MARIJUANA REFORM MUST GO FURTHER

In the wake of last week's tragedy in Alberta, some are calling on the
federal government to scrap its stalled marijuana reform legislation,
which would decriminalize possession of small amounts of the
substance. Such calls should be rejected. If anything, the event shows
that drug reform must go further.

In Thursday's quadruple murder, a known criminal shot four RCMP
officers while they were investigating his property northwest of
Edmonton, a property whose uses included a small marijuana grow-op.
Nothing written here or elsewhere can even partly mitigate the man's
brutal act -- that much is obvious. Nevertheless, Canadians must ask
themselves whether one of the policies that James Roszko was violating
-- drug prohibition, particularly as applied to marijuana -- is one
that police officers should be risking their lives to enforce. The
answer, as we see it, is no.

The marijuana industry attracts men like James Roszko not because
there is anything intrinsically evil about pot, but because it is an
illegal substance that, by definition, only criminals are in a
position to provide for consumers. As with alcohol prohibition in the
United States, the effect of criminalizing marijuana has been to
create a business opportunity for well-armed thugs.

This would not be a reason to question current policy if the legal
campaign against marijuana were worth the cost. After all, police put
their lives on the line all the time when they patrol our inner cities
or cruise our highways -- yet we accept those risks because we
recognize they are part of the price of safe cities and streets. But
in the case of pot, criminalization has been a failure: Marijuana is
still freely available at a low price to most high school students.
Indeed, it is so prevalent that most police simply look the other way
when they see it being smoked.

Moreover, it is not clear why this prevalence should overly alarm us.
Marijuana is not addictive, nor generally criminogenic. And while
studies have linked long-term pot use to cardiovascular impairments
and decreased cognitive function, the threat to human health is
minuscule compared with that posed by alcohol and tobacco -- as well
as, for that matter, fast food, motorcycles, double-diamond ski trails
and unprotected sex. The simple truth is that the war on drugs is far
more deadly than drugs themselves. As has been noted elsewhere, the
number of officers who died on Thursday exceeded -- by four -- the
total number of people known to medical science to have died from a
marijuana overdose, ever.

This brings us to the marijuana reform legislation being considered by
our government. We have argued in this space before that marijuana
should be legalized, and that it should become a government-regulated
substance like alcohol and tobacco. Because these latter substances
are legal, there is little attraction for criminals -- since they
cannot earn the enormous premiums associated with contraband. RCMP
officers do not die raiding tobacco grow-ops or Quonset huts full of
bootlegging stills. The same should be true of marijuana.

Unfortunately, our government is not willing to go that far. The
legislation that has been languishing in the Liberals' files for
several years now would only decriminalize marijuana possession, and
only in small quantities. Growing and selling marijuana would still be
illegal. This means the criminal class would continue to monopolize
the trade, with their hidden grow-ups and loaded guns.

It is time for common sense to prevail. We Canadians often pride ourselves
on being more sober-minded than our American neighbours, resisting the
chest-thumping bravado that we associate with militarism. Well then, let us
prove it now. The U.S.-led war on drugs is a failure. To borrow a phrase
that was often heard in the dying days of the Vietnam War: "How do you ask a
police officer to be the last man to die fighting marijuana?"