GETTING HIGH: QUEBECERS PUSH CANADA TO TOP OF LIST

Province Alone Could Place First in UN Study

Were it not for prodigious pot use in Quebec, Canada would not have
placed first in a United Nations drug study of marijuana use in the
industrialized world.

In fact, were Quebec a sovereign nation, it would have finished first
ahead of Canada, according to a breakdown of data supplied by Canada
for the study.

The biggest difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada is seen
in the youngest age groups. According to the Health Canada 2002 Youth
Smoking Survey, which looked at marijuana as well as tobacco, 32 per
cent of students in Grades 7 to 9 in Quebec have smoked marijuana at
least once.

This compares with 18 per cent in British Columbia, which ranked
second in Canada, and 11 per cent in Ontario, which ranked lowest
among provinces and territories.

The 2007 World Drug Report of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs made
headlines last week when it said Canada topped the list of
industrialized nations for marijuana use.

Spain topped the world for cocaine, Iran for heroin, Australia for
ecstasy and the Philippines for amphetamines.

In the Montreal area, police say, marijuana consumption has become a
particular problem in the booming suburbs north of Montreal and Laval.

Of the 10 high schools in metropolitan Montreal that saw the greatest
number of police interventions related to drug use in 2005, nine were
in the northern suburbs, according to an analysis of police records in
February by the Journal de MontrEal.

Schools in Terrebonne and Mascouche had the worst drug problems,
according to the Journal study, which involved 83 access-to-information
requests from 163 high schools in 41 Montreal-area municipalities,
including the city of Montreal.

No English-language schools were in the top 25 list.

Overall, marijuana use in Quebec is running 12 per cent higher than
the national average, according to the most recent inter-provincial
comparison, the 2004 Canadian Addiction Survey, co-ordinated by Health
Canada. That was the main study used by the UN to determine Canadian
consumption.

In Quebec, addiction experts say, marijuana has surpassed alcohol as
the drug for which young people are most likely to seek treatment in
publicly funded rehabilitation centres.

"It's really cannabis (i.e., marijuana) that is the substance that is
the most problematic among youths that come to treatment centres today
- - more than for alcohol, certainly," said Michel Landry, director of
research for the Centre Dollard Cormier.

The centre co-ordinates publicly funded drug rehabilitation services
in the Montreal region for Quebec's Health Department.

Alcohol still causes more societal problems in terms of risky sexual
behaviour, property damage and person-on-person violence, Landry said.
And overall, marijuana is still considered among the "least addictive
of all psycho-active substances," said Jurgen Rehm, a senior scientist
with the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

But marijuana, for whatever reason, is becoming more of a worry to
those who actually use it, or at least those who believe they are
dependent on it.

Whether increased demand among Quebec youth for marijuana-related
rehab services reflects the escalating potency of the illegal crop, or
the prevalence of grow operations in southwestern Quebec, are not
questions that are easily answered, Landry said.

The 2007 World Drug Report found 16.8 per cent of Canadians age 15 to
64 used marijuana in 2004; only four countries, all
non-industrialized, had higher rates - Papua New Guinea, the Federated
States of Micronesia, Ghana and Zambia.

The 16.8 per cent figure was arrived at after making adjustments to
the data sent to the UN by Canada. The data, which consisted mainly of
the Canadian Addiction Survey findings, found 14.1 per cent of
Canadians admitted to using marijuana at least once in 2004. The
figure for Quebec was 15.8 per cent, so Quebec consumption was found
to be running 12 per cent higher than national consumption overall.

In Quebec, the Institut de la statistique du QuEbec tracked 5,000 high
school students in grades 7 to 11 from 2000 through 2004 and found
consumption rates had dropped to 35 per cent from 40 per cent in that
period.

Landry and Rehm said policy-makers shouldn't get too concerned by data
over lifetime or past-year consumption rates, by which a certain
percentage of people are said to have tried marijuana at least once in
their lives, or at least once in the past year.

The key figure for addiction experts is chronic consumption. And as
far as marijuana is concerned, Landry and Rehm said, all the data
suggest only five to 15 per cent of Canadian marijuana users are
"problem" users - a proportion that is more or less the same for users
of alcohol and other drugs.