Canada’s strong communitarian or group-oriented culture has rejected the American melting pot in favour of a multi-cultural mosaic. As a nation, Canada has as its central and historical organizing principle what Adams (1997) calls an “Old World Tory Conservatism” that sees the whole as greater than its parts and values group rights over individual rights. The conventional wisdom says that this worldview, along with the challenges presented by Canada’s harsh climate, geography and small population (especially relative to landmass), has conspired to make Canadians accepting, even demanding, of state intervention in many aspects of their lives to an extent that Americans would find deeply troubling. Furthermore, Canadians are generally characterized as more deferent to authority, respectful of law and order, and keepers of the peace. Their organic view is reflected in the identifiably Canadian approach of trying to accommodate competing interests within existing frameworks--a deeply reformist mindset.

America’s organizing principle differs significantly, making individual liberty paramount above other considerations. According to Wills (2002) a deeply embedded American worldview sees any power given to government as subtracted from the liberty of the governed.

Are Americans less protected against threats to their health than other citizens of industrial democracies? Say that is so--but are we to purchase health at the price of liberty? For that is what giving power to the government would mean, including the power to provide medical care. If government has the power to take away guns, all our liberties are gone. If the states, as lesser units of government, cede power to the central government, tyranny impends. The power to regulate businesses is a power to crush them. Increasing the size of government inevitably decreases freedom (Wills 2002:16).

These differences have led to Canadians’ acceptance of collective programs to ensure health care, restrict gun ownership, or protect culture that Americans have not. And it is these two contrasting views of the state and its role, and the attitudes that arise from them, that informs and justifies each country’s drug policy.

CANADA: MARCHING AS TO WAR

For most of the last century Canada and the U.S. both pledged their allegiance to the prohibitionist credo relying, like most industrialized countries, on the criminal law and an array of formal and informal social controls to restrict the supply of banned substances and to condemn illicit drug use--the practice and practitioner alike. In the early development of the two countries’ respective drug policies it is difficult to say which country was leader and which was led (Erickson 1992). Canada’s Opium Act of 1908 preceded the American Act to Prohibit the Importation and Use of Opium for Other than Medical Purposes of 1909. Dr. Hamilton Wright, educated in Canada, drafted the early American narcotics legislation while Charles Brent, an Episcopal bishop born and raised in Canada, organized the first of a series of important international conferences known as the Shanghai Opium Convention of 1908. Both were notable players in a highly successful international movement to criminalize the non-medical use of narcotics in most Western nations (Hagan 1991, Erickson 1992).

Drug control policies in both countries tended to be driven by their respective enforcement bureaucracies and, in the early years of each nation’s legislation, targeted immigrants and racial, especially Chinese, minorities (Giffen et al. 1991). The approach favoured by both countries was punitive, relying heavily on the criminal justice system to remedy the problem of illicit drug use, and expansive as, over the years, a growing number of substances were outlawed.