegal smoking, they had done nothing to stop it.
Under Nova Scotia's tough new Smoke-Free Places Act, that's a crime. Both smokers and the proprietors of establishments in which they're caught face fines of up to $2,000.
Forgive me for feeling slightly dizzy. But it's hard to comprehend that smoking cigarettes is about to be a bigger crime than smoking marijuana.
If the government's new pot bill passes (and God knows it should -- after SARS, mad-cow and West Nile, we need to mellow out), the fine for smoking a joint will be less in some places than the fine for lighting up a Marlboro. And no problem for the pool hall's barmaids, either. Nova Scotia's Smoke-Free Places Act stipulates that "smoke" refers only to tobacco.
"I think it's a perfect picture of just how ridiculous government is sometimes," says Halifax bar owner Victor Syperek, speaking for the anti-anti-smoking lobby.
Some of us remember when the world was a simpler place. Cigarettes were sophisticated, and everybody smoked everywhere. I loved going to university because you could puff away in class.
Pot, on the other hand, forced you to puff away in secret, or at your professor's house. The authorities would throw you in jail for weeks on end if they found an old roach in your car. This was a serious drawback. Also, smoking marijuana led to more dangerous addictions, though not the ones we were warned against. It produced an insatiable craving for jelly doughnuts from Tim Hortons, on which my friends and I frequently overdosed. Cigarettes, we found, make you thin and focused. Grass makes you fat and fuzzy.
But only the lower classes smoke cigarettes without shame any more. All the rest of us feel guilty. My friends hide it from their children, the way they used to hide it from their parents. "Please don't tell my son I smoke!" one friend begged me as she puffed away in the garage.
The new smoking bylaw is not popular in New Glasgow. "Most people don't agree with it," says Dawn Matheson, another bartender at Dooly's. "A lot of them feel it should be their own decision." New Glasgow, however, is a small and backward place. In the more enlightened centres of Halifax, Toronto and New York, the clampdown on smoking is widely applauded by the opinion elites as a sign of social progress.
Those same elites are mighty chuffed about Canada's move to decriminalize pot. They think it's just one more sign of how enlightened and progressive we are, compared to those backward yahoos across the border. They see no contradiction between decriminalizing one substance and banning a whole bunch of other ones, even though they are equally, if not more, innocuous.
In Toronto, you'll soon be fined $250 for spraying your grass with dandelion killer. (Common herbicides have already been declared illegal in Halifax and dozens of other cities because people believe they give children brain cancer.) In Halifax, people are forbidden to wear perfume or aftershave, because someone might be allergic to it. Back in Toronto, you can be fined for not sorting your garbage properly. I will say nothing of the criminalization of harmless gun owners, who are now forced to sign up with a $1-billion gun registry that has failed to halt a single gun crime.
Even the pot law isn't very liberal, since it says it's basically okay to smoke dope but even more wicked than before to grow and sell it. Try explaining this reasoning to your kids.
The government plans to square this circle with a $240-million public-education campaign about the dangers of the evil weed. (Warning: Dope can make you fat.) But it won't work. The new law will be a giant windfall for the triads, Hells Angels and the other swell folks who control the supply chain, as anyone who took Economics 101 can figure out.
The good thing is that decriminalization will free up the police and courts for more important things -- like prosecuting smokers. Back in New Glasgow, the judge let the Dooly's barmaid off the hook last week because she was just the barmaid, not the manager. The manager's trial is later this month. There are a dozen more like it in the works.
There's real freedom and there's patriotic, jingoistic freedom.
Bingo. You get it. So many of the teeming masses simply want Big Stupid Republican Government, in order to rule us their way.
We get a lot of crap from Republicrats about "limited government" - what they mean is limited to the laws and restrictions they want. Individual liberty means nothing to these pinheads.
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