CANADA MUSTN'T GO TO POT

Nine unelected members of Canada's Senate recently put forth a rather
controversial proposal: the federal government should transform itself into
a Columbian drug cartel and make lots of money.

After all, Canadians are going to do drugs anyway -- it might as well be
the government that profits.

The brash proposal exhorts the government to legalize marijuana and then
sell it to anyone over the age of 16 (which will undoubtedly work as well
as current liquor and smoking laws). It should further license groups to
cultivate, distribute and sell the stuff, and then collect licensing fees
from producers and taxes from buyers.

This will inevitably put a lot of cash into government coffers, but such
lenience would make Canada the only nation in the world to rescind entirely
the legal prohibition against marijuana.

Apparently that appeals to Justice Minister Martin Cauchon, who says it
could be a good way to make Canada's laws more "efficient."

I'm all for the increased efficiency of anything, but I remain utterly
unconvinced that this proposed nonsense has anything to do with efficiency.

First of all, it seems somewhat unethical for the government to have a
financial incentive to get its people to use addictive drugs.

Particularly when the use of that drug is associated with a myriad of
health and social risks. Even if the health risks of marijuana itself are
deemed to be acceptable, the fact is that smoking marijuana poses the same
health risks as smoking -- only worse.

Far from being a benign drug, smoking two to three joints a day is
equivalent to smoking more than 20 cigarettes each day and produces the
same health problems, including emphysema, cancer and chronic bronchitis.

Our government forces tobacco companies to cover cigarette packages with
photos of tar-blackened lungs, yet one joint has four times more tar than
cigarette smoke and five times the amount of carbon monoxide.

Since marijuana smokers inhale more deeply and hold the smoke in their
lungs four times longer, the resulting damage to the lungs is significantly
greater than from cigarette smoke.

During the 1990s, governments in the U.S. and in Canada found it quite
fashionable to sue tobacco companies to gain financial compensation for the
heightened costs of providing medical care to smokers. So why are the known
medical consequences of using smoke as a drug delivery system now being
ignored?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but could it be because the government --
and not private industry -- will have the opportunity to profit?

A second concern stems from the very research that the Senate committee
itself supposedly considered.

Research shows that 10 per cent of Canadians over age 18 had used cannabis
in the past year, but that number increased to 40 per cent amongst teens
between 12 and 17.

So pot isn't necessarily the drug of choice for adults --- but it is for
kids. Legalization won't send teenagers the message of self-restraint; it
will, however, make drugs easier for them to access and make more teens
eager to experiment with drugs.

Legalization of marijuana may make the law more efficient -- but it will
only do so at the considerable risk of:

1) Exacerbating our current public health problems,

2) Creating a new generation of addicts.

When viewed in that light, it hardly seems worth it.