CANADA SATIVA

Before George W Bush's War on Terror, there was Richard Nixon's War
on Drugs ("America's public enemy No. 1," he had said). But then,
Canada, America's 'higher' neighbour, always had a confused attitude
towards drugs. If in 1977, Rolling Stone Keith Richards was famously
arrested by the Mounties for heroin and cocaine possession, only two
years later Canada's First Lady Margaret Trudeau was caught smoking
cannabis with the same Richards and his band mates. With this legacy,
Canadian Nato troops in Afghanistan must be forgiven for being
overwhelmed on stumbling across what has been reported as
"impenetrable forests of 10-feet high marijuana plants".

While America is trying to grow potted democracy all over the world,
Canada realises that uprooting age-old systems and habits is not the
way to go about things. So when General Rick Hiller, Chief of the
Canadian Defence Staff, stated in Ottawa last week that the Taliban
were using forests of cannabis sativa as cover, we understand why his
troops refrained from conducting a 'scorched earth' policy. Well,
they did try burning them. But apparently too much moisture in the
plants made them impervious to flames.

One suspects that because burning marijuana usually leads to the
inhalation of its smoke, which in turn leads to the chemical compound
tetrahydrocannabinol reacting with the brain, Gen. Hiller did not
quite tell us the whole story. But then, one just wonders whether the
Taliban, hiding in the bushes, smoke their own camouflage