DREARY TALE OF POT LAW FAILURE DRAGS ON

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the historical references to cannabis, the LeDain commission concluded
that 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 that 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, some 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.