I have been fascinated to see the knee-jerk reactions to Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he supports the legalization of marijuana. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Surely we have been fighting the war on marijuana for long enough to realize that it’s time for a new approach.

Under Stephen Harper, our government has chosen to follow the wildly expensive and dramatically failed US war on drugs, despite calls for change from Latin America and the Caribbean – where much of the drug trade originates. In May, the Organization of American States released a study that advocated a complete re-think of the war on drugs. It examined four alternative strategies, including simply abandoning the 40-year fight that has left a trail of violence, ruinous public expenditures and criminal enrichment in its wake.

I believe that it makes no sense for Canada to spend half a billion dollars a year on enforcement, courts and incarceration – much of it to pursue ordinary citizens pursuing their private pleasures, and then to put them in jail with hardened criminals.

Legalizing and regulating marijuana would save that half billion plus net half a billion in tax revenues – a billion-dollar positive swing that we could apply to higher public priorities. The lucrative trade would be taken out of the hands of the biker gangs and organized crime. It would make the product that is eventually sold legally safer – a matter of public health, much as we have experienced with alcohol and tobacco. And it would make it much more difficult for kids in schoolyards to get their hands on unsafe illicit drugs.

Public policy should be based on evidence, not ideology and hysteria. Justin Trudeau has taken a brave and principled stand here, and I support him.