POT'S COMING TO A BOIL; TODAY'S MARIJUANA NAYSAYERS MAY JUST BE BLOWING SMOKE

They used to tell us that marijuana would lay waste to a whole generation,
making it feeble and soft, albeit with the lung capacity to inhale like
pearl divers. We'd be ripe pickings for the Soviets. The Red Army would
enslave the world while we all stood idly by saying, "Wow, bad scene."

Well, that's not what happened. Ironically, the generation that smoked all
that pot turned out to be the most fiercely energetic, acquisitive,
unmellow son-of-a-bitch generation that the free enterprise system has ever
produced. It got the munchies.

The Soviets would be the ones who rolled over. Who would have guessed it?
Marijuana has never been able to live up to the negative hysteria its
critics have tried to whip up for it. Drugs and the drug trade have
certainly taken their toll on individual lives and on society as a whole, a
toll which cannot be minimized. But no one has ever been able to
convincingly establish that marijuana itself is any worse than, say,
alcohol. It certainly does not appear to be as addictive as alcohol, or
anywhere near as costly and injurious in terms of lives and families
shipwrecked over it.

Yet marijuana remains on the books, and alcohol is freely sold and
advertised. The hysteria persists -- though now it seems to be more of a
rearguard, almost fatalistic hysteria, in contrast to the kind of
pre-emptive hysteria of pot's critics in the '60s. Those now opposed to the
legalization of marijuana seem to sense that some kind of large, seismic
shift is at hand in the public's institutional response to the drug, a
shift in the openness and outward expression of the public's tolerance and
in its thinning patience with laws that no longer seem terribly practical,
fair or relevant.

In the last few months especially, events have really begun to shape
themselves into some kind of showdown. First, in the last federal election,
we had something called The Marijuana Party. And south of the border,
several states voted in propositions calling for the legalized selling of
marijuana for medicinal purposes -- the California proposition is now being
challenged before the Supreme Court. In Canada, the laws against the
selling of marijuana are also being challenged before our Supreme Court, by
an Ontario man who uses the drug for medicinal purposes.

There are many fronts on which the marijuana lobby is pressing its
advantage, but nowhere do they see a more promising wedge than on the
medicinal-use front. I think they are calculating that once they get past
that hurdle, they're home free. And they're probably right.

Perhaps that's why the U.S. Justice Department is fighting so fiercely
against the California proposition. Its lawyer recently argued that
marijuana's medicinal benefits are anecdotal only and that there is no
basis for its use as a treatment or a relief, that allowing what amounts to
marijuana pharmacies opens the doors to " charlatans." Yes, charlatans, as
opposed, to the legitimate, accredited professionals who are selling the
stuff on the street where sick people will presumably have to get it if the
state proposition is struck down.

The federal government decided to pursue the case on a civil basis rather
than criminally because it knew it could probably never get a jury that
would oppose the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

That reckoning reflects just how profound the shift in public opinion has
been. Of course it is a shift that has been building for decades.

There has long been a vigorous marijuana counter-culture. Right here in
Hamilton we have had Brother Walter and his Church of the Universe, which
accords hemp a sacramental status. When that counter-culture surfaced from
the underground, it did so largely on the strength of its potential as
comedy material. Cheech and Chong, that kind of thing.

But then, more and more, so-called head shops began to flourish openly in
the economy. And, increasingly, Hollywood has produced mainstream movies
and even TV shows in which the casual enjoyment of marijuana is portrayed
in an almost positive, or at least non-judgmental, light.

And the outright stoner, or pothead, has become a kind of stock figure of
gentle, comic amusement rather than contempt.

When public figures of the stature of a Stockwell Day and a Bill Clinton
admit to trying marijuana, when even George W. Bush admits to using
cocaine, you know that something is starting to give way in the brave front
of society's "official" anti-marijuana posturing.

Why are we loath to admit it? Almost everyone of a certain age tried
marijuana, at least once, and generally, they didn't go screaming mad. And
many, many people among us still use it frequently, even grow it in their
homes. All kinds of people -- business executives, arch conservatives,
stock exchange types, the ones who turned the economy hydroponic. It cuts
across all kinds of lines.

Just look on the Internet. There are thousands of marijuana sites. They
gleefully tell you how to build your own water pipe out of plastic pop
bottles and bits of tubing. They share dictionaries of pot slang -- flower
tops, shake, blunts, shotgun. They recommend good games to play when
stoned, like Ganga Farmer, a video game featuring a gun-toting Rastafarian
on top of a microbus, "protecting his crop" from federal agents swarming in
by helicopter and parachute.

Don't misunderstand me. Marijuana is bad for you. Inhaling it scorches your
lungs and throat. You're far better off not smoking it, than smoking it.
But the same can be said of alcohol, cigarettes, even potato chips.

They're not illegal. We don't waste billions of dollars trying to run down
the people who use and sell them.

What we should do is legalize pot, and tax it to the skies. At least then
we could regulate its traffic, control quality and cost, get it out of the
hands of organized crime and into the hands of huge, respectable
corporations which we can then sue into the ground when we determine that
marijuana use is making us sick.

They'll have to put horrible pictures and warnings on the marijuana
cigarette packages. The whole thing will be totally deromanticized and
consumption will go way, way down.

Everything's backwards. The people who hate marijuana should push for its
legalization if they really want to squash it, not tell alarmist lies about
it, which make people resent them and distrust everything they say.

Those who love it should oppose legalization because a big part of its
appeal is its forbiddenness, the sub-culture humour that the taboo
engenders, and the feeling it gives them that they're "rebels," like Woody
Harrelson or Bob Marley.