SENATOR BACK-PEDALS ON MARIJUANA

A Liberal Senator has thrown the Senate's unanimous call for the
legalization of marijuana into doubt, saying she only supports the
decriminalization of the drug.

"I wasn't at the last meeting and I don't agree," Shirley Maheu said
last night.

"I don't feel that we've come to a consensus that we ought to legalize
marijuana."

Ms. Maheu, a Liberal from Montreal, wasn't at the committee's final
meeting where members voted on the 600-page report, and she doesn't
feel she should have been lumped in as supporting legalization.

That Ms. Maheu doesn't agree with legalization was news to committee
chairman Pierre Claude Nolin. "What?" he asked. "She received the
report, she read the report. No, no, no, she cannot say that."

Mr. Nolin said his Senate colleague is probably back-pedalling because
she's afraid her former constituents in Montreal will get upset. "This
is troubling," he said. "She knows exactly what we were doing. I think
she's probably afraid of the turmoil."

Mr. Nolin admitted Ms. Maheu was not at the meeting where a vote was
held, but insisted she understood what was going on.

"She received copies of all the written material," he said. "It was
sent to her and she reviewed it. I spoke to her many times. She was
part of our discussions. She knew that we were taking the vote that
day. She said, 'Unfortunately I cannot be there, but don't worry.'
"

Meanwhile, Ms. Maheu insists "senator Nolin never used the word
legalization with me."

For her part, she admitted that if she wanted to formally dissent, she
should have written a dissenting report. But, she said, the timing was
difficult for her as she's been on vacation.

"It was the timing and we don't have staff in the field," she said.
"Last week, I was in Vietnam - we did a symposium with female MPs
over there - and I come back and get hit with this."

Ms. Maheu said she objects to the idea of 16-year-olds having legal
access to marijuana. She also doesn't agree with the statement that
it's less harmful than alcohol.

"None of this has been absolutely proven," she argued. "And if we
don't want people to smoke, why are we going to give 16-year-olds
permission to smoke marijuana? I'd hate to be a mother of a
16-year-old reading this report and seeing that there's a chance the
government's going to let my child smoke marijuana."

Last night, she was trying to reach the other committee members to
find out if they were at the meeting and if they supported the report.

"I don't know how many were there, but I'm going to find out," she
said. "There's a big difference between two saying we were unanimous
and three or five not being there."