TIME TO GET OFF THE POT

Nearly seven months ago, Senator Pierre-Claude Nolin told the country that
Canadians over the age of 16 should be allowed to smoke marijuana the way
that their elders knock back a scotch or two before dinner or have a
cigarette with their morning coffee.

Who would have thought the Senate could have been so, well, hip? After all,
16-year-olds can't buy a beer or a package of cigarettes until they're 19,
at least not legally. But in its four-volume report, the Senate concluded
that not only should pot be legalized, but that it was a lot less harmful
than either cigarettes or tobacco, not to mention a lot less stressful.

At the time, the Senate report raised some eyebrows and more than a few
expectations amongst the citizens of the Weed Nation. A lot of people
thought it was a kind of joke, or at the very worst, a trial balloon for a
government that was considering doing something about Canada's hoary
marijuana laws. The point of the exercise was surely to find out how much
Canadians were willing to take, or toke, when it came to weed.

Except for the usual suspects, there was no tidal wave of moral outrage
against the Senate's thumbs-up for marijuana. True, David Griffin,
executive director of the Canadian Police Association, called the Senate's
recommendations a back-to-school gift for drug pushers. Various health
experts rightly pointed out that smoking anything, including marijuana, was
not good for your health -- sort of like ciggies and hard liquor. But the
Great Unwashed in Great White North did not react to the possibility that
Reefer Madness might soon be upon us, thanks to all those closet
iconoclasts in the Senate. In a word, they adopted a policy of wait and see.

Having waited, we have now seen. At this week's annual Maple Leaf Dinner,
no less a dude than the prime minister confirmed that in the near future
Canadians will be able to mellow out over a joint without worrying about
getting a criminal record for using their recreational drug of choice.
Instead, they'll get a penalty like the one you get for parking your car in
front of a fire hydrant.

The Liberals don't intend to legalize marijuana, but they no longer
subscribe to the notion that people should carry a criminal record for life
for smoking a joint. This value judgment comes a little late for 600,000
Canadians who already have criminal CVs for their dalliance with Mary Jane,
but for the 2 million or so citizens who occasionally or regularly use
marijuana, it is better late than never.

This pending change in our laws is long overdue. Putting a criminal ban on
cannabis has accomplished a lot of things, none of them particularly
helpful. For starters, it has utterly failed to curtail the use of this
drug. Anyone who wants it, regardless of age, can most assuredly get it. It
has made the crooks who traffic in marijuana rich and strengthened
organized crime in the process. It has sapped a huge amount of resources
from policing budgets that ought to have higher priorities than chasing
toking teens. And it has created a mystique around this drug that is
entirely undeserved.

Look what the policy of zero tolerance has done in the United States: That
country spends $40 billion a year in taxpayers' money fighting illegal drug
use, roughly seven times what is needed (and unavailable) to take a stab at
dealing with Africa's runaway AIDS epidemic. The U.S. has more drug users,
including marijuana users, than any other country on earth.

One in four American teenagers regularly use marijuana by the time he or
she reaches the twelfth grade. A third of Americans over the age of 12
admit to having tried drugs at some point in the past year. Retail drugs in
the United States are worth a whopping $60 billion a year. And that's why
American jails are full of young blacks and Latinos, because back in the
middle '80s vice-president George Bush committed the Reagan administration
to a "real war on drugs." Only Vietnam has been a more obvious and
embarrassing defeat.

Apart from spawning a wonderful television series, The Untouchables,
America's experiment with prohibiting the sale of alcohol from 1920 to 1933
created a vast bootleg industry, inflated booze prizes wildly, encouraged
the spread of organized crime, and corrupted a quarter of federal
enforcement agents according to The Economist. Interestingly, no other
large country on earth copied the American attempt to ban alcohol.

Which brings me back to Canada and Jean Chretien's legislative going-away
present for pot users. The writing has been on the wall for our old drug
laws ever since judges started throwing out marijuana charges against
teenagers in recognition of the fact that we don't really have a law
prohibiting the possession of 30 grams or less of marijuana. The courts
also sided with Terry Parker, who argued that the laws violated the rights
of medical marijuana users. But don't expect the debate to be gentle, or
even restricted to this country.

The United States is already fuming at us because a lot of high quality,
i.e. pure and powerful, pot grown in Canada is flooding American markets.
The Americans are bound to take a very dim view of decriminalizing
marijuana, a move they loudly proclaim is not helpful to their war on drugs.

Before bending to the anger and the angst of our American cousins, we would
do well to remember that the U.S. drug policy has produced the most
important illicit drug market in the world. Meanwhile, in Holland, where
you can buy five grams of pot in 300 coffee shops around Amsterdam, the
Dutch aren't even in the top 50 when it comes to marijuana use. THC for
thought, yes?

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