Volume 22, numéro 1, 1989 Drogues et criminalités Sous la direction de Serge Brochu

EN :

Bill C-51 passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1985 and the publicity surrounding this legislation led many people to believe that a new crime regarding impaired driving had been created. This Bill, however, was to simply increase the penalty for drunk driving in the case of a first conviction. In fact, the penal solution to the “problem” of drunk driving is not new; in 1921 the offence of impaired driving was first introduced into the Code.

This article examines the evolution of the prohibition of driving under the influence of alcohol in the Canadian Criminal Code and the enforcement of this law in Canada, in Quebec and in Ontario from 1921 to 1973.

The first part presents the evolution of legislation concerning impaired driving. It goes through six important phases and covers the period from 1921 to 1973.

The second part presents the statistical data used in our study. We also consider the reliability and validity of the data used.

In the last part, we analyze the implementation of the law on infractions relating to drunk driving in a state of drunkeness indictable offence and summary conviction offence driving under the influence of alcohol or a drug (indictable offence and summary conviction offence), and finally, refusal to furnish a sample of breath (summary conviction offence).

In conclusion, we present several recommendations based on the results of our analysis.

EN :

Did the legislative changes of December 1985 concerning impaired driving affect the work of the penal agents? The author answers this question on the basis of interviews with peace officers of the various police corps of Greater Montreal. The Act did change their attitudes as well as their methods of enforcing the legislation. There was also a change in their personal and professional attitudes toward drunken driving. The police say they had noted variations in the attitudes and behaviour of the general public.

EN :

War is a form of competition and the drug wars are no exception to this definition. Drug wars are actually classic illustrations of competitors abusing the legal process to define their own drug trading as lawful while characterizing their competitor's behaviour as “crime”. Successive American federal administrations extended the drug wars through a combination of military assistance, financial pressure and secret agreements. These aggressions are the real abuses aimed at third world cultures. Since Americans purchase 60% of all illicit drugs and finance more than 90% of the police action against the trade, drug legalization drug crusade. On the other hand, even if drug legalization makes sense the U.S. federal government will not necessarily act sensibly. An alternative possibility is reform outside the U.S. capable of generating a competitive crises internationaly.

EN :

If the drugs now considered illegal were legalized, what difficulties would have to be resolved? To answer this question, this article first points out the limitations of a policy of decriminilization in the case of soft drugs; it then shows that today, legalization and marketing of legal drugs go hand in hand and that this is a dangerous model for the legalization of drugs.

Hence although the need to legalize all drugs in order to alleviate the present problems caused by their criminalization is easy enough to demonstrate, to find a model of legal distribution of drugs that avoids the negative consequences of the present policies regarding legal drugs is much more difficult. It merits some thought.

EN :

This article gives the results of the consultation of several bases of bibliographical data on Women and Heroin, using the Boolean type of research. Various subjects are discussed, the extent of its use, the characteristics and factors of involvement in drug dependency, treatment, Mother/children relationship, Aids and prostitution. In the light of this survey of the literature, it seemed necessary to question the actual pertinence of these studies. They pose a number of important problems. Our criticism of the quality of these studies are I) problems of method and sampling; 2) epistemological problems and 3) the “monodisciplinarity” of these studies. In these works, the norm or “normality” (of drug addiction) is proper to the male sex. Women are considered marginal to this norm. Other fundamental omissions are mentioned, especially the relativity of the norms, problems connected with the concepts and the terms used. With regard to these various criticisms, we propose two models of analysis. The first refers to the study of women heroin-users as a group rather than in regard to men. The second is to construct a more general plan of analysis ofmarginality, of deviance and the criminality of women using the theories of social reaction in criminology and of radical materialist feminism. These two models could be complementary.