TOKING CHIMPS NOT ONLY SIMIANS AT PLAY IN DRUG WAR

You know the war on drugs has gone ape when a documentary on marijuana
is banned because it shows lab monkeys smoking pot.

The offender in this case -- Ontario's Film Review Board -- later came
to its senses and reversed the ban on Toronto director Ron Mann's
film, Grass.

Board chairman Robert Warren then joined the New York Times and
Newsday in praising Grass, which opens in Vancouver next month.

The archival lampooning of America's failed war on pot "would be a
very appropriate educational video for use by teachers and that sort
of thing," Warren told a reporter.

And the kids will even get to watch the 20-second clip of four
ganja-toking simians from a 1970 U.S. anti-drug film.

The monkeys were restrained as they puffed from a pot pipe, which the
board initially claimed was animal abuse.

Then it heard from outraged folks like Bloor Cinema owner Carm
Bordonaro, where Grass was slated to run.

"You can show people killing people, you can show all kinds of things,
but you can't show chimps smoking? What's with that?"

It was all wonderful material for reefer humour, but the message in
Grass is as serious as a ruling recently delivered by the B.C. Court
of Appeal.

Mann illustrates how the U.S. government's war on pot was fuelled by
Depression-era alarmists who falsely tied marijuana use to insanity,
rape and communism.

The Court of Appeal discovered much the same history in Canada, noting
the hysteria prevalent when pot laws were introduced here in 1923.

Marijuana smokers were thought to be "raving maniacs" who were "liable
to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the
most savage methods of cruelty."

The court found that what pot actually does is make people passive and
quiet. It also found that marijuana is not addictive, there is no
causal relationship between pot use and other criminal behaviour, and
no evidence that pot is a "gateway" drug to harder stuff.

Even with the very low risk of harm, the court ruled in a 2-1 split
that outlawing possession is a political decision and Parliament is
within its right to do so.

The dissenter, Justice Jo-Anne Prowse, didn't buy it.

"In my view, the evidence does not establish that simple possession
presents a reasoned risk of serious . . . or significant harm to
either the individual or society."

She says the anti-possession law violates the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms. The case, involving pot possessors Randy Caine and David
Malmo-Levine, is likely to wind up before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Set against this fascinating legal backdrop are other new drug
developments in Ottawa and B.C.

Health Canada has put out a tender for marijuana -- 100,000 joints and
a couple of hundred pounds of bulk weed -- for use in clinical health
trials. More than 240 budding bud growers have shown interest in
servicing the long-overdue federal action.

In B.C., Chief Coroner Larry Campbell has just announced that overdose
deaths in the province are up 30 per cent this year over last, with
131 fatalities to May 15.

These are not marijuana deaths, but heroin and/or cocaine deaths.
Safe-injection sites and clinical heroin trials are proven antidotes
in other countries, but political leaders still prefer that addicts
shoot up in death-and-disease-filled alleys.

Our fearless leaders prefer it, failures and all, because that's the
way America's Reefer Madness crowd wants it, failures and all.

The smell of skunk is in the air, and it's not only coming from B.C.'s
growhouses.