Canada Moving to Legalize Marijuana

From today’s Washington Post:

Has this war on marijuana worked?

“No, it hasn’t,” said Clive Weighill, chief of the Saskatoon police force, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and a veteran of the August raids.

Times, however, are beginning to change in Canada.

The new Liberal government has promised to act quickly to legalize marijuana for general use, which would make Canada the first Group of 20 country to end cannabis prohibition on a national level….

“Our system is badly, badly flawed,” said Eugene Oscapella, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and a longtime advocate for legalization. “I keep asking myself a question that I have been asking for 30 years: ‘Could we have done a worse job if we tried? Could we have found a way to create more dysfunction than we managed to create?’ ”

Politicians in this country don’t like this subject. I think Hillary Clinton’s latest position is that medicial marijuana ought to be studied or something. The success of the marijuana legalization movement here has come by referendum thus far. Looks like California voters will approve it in 2016. In the meantime, dysfunction continues all over.

Related Cato work here and here.