Canuckistani

Further gutting of the Canadian middle class. Import huge numbers of people (250,000 immigrants, 400,000 temp workers) every year to drive wages down, while we ship the jobs overseas. Guess the top 20% will be content to be rulers of a third world country.

Pot is easier for kids to access than booze, exactly because pot is illegal and dealers don't check for ID. If prohibition worked, I'd be all for outlawing booze and smokes. They cause a lot of harm. But, it doesn't work, people still get their drugs, just in a less safe way. As for the medical coverage argument - far cheaper to provide treatment than to deal with the fallout of of not providing it. And with pot, the costs are insignificant, as a BC study showed - all of the social costs associated with pot were for enforcement. Tobacco, otoh, has very high medical costs to society.

I sure hope not. There would be a limit and it's for personal use only, just like it is with brewing beer or wine. I've brewed my own beer, I know lots of people who make their own wine, no companies involved. Those places are just for people that want the easy way. If you're stupid enough to grow pot in your garden, you are unlikely to have much of a crop left come harvest time, and the quality will likely be poor to. No selling without a license. Decrim is stupid - bust the producers but not the users? Note how neither WA or CO have gone that chickenshite route. I'm not a user, I think using any drug is stupid. But many people seem to want to do so with little ill effect. Actually I'm for legalizing all drugs, tho regulations would be different depending on the drug. Drugs like crystal meth or crack, I don't now how you legalize them, but making them illegal certainly hasn't prevented their use. Would you or anybody you know (except Rob Ford) use those drugs if they were legal?

Pot is still can cause harm. But the harm of criminalizing it outweighs the harm of legal use, IMO.

Pot costs about as much to produce as tobacco. You would pay a lot less with legal pot, and the govt could still rake in a good whack of taxes. Plus growing for personal use would have to be allowed, just like you can brew beer and wine for yourself now.

We should be providing more of the services I have described - ie community based supportive housing. That would prevent a lot of problems. Wouldn't have caught Li tho, and I don't think anything we do, short of locking up everybody who acts a bit "weird" would do so. Many people look lost, almost none go on to kill and eat other people. With Li, and other NCR people, I have no problem with releasing them back into the community if deemed safe to do so, as long as close support and monitoring exists in that community - ie make sure they take their meds every day. If they don't, or otherwise go off the rails, they should be re-institutionalized. Not for punishment because they are responsible, but for the safety of themselves and the community. As for something to lose by going for help, that was not likely his motivation. It's the stigma of being labelled, as well as his internal reality that tells him he's quite sane and how will he stop the aliens if he's locked up. We do no punish alcoholics for being alcoholics. They are free to drink themselves to death. We punish them because of illegal actions they take that might be driven by their alcoholism. We do deem them rational beings able to make decisions. Which is kind of funny, because when somebody is blotto, they're not rational, not able to make good decisions, so maybe they should all be found NCR for killing somebody too. And in fact we do have the diminished capacity defense for just that. "I was too drunk to form intent, you're honor, so I'm not guilty of murder"

We do let alcoholics get away with being alcoholics, we only intervene when they do something illegal. No forcing alcoholics into treatment just because they overdo the booze. As I say, if we go that route, we'd better get busy opening treatment facilities and hiring community nurses because there are a lot of untreated mentally ill people out there. And that gets into a civil rights issue - Russia was big on forcing people into treatment, and we rightly criticized them for it. Finding the right balance here is not so easy.

You're conflating two ideas. They're not responsible for their actions, so can not be held responsible - seems obvious. That's different than being forced to get help. They're not culpable, but that doesn't mean we just let the wander about, doing as they please. The difficulty is the civil rights question - you can't pre arrest somebody, sane or insane, before they do something, and being mentally ill is not a crime. In fact as a group, the mentally ill are less violent than "normal" people. Someone who is obviously "weird" but hasn't hurt anybody and can function adequately, as was Li's case before he killed, do we really want to lock them all up (there's tons of them out there) or even force them all to take medications with their horrible side effects? This is the conundrum. Personally I would like us to be a bit more aggressive in forcing help on these people, but then we'd better get busy opening or building more mental institutions. During the big purge, ie when mental hospitals were shut down, the idea was to open many small supportive homes for the mentally ill. That costs money, not something that tax slashing govts want to spend, so they were just dumped on the streets. Now we pay in justice system and healthcare costs that are far higher than providing proper care in the first place. We just had a year long experiment (was it longer?) where mentally ill people were housed with inhouse services. It was calculated that this program saved $20,000 per year per person vs these people being homeless, but the federal govt shut down funding. Always with the penny wise, pound foolish.

No, because they're incapable of making rational decisions, including accepting that they are mentally ill. If they can't differentiate right from wrong when cutting somebody's heart out, why would they be able to accurately assess their condition?

The guy is under the care of doctors who decide what his treatment should be, including trips to the beach. If they decide he's cured, then he's free. (doubt that will happen very soon). That's the danger - there is no cure, and he should be watched for the rest of his life to make sure he takes his meds and doesn't go off the rails. He doesn't need to be locked up for that to happen, but there needs to be a structure in place that makes sure it does.

But is has been, including manslaughter. It's used anywhere there are no minimum sentencing laws. It may not be a get out of jail free card, but it's certainly a get less jail time because you're aboriginal card.

Ben Stein thinks life is not a set of chemical reactions? Or is Ben going on aout we don't know when or how? If the latter, well he's undercut any argument to claiming it required an intelligence right there - we don't know.

Well people have been puzzling about that for ever, but there really is no way to know. As a group, schizophrenics are less violent than the norm, but as we see, individually they can be very violent. We don't know what causes schizophrenia, we don't know how to prevent it, really (don't do drugs) and we don't know how to cure it, only manage it. But, when people are recognized as going off the rails, if we were quicker to respond it might prevent tragedies like this. Of course then civil liberty issues are raised. But if you're going to discuss a case like this, you really should have more knowledge about it than to say if a mountie had been there Li would not have acted as he did, as if he was making rational decisions.

Yes. Maybe the voices would have told him the Mountie was the alien. If you can make a statement like that, you really know nothing of schizophrenia. What do you think motivated Lee to do what he did - "kicks just keep getting harder to find?"

Neither the age of the victims or perp is really the issue - he's sexually assaulting other people. If he's doing it because of senility, ie can't help it, put him in a proper facility, otherwise let him bear the consequences. The sentence does seem harsh tho in comparison to an Inuit woman who was just given one year for setting a shed on fire that contained her, now dead, husband. Manslaughter seems like a more serious crime than grabbing somebody's tits to me.

But there's the rub. Treatment is only management, there's no cure for schizophrenia. Medications often manage the disease quite well, so when he's released he should be monitored for the rest of this life to make sure he's taking the meds and institutionalized again if he's not.

The is the problem - we have no mechanism to supervise him once he's released. And our current parole system wouldn't be up to the task anyway - most cons don't get enough supervision on parole.

I'm willing to go with the doctor's opinion that he has been stabilized with meds, however long that takes, and so is fit to be released. I wouldn't put an arbitrary figure on his being detained. But he should have lifetime parole with conditions, and that's not in place because he was not convicted. He was ordered held in an institution until docs say it's OK to release him - there are no conditions after that.

I agree with this, tho it wouldn't even take 15 years to assess his stability. Unfortunately, as has been pointed out, there are no mechanisms in place to monitor him once he's released, because he has not been found guilty. That's what needs to change.

Currently yes. But he will be released at some point, with no conditions. That's where he should be on parole to make sure he takes his meds and goes back in if he doesn't. Until a doctor is willing to certify he doesn't need his meds anymore. (hell meet high water).

We should change it to convicted but not incarcerated because of a mental illness. Vince Li is not cured. His illness is being managed. It should be so for the rest of his life. Having to demonstrate that you took your meds every day is not an onerous parole condition.

We know how poor doctors are at predicting future behavior of the mentally ill. What should happen is that Li is on parole for the rest of his life and closely monitored once he's released. Someone should be making sure every day that Li is taking is meds, and if his behavior starts going off the rails again, should report that so he can be more closely assessed and confined again if necessary. We should stop pretending that these people are "treated" in the sense of healed. The meds keep them functioning reasonably normally, so we should be making sure they always take them. Many mentally ill people stop taking their meds (as did LI before he killed, I believe) because of the side effects and because they want to see themselves as "healed". We don't heal schizophrenia, we manage it until it possibly burns itself out.

Funny how that only applies to the people at the bottom. Everybody else seems to strive quite hard to get paid more. Of course there will always be people at the bottom of the income scale. What matters is how far that bottom is from the middle and the top. There's no reason it has to be so low they live in abject poverty.

And the best way to reduce child poverty is to reduce parent poverty. Higher wages for the working poor better support for people with kids on welfare if they can't work.