'We're not ready': York's Jolliffe questions safety of pot legalization

Impaired crashes in Colorado and Washington have skyrocketed

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 2, 2018
By Jeremy Grimaldi

If the number of impaired driving charges in York Region have risen 13 per cent between 2014 and 2017, what's going to happen to them when pot is legalized in Canada?

York police Chief Eric Jolliffe believes they could go up, way up.

Armed with statistics from Colorado and Washington, two states that legalized marijuana in 2012, he indicated that by 2014 numbers of drivers under the influence of cannabis rose 45 per cent.

Potentially even more impactful are the numbers showing that in states where cannabis has been legalized“ impaired by drugs is overtaking impaired by alcohol, currently the biggest criminal killer of people across Canada.

One report by the Denver Post newspaper indicated those who tested positive for marijuana use in fatal crashes rose 115 per cent, from 47 in 2013 to 115 in 2016.

"When you are normalizing it," he said, "that creates a risk that we have to mitigate."

Besides sharing the numbers with the public, Chief Jolliffe believes it's important to highlight the cost of this mitigation to the force.

Because if the government won't pay for it, York Region residents might have to.

In a bold move, the first of any major police force in Canada, York police have listed exactly how much they expect the new legislation that will legalize marijuana throughout Canada on July 1, 2018, will cost: $20.7 million to train their officers and purchase new equipment

That includes $7.2 million training drug recognition officers and field sobriety training.

"We're hoping the folks that look after the purse strings are listening," he said, explaining how number crunchers at the service have been studying the effects elsewhere over the past five months.

One example of how far the service needs to update itself over the next six months is the number of Drug Recognition Experts it has currently, 13, and how many it will need to cover the region, 40.

Training for these officers, which is not available in Canada, runs the force $17,000.

Jolliffe insists achieving this before July 1 will be near impossible, if not completely so.

The service further insists that it needs to train half of its 700 uniformed officers in alcohol roadside testing, called Standard Field Sobriety Tests.

Currently there have been only 49 trained.

However, these are just some, in a long list of concerns Jolliffe harbours about legalization and resulting public safety

As Bill C-45, the legislation intending to update the controlled substances act and C-46, the act amending the criminal code, wind their way through committee and second reading stages, there are a slew of unanswered questions about policing legal drugs.

For example, he says there is currently a provision in the legislation that states police, if they confiscate marijuana, will have to maintain and continue to grow the marijuana, raising questions about whether the force will have to outsource a grow-op to help out.

Questions also remain about swabs police are expecting to use on roadside to identify those ingesting pot and driving

"The government has yet to approve what that will be," Jolliffe said, explaining that currently the plan is to test whether people have been using and driving with a swab, before escorting suspects back to police stations for blood tests. "We've been led to believe the swab won't be ready until at least the end of 2018. We won't have the tools when the legislation is passed."

The worries don't end there, the possibility that young people will have greater access to marijuana leading to further calls to police and visits to emergency rooms also lingers.

Residents will be allowed to keep up to four plants and an unlimited amount of dried cannabis in their homes

In Colorado, twice as many kids visited the Children's Hospital emergency room in 2014 and 2015 as did in the years before legalization.

Calls to poison control increased five-fold.

There are also doubts in policing circles about the government's suggestions that selling marijuana legally will result in the end to Canada's black market.

Chief Jolliffe harkens back to when the government began building casinos in the1990s, some experts mistakenly suggesting they will stamp out the black market – something we have not seen in York Region or nationally.

Dep. Chief Thomas Carrique wonders if legal marijuana does impact organized crime,  currently estimated at $6-7 billion income across Canada, what other crimes might take its place?

"They will need to diversify their portfolio somehow," he said.

As for whether Jolliffe sees any potential for marijuana legalization he shakes his head no.

"I have seen the effects of alcohol on this community," he said. "I wish I could be more optimistic."

Although many of the questions asked to Public Safety Canada and the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services went unanswered, both did release statements.

In the lead up to legalization, Canada announced up to $274 million for law enforcement across the country, according to Jean-Phillippe Levert from Public Safety Canada.

Meanwhile Ontario is hoping to add 770 field sobriety officers to its current stable of 1,500 by the end of 2019 on top of adding 60 drug recognition officers by July 1, 2018.