LET'S FACE FACTS: IT'S TIME TO MAKE MARIJUANA LEGAL

I can't imagine how much money has been spent in 100 years of trying
to rid the country of marijuana. But however many mega-billions it
adds up to, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it's
all been for naught.

I mean, one look at the TV footage of that great big barn of a
marijuana operation discovered alongside the highway in Barrie, Ont.
tells you everything you need to know about how the "war on drugs" is
going in Canada. Not well.

I guess we could blame police, although it seems to me they've been
trying their damnedest for the better part of a century now. Or maybe
the courts for being too lenient in their sentencing. Or the Summer of
Love.

But I'm thinking that the real problem is us, smoking marijuana by the
bushel from one end of the country to the other and then acting like
it's a surprise that a hot little growth industry has sprung up to
keep us supplied.

Market forces are a powerful thing, especially when the product in
question brings pleasure. People like pleasure. They'll seek it even
when it's illegal, which is why laws to stop drug use and prostitution
have had little effect.

And as long as there are buyers, there are always going to be sellers.
That massive hydroponics operation in Barrie, not to mention the
20,000 or so grow operations right here in B.C., exists because
there's a phenomenal demand for marijuana.

What's to be made of that? An illegal drug that four generations of
Canadians have been warned away from, at times hysterically, continues
to be in such demand that an extensive and complex industry has
developed to serve an immense market.

Have we gone mad? Don't we know what happens to people who smoke
marijuana?

Yes, we probably do, which would explain why an estimated one million
Canadians regularly break the law around marijuana possession. Because
the truth is that nothing too bad happens when people smoke pot.

That's not to say that the drug is good for you. Few drugs are. But
marijuana also isn't the insane-making, violence-inducing,
soul-destroying substance that it has been made out to be for too many
years to count, a fact that a long line of users has happily
discovered for themselves.

If marijuana had been dealt with from the start as the rather
interesting garden plant that it is, the cautionary tales we all heard
as kids might have focused on health risks from smoke inhalation and
the drug's detrimental effect on the immune system, or its poor fit
with school, work and heavy equipment. Informed decisions could have
been made based on the drug's actual risk factors.

Instead, we got the reefer madness treatment. We got the scary
lectures and the frightening movies in guidance class. We got the
"Just Say No" campaign as it trickled north from the U.S., and then
the "gateway drug" version a few years later. When we smoked pot
anyway and the sky didn't fall, we ended up concluding that we'd been
lied to.

Which has brought us to the point that we're at now, where marijuana
use is so common -- and the laws so widely ignored -- that urban farms
are springing up everywhere from posh neighbourhoods and middle-class
basements to abandoned breweries along one of the busiest highways in
the country. And now we really do have a problem, because organized
crime owns the vast industry.

What's the solution? Give up the fight. Legalize marijuana.

Knock the illegal profit out of the business by returning pot to its
humble roots as a simple plant.

Let people grow it in their yards instead of skulking down to
Centennial Square to see if some kid can buy it for them.

Lift the curtain of shame around Canada's bustling marijuana trade and
recast it as a legal enterprise that we Canucks are obviously quite
good at.

The country's marijuana industry thrives because people like the
stuff. And while it's not necessarily good for them, neither is it
terribly bad, particularly when compared to legal drugs such as
alcohol and nicotine.

So let's quit the foolishness and move on. We've gone to pot, and
there's no going back.