JUST SAY YES TO DECRIMINALIZATION

You can't swing a cat these days without hitting a public official who
admits that he or she "smoked pot once," usually in an act of "youthful
indiscretion." Yesterday, for instance, Ontario Attorney-General David Young
admitted that he'd "smoked pot once," and went on to claim that he was
"flabbergasted that the federal government has prioritized the
decriminalization of marijuana at this time."

It's an amazing coincidence, really, that every adolescent Canadian in the
1970s who later went into politics only smoked pot once: Virtually none of
them smoked pot twice, or half a dozen times, except for Ontario Premier
Ernie Eves, who has assigned a non-specific number to the number of times he
got high, but has emphasized that all of the times were in his "salad days."

I wonder if there's a personality correlation between smoking pot once and
being a political animal. Maybe incipient politicians are particularly
self-conscious in social situations, and thus acutely vulnerable to the
paranoia pot creates, wherein you worry that you just said something stupid
and that everyone's going to laugh at you.

Of course, this isn't completely off-base, given that there is something
inherently laughable in the need politicians have to splutter their
disapproval about the decriminalization of pot, even while they and
practically everyone they know has smoked it once, and would now have a
criminal record if they happened to share their spliff with an undercover
cop.

The more than 1.5-million Canadians who smoke pot recreationally doubtless
smoke it a number of times. One notices that pot, like Champagne, makes the
rounds at the tail end of wedding receptions, and often turns up at raucous
dinner parties. Some Canadians smoke pot for very particular events, like
going to see The Lord of the Rings or to relax on a husband-wife date
without the kids.

Others smoke it once or twice a week, and still others every few years. A
friend of mine smoked pot for a couple of weeks when she suffered from
lockjaw, and discovered that THC was the only substance that kept her face
muscles from tensing up.

All of these people are the target of the federal government's highly
sensible proposal -- to make simple possession a transgression that is
subject to a fine, like a parking ticket, rather than to expensive,
resource-wasting criminal prosecution.

The police have been advocating this for years, because they actually have
far better things to do than to arrest architects and store clerks at
wedding receptions who are stuffing their faces full of dinner buns and
giggling.

Yet the higher echelons of the police can't let the whole matter go at
decriminalization. No. They have to splutter their disapproval, too. Thus,
we have RCMP Chief Superintendent Raf Souccar telling the press this week
that he would like to see a program of mandated treatment and rehabilitation
for people caught with joints.

He likened such a program to the "john schools" that men must attend when
they are arrested for soliciting prostitutes.

But wait a minute: What in God's name would be taught in these schools, and
who are the unlucky saps who actually get caught these days? Let's take the
person who smokes up to see The Lord of the Rings. Assume that that person
drops his modest stash of homegrown weed on the cinema lobby carpet, and a
cop sees it, which is the only way I can think of him being apprehended.

OK, so he doesn't get stuck with an odious criminal record, but he does have
to receive "treatment and rehabilitation," which is tantamount to treating
and rehabilitating somebody for "eating the whole damn bag of chips," or for
throwing a snowball at a car. It belies the whole point of decriminalizing
pot in the first instance, which is that the principle harm in marijuana is
not its effect upon users, but the involvement of organized crime in the
drug's distribution.

Just last week, another study was published in the United States by the RAND
Drug Policy Research Center in Virginia, disproving the "gateway" connection
between marijuana and harder drug use.

"Kids who have a high propensity to use drugs will use whatever drugs they
have the first opportunity to use," researcher Andrew Morral said. It could
be glue, it could be pot, it could be muscle relaxants. Unfortunately, kids
are the ones who are most subject to criminal prosecution, because they are
the ones who tend to get caught. They are also the only pot users who are
already being exposed to social re-education through school initiatives.

In other words, what the RCMP Chief is proposing would be a complete waste
of money. Yet still, this ludicrous infrastructure of disapproval finds
endorsement: Manitoba's Attorney-General Gord Mackintosh, in opposing
decriminalization, said this week that the feds should take cash "being
wasted on the gun registry ... and divert resources to the enforcement of an
effective drug strategy."

Right. It's called decriminalization, gentlemen.