I found the article. As the guy who was stopped says, he was held and questioned for hours; if it were simply a matter of "did you toke?" "yes" "bye" then they wouldn't waste their time. Now, it's possible they went through the whole rigmarole of getting him sworn in, digging up the statutes for the time and place where he did the thing, and getting him to admit every element under oath, but more likely he just copped to having paid a $25 fine in nineteen-seventy-whatever after getting swept up in a head-shop raid. I'm not saying it's not an obnoxious thing for inspectors to be doing if they are in fact making a habit of asking everyone over 50 if they've ever used drugs, but this "increase in bans" or whatever looks to be purely anecdotal. Worst case scenario, if this guy's truly been clean for forty years, is he now has to pony up a hundred and sixty bucks for a visa every five years or so a few hundred dollars for waiver reviews [edit: forgot the rules are different for Canada due to the whole visa-free thing]. "Lifetime ban" is a very dramatic way of describing an ineligibility that for most former, minor drug users is a temporary inconvenience.