LEGALIZING POT MAKES SENSE

If you had to guess which of the world's countries consumed a lot of
marijuana, and you had only crude, tabular economic information
instead of facts about culture to work from, you would probably look
for a physically huge land mass with a long open border that was
parcelled out into hundreds of thousands of privately owned
agricultural tracts: farms full of brush and little stands of trees
that no policeman would ever set foot in more than once every hundred
years. And you'd be right on the money.

The latest report on trends in international drug use from the UN
Office of Drugs and Crime reveals that Canada leads the
industrialized world in cannabis consumption.

Worldwide, about 3.8% of members of the human species between the
ages of 15 and 64 are thought to have used marijuana or hashish at
least once during 2005. In Asia the figure is just 1.9%; in Europe,
5.6%; in the United States, a sobering 12.6%; but in Canada, it
reaches a remarkable 16.8%, or more than one in six adults under
pension age. Our proportion of pot users is virtually double that of
England (8.7%) or France (8.6%) and, in a truly eyebrow-raising
development, is nearly triple that of the famously libertine
Netherlands (6.1%), a rather remarkable signal that cannabis would
not necessarily become ubiquitous if it became available legally at
the corner coffee shop. We apparently even have more THC tokers than
Jamaica (10.1%). Only a handful of countries in Africa and the
Pacific can rival us in affection for hemp-based smokeables.

Is this a cause for concern? For those opposed to marijuana usage as
a matter of principle, the report offers some encouraging news. The
numbers provided to the UN by our police agencies suggest that
overall marijuana and hashish production stabilized and possibly even
declined in 2005, reflecting global trends, after a period of
ferocious growth that saw the harvest double between 2000 and 2004.
Trafficking to the United States is also down, and youth use within
Canada seems to be declining rather quickly; the Centre for Addiction
and Mental Health's measurements of cannabis use among junior-high
and high-school students in Ontario show a 19% falloff in the
proportion of onetime users between 2003 and 2005. It may be that we
have reached a state of relatively comfortable equilibrium among law
enforcement, cultural attitudes towards marijuana, protection of our
children and the pure aggregate black-market demand for the product.

What's really remarkable about Canada's status as a cannabis capital
is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it
- -- reasons that do not amount to disliking it for its own sake -- you
would have an awfully hard time finding them. If Canada had rates of
alcohol consumption that were more than four times the world average,
the fact would be written in fire in dozens of different tables of
medical and social statistics. You could tell from our auto-accident
rates, from our rates of cirrhosis of the liver or even from family
violence statistics, that we had a propensity for a very dangerous
and nasty substance. If Canada had four times as many tobacco smokers
as the average country, you could easily extract the news and
quantify it to two decimal places from our statistics on cancer and
cardiac health, or indeed from overall life-expectancy figures.

But where is the health "footprint" of our love for the weed? Maybe
it's hidden in our labour productivity statistics; it certainly
doesn't seem to have any impact on our life expectancy or our other
measurable health outcomes. Despite dauntingly high ostensible rates
of use, and despite the hazards of adulteration and intensification
that are attendant upon cannabis's illegal status, we don't seem to
be doing ourselves any major harm from a long experiment in
comparative weed tolerance.

This is a strong datum in favour of the view that marijuana is
fundamentally innocuous compared with the "historical" drugs of abuse
that enjoy broad social and legal acceptance, and a blow to those who
contend that it is a "gateway" to harder drugs, since there is
nothing in the UN data on those drugs to suggest that we are passing
through that gate in particularly large numbers. That would seem to
leave very little, aside from the omnipresent trade and travel
considerations that come from being a neighbour of the U.S., to stand
logically in the way of decriminalization.