SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, AND YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS, DON'T YOU, MR. ROCK?

I am a bit too old to have smoked much marijuana in my youth. I was over 30
by the time the Sixties arrived, which in Canada was around 1965. So I'm no
expert, even though I knew how to roll my own cigarettes (which came from
the days when I couldn't afford tailor-mades), and even though I'll confess
to inhaling what I did sample (hey, man, I don't want to run for political
office, anyway).

I'm no proselytizer either. I've certainly never been convinced that pot
enriches the creative process, though I'm pretty sure it affected some of
the worst and most boring musical performances I attended. I don't think
I've ever heard a comic being funnier because he'd had a couple of drags
before he took to the stage, though even my limited experience has included
a couple of performances seeming funnier because I had.

Most convincing of all the pro-pot arguments arising from my own highly
(oops, sorry) unscientific experiments has been the fact that I've never
seen pot-induced violence: No bar-brawls, no pot-inspired air rage, no
incidents of what on the police beat we used to call "domestics" in which
the litter included piles of roaches (the grassy kind) smoked down to
lip-burning embers.

I know most of the antipot arguments, too, the scariest of which -- that
marijuana leads to increasingly heavier and indisputably more dangerous
drugs -- has always seemed to me a classic example of the logical fallacy
post hoc ergo propter hoc -- after something therefore because of it --
which, casually applied, could just as easily blame mother's milk for
heroin addiction.

I do share some of the reluctance, much of it from police spokespeople, to
put a societal stamp of acceptance on yet another drug (Lord knows we have
enough of them now). But if I were in charge of cracking down on the evils
of narcotics, I'd welcome even the simple economics of putting marijuana in
the same category as booze. You could save the millions of dollars spent
chasing down people who aren't really criminals, and put the profits of a
government-run distribution system into the war on truly dangerous drugs
and the truly dangerous criminals who deal in them.

Meanwhile, even the government -- I'd say especially Health Minister Allan
Rock -- seems at last to be realizing that people are ready for change.
Starting this week, certain Canadians are allowed to hold marijuana for
medical purposes. That's more than 30 years after the feds' LeDain
Commission reported that marijuana was neither addictive nor seriously
harmful, and more than 20 since Jean Chretien, then justice minister, said
that the government of the day had plans to at least decriminalize it.

For most of us, there's been no change in legislation, though most police
officers seem more willing now to turn their backs on a joint or two in
someone's pocket. And public opinion has changed. Now, according to the
University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, 47 per cent of
Canadians favour not just decriminalizing but legalizing marijuana, nearly
double the percentage who would sit still for it just five years after LeDain.

Something is happening, as Bob Dylan wrote, (and if it doesn't date me too
much to quote him now) but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

I'd suggest that what's happening is the simple growing up of a couple of
generations. We and now our children smoked pot (though both of us, I
think, would still prefer a cold beer in the kind of afternoons we've been
having around Toronto) and the world didn't come to an end.

And Mr. Jones may not know this, but I think Rock has figured it out. Allan
Rock -- whom I know only from interviews -- is a thoughtful and articulate
guy, who hasn't given up on pulling ahead of Paul Martin in the Liberal
leadership marathon. He's a pleasant and challenging subject, with an
all-too-rare willingness to listen and to try to answer the questions. He's
also a distance runner.

So far, other than running a couple of very tough departments (justice and
health) and being seen as vaguely to the left of Martin, he hasn't really
found his issue. (It certainly isn't gun control.) Making common sense of
our marijuana laws might not be what he's looking for -- it's no "state in
the bedrooms of the nation." But it wouldn't hurt him either.

Rock's ministry has also announced the funding of several programs to test
the efficacy of smoked cannabis as a pain reliever. The first study,
announced just last week, will be at the world-renowned McGill Pain Centre
in Montreal -- looking at marijuana's effect on chronic neuropathic pain.
Soon, others will continue the work on people with AIDS, multiple sclerosis
and other afflictions.

Many of them, presumably, will be working with marijuana grown under
government supervision in an abandoned mine near Flin, Flon, Man., surely a
better use for tapped-out underground chambers than throwing big-city
garbage down them.

The testing programs are going to require intense supervision. According to
a McGill press release, participants in the first part of the trials will
smoke the substance as outpatients. And at least one project is going to
mirror, "as much as possible, the real-life conditions under which patients
can currently use cannabis."

Surely they'll need some help with the observation, won't they? Now I'm
really sorry I'm too old to apply for a summer job.

PS: To anticipate letters from people who've been reading me here recently
on a similar subject: While hardly good for the lungs, you simply cannot
smoke enough marijuana to do yourself the kind of damage smoking tobacco
has done to me.