OTTAWA CAN DO THE RIGHT THING ON POT

About 50 years ago, my grandparents' farm was visited by some RCMP
officers who had spotted poppies growing in my grandma's kitchen
garden. She had planted the flowers for their seeds which, along
with cabbages and potatoes, represent the holy trinity of Slovak
cuisine.

Struggling with her English, she tried to explain this, but the
Mounties didn't buy it. Fuelled by the era's anti-drug, anti-immigrant
bigotry, they assumed my grandma, a church-going mother of four, was a
drug-dealing, Bolshevik-breeding degenerate, harvesting poppies to
supply opium dens. They confiscated her flowers and warned her not to
grow them any more. I remembered this story a couple of years ago when
an acquaintance was arrested for drug possession. Two police officers
had watched his apartment for several weeks, after spotting a
marijuana plant growing near his window. He lived in a poor
neighbourhood above an Asian restaurant and the police, fuelled by our
era's anti-drug, anti-immigrant bigotry, assumed they had discovered a
dealer's warehouse.

They arrested him, trashed his apartment and seized all his illegal
substances - which amounted to the plant they saw through the window
and half a joint.

All told, there was less than one ounce of marijuana, and that
included the entire plant - roots, stem and all.

Plus ca change and all that, only my friend's story has a much
different ending than my grandma's. When his case made it to trial,
the judge, with her docket full of accused rapists and robbers, turned
to my friend, apologized to him and then lectured the arresting
officers for wasting her time and taxpayers' money on such a trivial
matter.

She dismissed the charges. With Monday's Ontario Court of Appeal
ruling on marijuana possession, cooler and more sensible heads like
these may now prevail in the national debate on drugs. Upholding a
decision in the case of an epileptic man who smokes pot to control his
seizures, the court ruled that sections of the Controlled Drugs and
Substances Act dealing with marijuana possession are unconstitutional.
It gave Ottawa one year to amend the act or lose it. Currently, people
with medical conditions that can be relieved by marijuana can only get
it legally through a federal health department program.

It's a ridiculously time-consuming process that has only granted about
50 people legal access to pot, although an estimated 150,000 Canadians
need it to ease the symptoms of AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, epilepsy and
chronic pain. Reluctant to act despite increasing public acceptance of
pot use, the federal government has a year to make one of three
choices: appeal the decision; accept the decision and rewrite the law
to allow for medicinal use; or do nothing and allow the law to be
struck down, effectively legalizing marijuana use.

Appealing the decision would just be boneheaded. By now, the medicinal
benefits of pot are widely accepted.

Who wants to be known as the government that denied cancer and AIDS
patients access to an effective, side-effect-free drug? But I hope the
feds go even further and let the law lapse. Canada's war on drugs is
an ineffective, money- and resource-wasting, public-relations-driven
American import.

True, there is devastating social and economic fallout from addictions
to substances ranging from illegal drugs such as heroin to legal ones
such as alcohol and cigarettes. But addressing that problem through
the criminal justice system has never and will never begin to solve
it.

According to a Statistics Canada annual report on crime, marijuana
accounted for three-quarters of all drug-related incidents in 1999; 66
per cent of those were for possession. That's a huge amount of
policing to fight a benign substance that, at worst, leads to
slothfulness and the munchies. Legalizing marijuana could free
resources for addiction research and counselling.

The federal government should take the appeal court's ruling for the
gift that it is. The government should do nothing for a year,
legalizing pot without really being the one responsible, thus
deflecting any potential heat. This is exactly how the abortion law
was struck down a decade ago. It's the cowardly way to go about
decriminalizing a drug that, frankly, no one really thinks is a big
deal any more. But it's probably the only way for the government to do
the sensible thing.