jacob hunter

Check out the new Pot-TV morning show with Mandy Potter and Jacob Hunter.

By Matthew Burrows, Georgia Straight
About one-third of the 24 cultivators contracted to grow medicinal marijuana exclusively for the B.C. Compassion Club Society will be affected if the minority Conservative government’s Bill C-15 becomes law. The bill is seeking mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

Jacob Hunter, policy director of the Beyond Prohibition Foundation, told the Georgia Straight by phone that as a result of Senate amendments, growers who own homes can cultivate up to 200 plants and not face a mandatory minimum. “If they are renting, however, and even if they are a medicinal grower, one plant is a nine-month mandatory minimum,” he said.

Jeet-Kei Leung, communications coordinator at the society’s Commercial Drive cannabis dispensary, told the Straight “there are a dozen different ways in which this is bad news.”

Leung dismissed the Conservatives for being “stuck in the 1950s”. However, he didn’t spare the federal Liberals, who have almost unanimously followed the governing party through three readings of Bill C-15 in the House of Commons. If the House approves Senate amendments, only royal assent separates the bill from becoming law.

Groups opposing the bill claim it is more harmful then helpful

By. Britt Carlsen

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - For the first time in Canadian history, if passed, Bill C-15 proposes to apply a mandatory minimum sentence for a wide range of drug offences, even growing a single marijuana plant. Jacob Hunter of Beyond Prohibition Foundation believes that this will cause more harm than good. Hunter says we'll see more violent drug markets fueled by higher profit and characterized by a greater participation of organized crime if the bill is passed.  He added that more hardened criminals will use the mandatory minimums to justify large scale grow operations.

So what is Hunter's group proposing? He says his groups aim is a regulated, taxed and legal marketplace for cannabis. Hunter believes that prohibition is causing more dangerous effects to our society than marijuana ever could and he's not the only one. When asked about what he thought of the proposed Bill C-15 Vancouver's so-called Prince of Pot, Mark Emery, said anything that puts people in jail for drugs is going to fill prisons.

I made this image today for an article, but didn't end up using it. We had a good chuckle around the office, so I figured I would post it up here on WhyProhibition.ca

 

John Martin, a self-described criminologist, wrote in the Vancouver Sun that credible criminologists “refuse to concede that locking up criminals for lengthy periods of time had anything whatsoever to do with the plummeting crime rate south of the border”.

Plummeting crime rate? From 1980 until 2007 the US violent crime rate remained mostly steady, increasing for a period from 1988 to 1998, then returning to the levels seen throughout the 1980s. Overall from 1980 to 2007, the US violent crime rate actually increased by 5%.

The US Prison population has increased an astounding 398% from 1980 to 2007. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country, at a cost of $60 Billion dollars per year.