[420 Girl]

They fought the law and the ... law lost.

In fact, Canada's petty, nanny-state prohibition on simple marijuana possession has been repeatedly revealed as either non-existent or as murky as well --used bong water.

Except, you'd never know it as the charges continue to be laid and judicial resources go up in smoke.

Since the statute criminalizing possession was ruled constitutionally invalid after an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in 2000, a score of charges in that province, P.E.I., Nova Scotia and B.C. have been tossed out for lack of any clearly valid law.

Prosecutors' wrists have even been slapped by judges for pushing through charges that in other provinces have been deemed moot. Tens of thousands of the cases were dismissed in Ontario until and even after October 2003, when that province's appellate court supposedly reinstated the prohibition.

But there's doubt over the power of the court to re-validate a law that's been struck out of the legal system. And there's doubt about the validity of the medical marijuana regulations issued by the Privy Council, when this is the court-declared job of Parliament.

In the meantime, defendants using case law challenging its constitutional validity have since been winning in court, as recently as last month in Prince Rupert, B.C. A case was withdrawn in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., in February by a judge five months after a ruling in Oshawa stated "there is no offence known to law."

We can thank our spineless, indecisive politicians -- both Liberal and Tory -- for the disarray.

Kudos also go out to a downloadable legal defence kit trumpeting previous cases that have stymied prosecutions available at thepotlawhasfallen.ca.

Pro-cannabis activist Keith Fagin has been handing out the kits to defendants at Calgary's courts building.

Several have accepted them, with one case to be heard June 3 of interest, he says.

But Fagin admits most are reluctant to resist even what's been proven in court to be a vulnerable law.

"They say 'I'll take the $100 fine' but it's also a criminal record and more than that -- it's standing up for something," he says.

That submissive attitude plays into the hands of prosecutors who are, however, not immune to a concerted challenge, says Doug Hutchinson, a University of Toronto philosophy professor and author of the legal defence kit.

"When you start showing resistance on principle, they drop the charges ... they say pursuing those cases are not in the public interest but in fact they're just running away from resistance," says Hutchinson, a Rhodes Scholar whose Oxford thesis on jurisprudence was the rule of law.

"But the police have been told to keep on arresting even though the invalidated law hasn't changed."

It's hardly a surprise in a country where police still harass law-abiding medical marijuana-users.

Hutchinson says the Harper government is ready to take a tougher line on the general possession issue while it trains a nervously submissive eye to the south.

"They don't care about the law being invalid, they want to keep the pretence of its validity for the benefit of the Americans."

Given that, says Hutchinson, the legal kit should be viewed by its users not as a silver bullet but as another layer of defence.

Hutchinson's confronted police officers and needled prosecutors for continuing to pursue cases, often drawing, he says, an exasperated hostility.

And he's flabbergasted at the arrest for possession of three Calgary pro-pot demonstrators May 3.

"The CPS was foolish enough to try to intimidate a peaceful demonstration ... there's no other city in the country where that's a remote possibility," he says.

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