REEFER MADNESS REDUX

The best pot I ever smoked came from a cabernet sauvignon vineyard in
California, outside my cottage in the Napa Valley. It was minty-green and
very mild. I liked to sit on my patio in the early-evening light, sipping
red wine from the same vineyard as the pot. Somehow the wine and cannabis
complemented each other in a slow, thoughtful way.

I'm pleased the Senate committee studying marijuana has come out in favour
of legalizing it. I was a latecomer to pot, starting in my early-30s. When
I served on the editorial board of The Globe and Mail in the late 1960s, I
didn't smoke pot, though because of my age, 27, I often was called upon to
write editorials about the youth culture when the answers were blowin' in
the wind.

My seniors at the newspaper didn't understand that, at 27, I might as well
have been a grandfather in terms of rapport with the early-20-somethings,
and especially the late-teen-somethings, of the 1960s.

I did make one contribution I believe had an impact on that august board.
That was when a senior member argued vociferously - much like the Canadian
Police Association this week - that marijuana is dangerous because it leads
inexorably to harder drugs such as heroin.

"People on heroin all started with marijuana," she scolded.

I suggested most people on heroin probably started with milk.

I've never written anything under the influence of pot (or booze, for that
matter) but I've scribbled notes and sometimes - not a lot - these
"pot-thoughts" helped me find a way through logjams when I was blocked. (I
once asked the great critic Northrop Frye what he thought of pot and the
other '60s drugs and he told me, "I was curious what insights these drugs
might provide, but people who used them all returned from their trips with
nothing but platitudes.")

The Globe and Mail has come a long way since the 1960s in its regard for
pot. It carried an article this summer by Brian Preston, the author of Pot
Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture. Preston's article details
the contribution marijuana made to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bob
Dylan ("Everybody must get stoned") and the Beatles, especially with their
album Rubber Soul, which they did entirely on pot. Consider Norwegian Wood:
"She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh/ I told her I
didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath."

What most impressed me was the news that jazz great Louis Armstrong, born
in 1901, smoked pot - he called it gage - every day of his adult life. As
Preston writes, Armstrong ended many of his concerts by playing 250 or more
high Cs, capped with a high F.

I've never felt like smashing anyone in the face while under the influence
of pot, unlike my erstwhile Irish belligerence when under the influence of
whiskey or beer. Under the influence of pot I hear base tones better, and I
like to laugh at my toes.

Last year when the Canadian Police Association appeared before the Senate
committee on illegal drugs it testified that the Netherlands, where
marijuana is freely available in cafes, has the highest rate of violent
crime in Europe and a murder rate three times that of the United States.
Figures from the United Nations for 1998, however, showed that the murder
rate was 15.20 per 100,000 in the United States and 1.81 per 100,000 in the
Netherlands.

The kids of the New Millennium, like the kids of the '60s, see through the
Reefer Madness hysterics of their elders, which results in a disrespect for
the law. Worse, it could possibly lead them on to harder and truly
dangerous drugs such as crack. If the cops are so wrong about pot, a kid
may reason, maybe they're wrong about crack, too.

As editor of a student newspaper at the University of Manitoba, I once
wrote an editorial I thought was rather clever. It assumed a world where
everybody was drunk or stoned and then someone comes up with a drug that
makes you sober.

Like, wow, man! A gram of this, baby, and, like, we all can be Northrop Fryes.

Preston, the author of Pot Planet, cites Australian economist Carl A.
Trocki who argues that Britain built its 19th century empire on the global
trade of drugs - alcohol, tobacco and opium - and "drug foods" such as
sugar, coffee and tea. "Without drugs and drug economies, capitalism could
never have come into being," Trocki says in his book Opium, Empire and the
Global Political Economy. "These new consumer markets were built on
commodities that no one had ever really consumed before, and which, in
general, were totally unnecessary."

I've been off cigarettes for nine months. I'll partake of pot if someone
passes a joint my way, but what worries me is that some people lace very
potent joints with cigarette tobacco to soften the punch. This means I
could unintentionally ingest nicotine and be back to my old pack-a-day,
$300-a-month habit.

Why don't they come up with a marijuana patch that would allow me to
appreciate the base tones and still laugh at my toes?