Maybe he should concentrate on real crime

Not that it was unexpected, but Stephen Harper has a plan to combat the "scourge" of drugs.

Maybe he should ask the US what their drug war costs every year - how many hundreds of billions was that again? I always forget. "Mandatory minimums" are not what we need with regards to drugs. If you want to keep marijuana out of the hands of kids, regulate it and sell it only to adults. And if you want to keep it out of the hands of adults, you have no respect for individual choice, anyway, so why not criminalize alcohol, too? The government really has no business deciding what adults do with their own time unless they are harming others in doing so.

If he wanted to introduce a law and order agenda, he should be talking about actual crime, with a perpetrator and a victim, not victimless "crimes" like smoking marijuana - which nearly every Canadian after a certain generation has done, and most people think should be legal anyway. Or better yet, he could propose alternative solutions to drugs, as opposed to just pouring more resources into a futile drug war. The best way to combat organized crime is to cut off their revenue - and the best way to do that is to make it legal, and if it's potentially dangerous, regulate the hell out of it to keep it controlled and, most importantly, out of the hands of minors, who are able to obtain it ridiculously easily at the moment. Prohibition was the greatest gift ever given to organized crime; the prohibition of alcohol allowed them to gain a monopoly on it and sell it illegally, funding their operations. Likewise, decriminalizing alcohol was a huge blow, as they lost a major source of revenue. And to return to an earlier point, when alcohol was illegal, there were no age caps - kids could buy it just as easily as adults, because the gangsters didn't much care who they were selling it to. The single best way to keep drugs out of the hands of children - and respecting the choices of adults - and combating organized crime is legalization and regulation, not wasting money and police resources on a useless, harmful and futile war against drugs.