More reefer madness

Our neighbours to the south have given this country much that is welcome
but, along with that, have come many things talk shows and "feel your
pain" politicians, come to mind that we can do without. Now another
noxious American import has arrived to blight this country: punishing
marijuana crimes with property forfeitures.

Readers of the Citizen recently learned that in two cases, Brockville
courts confiscated a total of 335 acres of land from owners convicted of
growing and trafficking in marijuana. The courts used new forfeiture laws
that allow them to seize land and property when it has been modified for
use in committing a crime.

The justice system has tried to paint this expansion of its arsenal as an
effective way to make landowners think twice about growing marijuana
themselves or taking cash from others in exchange for an unused corner of
their land. Such an expansion may seem reasonable at first glance. But the
United States is already far down this road and its experience shows
exactly what forfeitures will accomplish: less justice but not fewer drugs.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's "zero tolerance" policy spawned state and
federal forfeiture powers of unparalleled ferocity, including the ability
to seize property without charging the owner with a crime or even having to
prove the owner knew drugs were on the property. Farms have been taken from
owners found growing just a few marijuana plants. Cars, boats, and houses
are regularly seized and sold, even from owners unaware that the person to
whom they had lent a car or rented a room possessed marijuana.

To be sure, the government hasn't always got its way: After a long legal
battle, a paraplegic who smoked marijuana to relieve muscle spasms managed
to keep the house he shares with his widowed mother.

But despite the occasional setback in the courts, American state and
federal governments have benefitted handsomely from forfeiture. The total
take from 1982 to 1994 on property seized for marijuana crimes alone was
over $2 billion. Since American police forces often get to keep a share of
the seized assets, the danger of corruption is very real. Also, when assets
are frozen prior to trial, as they often are, defendants are unable to
afford a defence and the presumption of innocence is thus abandoned. In a
surprising number of American cases in which property is forfeited, there
never is a conviction. It has become something of a protection racket: Let
us keep your stuff, and we won't put you away.

Forfeiture is now a thriving, if brutal American cottage industry. But what
has it done to marijuana use and production? Cannabis, that symbol of 1960s
rebelliousness, is enjoying something of a renaissance in the U.S. Teenage
use, by some estimates, has doubled in the nineties. American growers of
marijuana are estimated to number between one and three million, of whom
100,000 to 200,000 are commercial farmers.

But forfeiture is worse than merely useless. It often grossly violates the
basic principle of justice that punishment must be proportional to the
crime. When a man loses his farm and livelihood for growing a few marijuana
plants, the excess punishment is, in Jeremy Bentham's words, "just so much
misery run to waste." This injustice adds nothing to the safety of society.
Who is more dangerous: The man quietly growing a common weed on his rural
property. Or the same man, now declared a convict, who suddenly finds
himself penniless, homeless, and desperate?

Forfeiture laws offer us little but failed intentions, injustice and
useless ruin. And yet this is what the Canadian war on drugs is now
preparing to inflict on this nation.