Cannabis Law Reform in Canada: Is the "Saga of Promise, Hesitation and Retreat" Coming to an End?1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian federal government has promised legislation that will decriminalize the simple possession of cannabis by the summer of 2003. This paper will first review the socio-historical context as it pertains to the criminalization of cannabis use in Canada. Specifically, it will discuss the numerous (unsuccessful) legal and political attempts at cannabis-control reform in the past 30 years, called "the saga of promise, hesitation and retreat" by Giffen, Endicott, and Lambert (1991: 571). It will then review some distinct forces in the current cannabis law reform debate, namely a series of high-profile court cases, patterns of public opinion, and the recommendations of two federal inquiries, all of which contribute to the momentum for reform. After summarizing the diverse landscape of cannabis-control regimes in other Western countries, this paper will examine more closely the actual options that exist for cannabis decriminalization in Canada and their possible effects and implications. Specifically, making simple cannabis possession a civil offence, as suggested, would provide for both discretionary interpretations and net-widening effects in law enforcement and would, in addition, leave the cannabis supply question unresolved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".