Bruce Dowbiggin
Let’s Be Blunt: Getting Into The Weed On Crime & Punishment
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There are many sacred texts in the Barrack Obama canon of progressive belief. Among the most sacred is that U.S. prisons are full of black men serving time for simple marijuana possession. This presumed truth has been taken to the mountain top by Obama acolytes from Rob Reiner to Maxine Waters to Stephen Colbert.
And hammered home by a fanatical THC lobby group that will make you regret you ever lived if you dare question Lord Obama’s wisdom. It was only awaiting the proper moment for a Democratic politician to lay the text upon the altar of Wokeism.
So no surprise that, with a midterm election spanking of DEMs in the offing a month from now, Captain Teleprompter Joe Biden announced he was declaring an amnesty for prisoners federally convicted of marijuana possession. (Justin Trudeau is still in holding pattern in Ottawa.)
You’ll be shocked (cough) by the reasons President Biden acted: His move was to “right” the racial “wrongs” that the criminal justice system has allegedly perpetrated. “While white and black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionately higher rates,” Biden announced.
The only problem with this umpteenth revision to “racism explains everything” is that it’s not true. As Manhattan Institute researcher Heather Mac Donald reports, “possessing a small amount of marijuana lands no one in federal or state prison, absent more significant criminal activity… Marijuana possession convictions are usually the result of plea bargaining down from more serious charges, whether drug trafficking or other felonies.” Fun fact: the average amount of weed in arrests in U.S. is 48 pounds.
Well, what about racism, Heather? “If all drug prisoners in U.S. state prisons were removed from the rolls, the proportion of black prisoners would not change. Violent crime and property offenses drive the black incarceration rate, not drug enforcement.” Mac Donald further shreds the racism charge that blacks are scapegoated, that they merely consume weed in equal proportions to white people.
She points out that the best indicator is treatment numbers, not survey results. Surveys exclude prisoners, street vagrants, and other individuals not tied to a stable home; school surveys exclude dropouts. Those excluded populations are precisely the ones with higher rates of drug use. Treatment numbers chart the reality.
“Blacks comprise one-third of all treatment admissions nationally for marijuana abuse, though they represent only about 13 percent of the nation’s population. Among cannabis users, blacks have a nearly 70 percent higher rate of cannabis dependence than whites (16.82 percent v. 10.01 percent)… from 2017 to 2019, the rate of treatment admissions for substance abuse disorder was nearly 58 percent higher for blacks than for whites (85.5 per 10,000 population, compared to 54.2 per 100,000).”
Yet, for a large segment of the white, brown and black population in the U.S. and Canada cannabis is still no big whoop. We’re talking marijuana here. Weed. The stuff now being marketed in your local strip mall as a cure-all for pain, depression, stress and whatever ails you. The bud of choice at a Grateful Dead concert. Cheech & Chong stoner humour of sloppy guys going, “I’m looking for Dave, man”.
The problem for these bemused Boomers who now make policy but don’t consume any more? This is not your grandpa’s marijuana. Says Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell: “The kind of marijuana that people of my generation smoked 20 years ago probably had one-fifth of the THC levels that the marijuana that’s being sold now has.
“And in some forms, the THC levels of marijuana are even higher, like in some of the oils and things. And we don’t really know a lot about what it means to crank up the active ingredient that high.”
It might not be pretty. Before he challenged the Covid-19 establishment, author Alex Berenson examined marijuana use in his book “Tell Your Children” (the original name for stoner classic film “Reefer Madness”). And he has driven the weed-as-gentle-balm crowd crazy by linking heavy use with violent behaviour.
“People with schizophrenia commit violent crime at rates far higher than healthy people— their homicide rates are about 20 times as high. Worse, they commit most of that crime while they are under the influence. Since cannabis causes paranoia—not even advocates dispute that fact—and psychosis, it is not surprising that it would drive violent crime. And in fact there are a number of good studies showing that users have significantly higher violence rates than non-users.”
(Heath Canada admits that “cannabis use increases the risk of developing mental illnesses such as psychosis or schizophrenia, especially those who start using cannabis at a young age/use cannabis frequently or almost every day/ have a personal or family history of psychosis and/or schizophrenia.”)
As for its new status as pain relief prescribed for Boomers, Berenson points out, “Marijuana is not ‘prescribed’ for anything. It can’t be, because the FDA has never approved it to treat any disease (ed. herbal medical cannabis has not gone though Health Canada’s drug review), and there is little evidence that smoked cannabis or THC extracts help any of the diseases… except pain. Physicians ‘authorize’ its use, usually after very short visits by patients who have come to them specifically to receive an authorization card… medical legalization is simply a backdoor way to protect recreational users from arrest.”
Gladwell Is not willing to go as far as linking THC products to violent crime, but he says, “I do think that when you don’t know a lot, you have to know what the parameters of the risks are… (Berenson) points us to a bunch of interesting questions, like, ‘We know there is a link between smoking marijuana for prolonged periods and an increased risk of mental illness.’
“So they’re talking about relatively prolonged use in a very specific and relatively small subset of the using population. Nonetheless, it is a real risk, and the data that we have so far does appear to support that connection.”
Ergo, more information is needed.Unfortunately, as Biden’s pandering demonstrates, data is losing out to Progressive racial politics on the marijuana issue in both Canada and the U.S. Take the anti-racism crowd, add in politicians who want no part of challenging the hip status of the drug, then season with a media too lazy to go past headlines and you have a recipe for unpredictable results. And a large number of convicts back on the street.
You can be sure, however, that the street will not be the one running by the Obama mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.
Chicago: -11 degrees C.
Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.
Kansas City: -8 degrees C.
New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).
Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.
New York -1 degree C.
Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.
For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.
Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).
Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C
Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)
As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.
The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.
For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.
Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.
Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization.
But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”
Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”
Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”
Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.
PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.
So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.
It’s a big day for the Who’s of Whoville. Mayor Augustus Maywho is now polling at 62 percent approval. Cindy Lou Who and Martha May Whovier can barely contain their trans-loving heart that finally the Pierre The Grinch is done.
Okay it’s not WhoVille. It’s Canada and it is leader Mark Carney who’s zooming in the polls against Pierre Poilievre. But it might as well be the real nation that Carney commands today. As 2025 comes to a conclusion Donald Trump seems the least of Whoville’s perils. For example:
The NDP government in B.C. has now declared that future legislation must be interpreted through the lens of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. According to Chief Bent Knee (David Eby) this means that the province cannot act independently of the progressive diktats of Sudan, Nepal, Moldova and other international titans. Having been informed of Canada’s “genocidal” behaviour by Trudeau in the Rez Graves pantomime, the UN folk will no doubt look on Canadians as worthy of punishment.
The UNDRIP menace has been around since the days when Skippy Trudeau was wielding the mace in Parliament. On June 20, 2021 the federal government passed UNDRIP into law by a vote of 210 to 118. (The Liberals, NDP and Bloc all voted in favour.) The only party that opposed it were the Conservatives. In defence of those hapless boobs none of them voting yes ever expected a province to align itself with such legislation. That’s the Canadian way. Act on conscience. Retract on self preservation.
But on the heels of Eby’s unopposed capitulation to B.C.’s many “peoples” in recent land settlements, ones that threaten the legal right to properties of home owners, the wholesale framework for governing the province now will be determined by appeal to the UN.
The Carney crew — who act as though Canada’s indigenous communities are now equal partners in Confederation— assure Canadians that judicious lawyering by government savants has everything under control, but anyone trusting the Liberals after the past decade is in need of counselling.
The B.C. conundrum plays into another of the challenges (read: disasters) faced in B.C. by the Elbows Up brigade. Namely the much-heralded memorandum of understanding on energy policy between the feds and Alberta. Canadians were assured by Ottawa that this federal government sees pipelines as a priority, and getting Alberta’s product to tidewater as an urgent infrastructure need. Carney described the MOU as if it were a love-letter to the restless West. How is he going to get pipelines through to the B.C. coast when Eby and the indigenous said it was a no-go? Trust us, said Carney.
Before you could say Wetaskiwin dark clouds gathered on the deal. Smith took it in the ear from Alberta separatists for compromising anything to the feds. Carney, meanwhile, ran into the predictable roadblock from B.C. Eby talked of maybe allowing pipelines in the future, but the ban on shipping off the province’s shoreline was verboten.
To test the resilience of the MOU the federal Conservatives (remember them?) put forward a motion to build the pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coast. Even though the motion used the same language of the MOU between Danielle Smith and Mark Carney, the Liberals and their hand maidens defeated the motion. Carney himself abstained because, hey look at that shiny object.
Immediately the Trudeaupian Deflection Shield was employed. Here’s Liberal Indigenous Service minister and proud Cree operative Mandy Gull Masty “Today’s motion that’s being put on the floor is not a no vote for the MOU. It’s a no vote against the Conservatives playing games and creating optics and wasting parliamentary time when they should be voting on things that are way more important.”
Robert Fife, the highly rated G&M scribbler who just won some big award, led the media pack, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country? Into the ground?
Let’s not forget the $1.5 billion bloviators at CBC. They, too, say the vote is a big loss for the Tories. “It risks putting them offside, what is a very top priority and frankly, was considered a big win for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.’” said Janyce McGregor. Here’s Martin Patriquin on one of the Ceeb’s endless panels. “It’s embarrassing, man. I don’t see any sort of political advantage to what happened today.”
Embarrassing? The Libs have committed to re-building gas pipelines in Ukraine, even as they stall on developing pipelines in Canada. Luckily CBC washrooms have no mirrors. And there’s always Donald Trump to deflect from the pantomimes of Canadians Laurentian debating club.
Here, CTV hair-and-teeth Scott Reid is nursing a Reuters poll that has Trump’s approval at historic lows of 36 percent. Reuters is a firm that predicted Kamala winning the presidency. Until she didn’t on Nov.4. Meanwhile Rasmussen, which correctly had Trump ahead the entire campaign, has his current approval at 44 percent while the RCP average is 43.9.
But corrupt data to make Trump seem odious is no sin in WhoVille Ottawa. Keep feeding the Karens bad data. At least Canadians have their beloved healthcare to fall back on. Or maybe their beloved MAID. A Saskatchewan woman suffering from parathyroid disease has revealed that she is considering assisted suicide, because she cannot get the surgery she needs.
“Jolene Van Alstine, from Saskatchewan, has extreme bone pain, nausea and vomiting. She requires surgery to remove a remaining parathyroid, but no surgeons in the province are able to perform the operation. In order to be referred to another province for the operation, Van Alstine must first be seen by an endocrinologist, yet no Saskatchewan endocrinologists are currently accepting new patients.
The pain has become so unbearable that she has been approved for Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide program, with the ending of her life scheduled to take place on 7 January 2026.”
Well. Happy New Year, Canada. May no one offer you MAID in the next twelve months.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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