Most wars are easier to start than to end, and the misguided and often malevolent War on Drugs is no exception.

Little by little, however, that dubious campaign is in sensible and overdue retreat.

As the Stars Jacques Gallant reported this week, Canadians with criminal records for drug possession will see them effectively vanish within two years after the federal governments criminal justice reform bill becomes law, a measure that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.

The landscape has changed.

Cannabis is now legal in Canada. Drug addiction is widely seen as a health rather than criminal issue. There is greater support for harm-reduction strategies and safe-injection sites. And, recently, selected exemptions were granted for possession of small amounts of harder drugs for personal use.

But largely owing to the stigma attached to drug use and addiction, each step has been controversial, fiercely opposed, and slow in coming.

Drug laws in Canada and elsewhere have been deeply tinged with racism, disproportionately affecting and incarcerating racialized individuals, Indigenous people and those living in poverty.

A study published last year looking at arrest data in five Canadian cities found an over-representation of Black and Indigenous people arrested for cannabis possession in all but one.

The consequent burden of a criminal record, which hugely impedes chances of employment, housing, travel and increases likelihood of future criminality, flies in the face of fairness and the pretence of the justice system as concerned chiefly with rehabilitation.

The proposed bills automatic sequestration of drug possession records which means they wont show up on a criminal records check was made possible due to a New Democratic amendment to the Liberal governments Bill C-5.

Randall Garrison, NDP justice critic, said the government has assure him that in two years from the passage of the bill criminal records for personal possession for all drugs will disappear.

The bill, to be studied by a Senate committee this fall after passage by the Commons in June, would also repeal mandatory minimum sentence for all drug offences, expand the use of conditional sentences, and require police and prosecutors to use their discretion to keep drug possession cases out of the courts.

It's estimated that as many as 250,000 Canadians may have drug-possession convictions stemming from cannabis possession alone when it was still illegal.

Three years ago, the government launched a revamped pardon application process, but Garrison said only a few hundred people have been successful because of the convoluted, expensive process involved.

The bill stops short of decriminalizing drug possession, a step health advocates have long called for.

The opioid epidemic that has hit communities across the country and is especially lethal in Vancouver and Toronto has changed the views on how drug crises should be seen and tackled.

The moralizing tough on crime rhetoric so favoured by conservative politicians, and so dismissive of public health and harm reduction approaches, no longer resonates quite so viscerally with those encountering addiction in their own neighbourhoods and families.

By legalizing cannabis, the federal government admitted that 100 years of prohibition of the drug in Canada was at the very least unwarranted, and more bluntly put a huge injustice against hundreds of thousands of people.

The Garrison amendment is a good step in the large project of righting the lifelong consequences of damage done by what was essentially a war not on drugs, but on people.

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A welcome retreat in the drug war - Toronto Star