Abstract
The production, sale and consumption of cannabis are being fully legalized in Canada. In the United States, while much of the population lives in states where legalization is a fact, the cannabis trade remains criminalized at the federal level. The Trump administration has in fact made clear that it strongly disagrees with what liberalization has taken place, though it has been unwilling to challenge states’ policies. This chapter examines the impact of Canada’s decision on the relationship between the two countries. The analysis focuses on the public health and public safety effects that legalization in Canada is likely to have on the United States and shows them to be at worst mildly negative in character and largely irrelevant in scale. We nonetheless conclude that the current administration could well see a significant political advantage in adopting an aggressive stand against Canada, precisely because it is politically powerless to challenge the liberalization that is quickly gaining ground domestically.
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Notes
- 1.
Article 31 of law 14.294 from November 11, 1974.
- 2.
We include West Virginia, where medical cannabis will be legal at some point in 2019.
- 3.
The Cole memo barely rephrases the argument: “The Department is … committed to using its limited investigative and prosecutorial resources to address the most significant threats in the most effective, consistent and rational way.”
- 4.
Which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime calls “ecstasy-type” drugs.
- 5.
The UNODC and most law-enforcement agencies use “terrorist organizations” instead of our “violent political organizations.” We do not, as the basis for such a descriptive inference is unclear. We understand terrorism to be the use violence against civilians for psychological effect. From that standpoint, the Allies during World World II, the United States in Vietnam, and more recently the FARC in Colombia and the Syrian government in Aleppo made extensive use of terrorist tactics, but such use certainly does not give use a useful picture of their nature.
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Daudelin, J., Jones, P. (2019). Drug Policy and Canada–US Relations: The Evidence and Its (Ir)relevance. In: Carment, D., Sands, C. (eds) Canada–US Relations. Canada and International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05036-8_11
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