OTTAWA — U.S. President Barack Obama recently used the twilight of his tenure to again grant clemency to almost 60 non-violent drug offenders.

With those commutations, Obama has now reduced the sentences of 300 federal prisoners in order to secure their release, more than the last six presidents combined.

He has been more reluctant, however, in dishing out the full Monty, as in outright pardons of crimes committed, which is a powerful right granted to all U.S. presidents.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama has pardoned just 70 individuals during his almost eight years in the Oval Office, well below the number of pardons granted by the most recent presidents.

George W. Bush was until now the stingiest, granting 189 pardons during his presidency, while Bill Clinton was the most generous in recent times with 400 pardons.

Here in Canada, prime ministers have no such authority to commute or pardon but, then again, our prisons are not crammed with (mostly black) inmates convicted of penny-ante drug crimes and, despite the Harperites’ tough-on-crime position, there is no three-strikes-you’re-out legislation which gets the keys to jail cells thrown away.

So, as the Trudeau Liberals prepare to make Canada the Woodstock of the Americas, and legalize marijuana, let’s take a look inside our prisons to smoke out the numbers.

On the federal side, there are presently 3,943 inmates — 320 of them women — who are serving at least two years for what are described as “serious drug offenses” — trafficking, conspiracy to traffic, manufacturing, and importing.

Sentences under two years less a day, which are primarily possession charges or plea-bargain arrangements, are served in provincial jails, and are therefore not reflected in federal numbers collected by the Ministry of Public Safety, now headed by Liberal cabinet minister Ralph Goodale.

The most-recent Statistics Canada numbers show that of the 73,000 police-reported marijuana offences in 2013, nearly 59,000, or 80%, were for simple possession.

Possession charges, in fact, represented 54% of all police-reported drug crime across the country.

It has been written that police report a pot possession incident an average of every nine minutes. Legalization would therefore wipe out more than half the court and police time currently eaten up by marijuana cases.

A 2002 Senate report, while now somewhat dated, pegged the annual cost of law enforcement and court time regarding the criminalization of marijuana as $500 million.

And that was then a conservative estimate.

The number of pot dispensaries popping up across the country, and particularly giving a headache to Toronto Mayor John Tory, who is witnessing new outlets suddenly appearing almost daily, provides an interesting scenario.

“The speed with which these storefronts are proliferating, and the concentration of dispensaries in some areas of our city, is alarming,” said Tory.

But when the city’s former police chief, Bill Blair, is the Liberal MP assigned by the prime minister to spearhead the legalization of marijuana, one cannot see his successor, Chief Mark Saunders, ordering his drug squad to start raiding these supposedly medicinal pot shops, or ramping up any arrest quota for simple possession.

That smoke has already gone up the chimney, and is why Tory is unleashing the bylaw cops instead.

According to Statistics Canada, some 7,000 adults saw themselves actually going before the courts for drug possession in 2013-2014, although it does not break down the type of drugs involved in charges being laid.

Of those cases, only 758 were found guilty, 150 were acquitted, and some 3,400 had their charges either stayed or withdrawn. Almost 4,500 were given conditional or absolute discharges and/or some form of community service

As for StatsCan’s analysis of youth courts across the country, there were only 1,568 drug possession charges that actually went to court in 2013-2014, with 435 of the offenders being found guilty. There was only one acquittal, but 1,123 of the charges were stayed or withdrawn by the prosecution.

It is not much value for the taxpayers’ dollar.

markbonokoski@gmail.com