GET OFF THE POT

More Than Thirty Years after the LeDain Commission on Drugs, the Canadian
Government Is Still Controlled by Reefer-Madness Zealots

Marijuana was just catching the interest of the Canadian public 34 years
ago when the federal government asked law professor Gerald LeDain to head
up an investigation into recreational drug use in the country.

A growing number of people were being caught with marijuana in their
possession, and Ottawa wanted to know what to do about it. The reports that
came out of the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs are
still considered the gold standard on the subject, and its recommendations
around cannabis are mocking reminders of how far we haven't come.

Whatever you might think of marijuana use, it's clear after reading the
commission's cannabis report - you can find it on the Web - that three
decades on, Canada's pot laws have failed everybody. We're running in place
at great cost, and all because no government has had the guts to face down
the small but vociferous reefer-madness crowd whose uninformed laments
continue to shape drug policy.

So little has changed that the commission's recommendations from 1971 would
be every bit as progressive if they were made today. Having looked under
every rock, reviewed the literature and traced down all the historical
references to cannabis, the LeDain commission concluded the risks posed by
marijuana use simply didn't justify the extreme measures being taken by the
state to prevent it.

Legalize simple possession and cultivation for personal use, it
recommended, but crack down on trafficking and import/export. Don't suggest
to people the drug is harmless when nobody knows for sure, but launch the
longitudinal studies that will clarify that, one way or the other.
Discourage its use among adolescents but not by arresting them.

(One commission member went even further, writing in a dissenting opinion
that the government should regulate, produce and market marijuana.)

The aspects of criminalization that most concerned the LeDain commission
have all come to pass. Young people are still being arrested in great
numbers, and saddled with criminal records that hang over them for the rest
of their lives. A drug that other studies had by then already deemed to be
less dangerous and definitely less "criminogenic" than other drugs,
including alcohol, remains lumped in with the worst of them.

The organized crime that was barely involved in the trade in those years,
the tax dollars that were just beginning to be spent on policing and
prosecutions - all of that has increased dramatically in the intervening
years. The long-term health studies never did get started.

Nationwide, 8,389 people were arrested for possession in the year of the
LeDain report; in 2001, more than 11,000 were arrested for the same offence
in B.C. alone. Despite a common perception that nobody is jailed for
marijuana possession in Canada anymore, about 2,000 people a year still
are. Chasing and punishing illicit drug use now costs Canadians more than
$400 million a year.

"Persons using this narcotic smoke the dry leaves of the plant, which has
the effect of driving them insane," the Los Angeles chief of police told
Maclean's magazine in the early 1920s. "The addict loses all sense of moral
responsibility. Immune to pain, the raving maniacs are liable to kill using
the most savage methods of cruelty."

The chief's comments figured heavily in the country's decision in 1923 to
make marijuana use illegal. Some well-informed dissenting voices were
already out there; a few European doctors were praising the health uses of
marijuana as far back as the late 1700s, the LeDain report noted. But then,
as now, government found itself in the sway of the scaremongers.

And here we are in 2003, a federal decriminalization bill dead on the order
paper, and the debate still raging over what to do about marijuana. This
country has received reasoned, thoughtful input on this subject time and
again but still can't get it right.