TIME TO LEGALIZE POT

Last year, the Association of Canadian Police Chiefs announced support for
the legalization of simple possession of marijuana and hashish.

Recently Keith Martin, a Reform MP (and a practising emergency room
physician), introduced a private members bill that would decriminalize
marijuana.

And while his bill has languished, its gist has been adopted by the
Liberals. At the final plenary session of the Liberal convention, delegates
backed a proposal to decriminalize simple pot possession.

This movement to call off the war against marijuana is gaining strength in
other countries as well. A report prepared for the British government by
Viscountess Runciman, Drugs and the Law, suggested this week that marijuana
possession should be punishable only by fines.

In the United States, half a dozen state referendums since 1992 have urged
the legalization of marijuana for medical uses. And some legislators -- such
as Republican congressmen Jim Ramstad (MN) and Tom Campbell (CA) -- have
publicly charged that the "war on drugs" has been a costly failure.

None of this suggests that decriminalizing marijuana would be a positive
good. The drug is still something to be discouraged. It is mind-altering;
and smoking it is both physically and psychologically unhealthy.

If recreational marijuana use could be wiped out at one stroke, the world
would be a better place -- as it would be if tobacco could be removed from
the world and our memories.

But such developments are a more impossible dream than anything experienced
under hashish.

And the actual policy we have -- the war on drugs -- does a very great deal
of observable harm. Because the drug trade is illegal, it is unregulated and
untaxed; there is no quality control and some illegal drugs are strengthened
with cheap poisons; disputes are settled gangland style by sawn-off
shotguns; massive teams of policemen are diverted from solving worse crimes;
others are corrupted; and respect for the law is eroded when millions of
young people are enticed into flouting a law that is itself enforced
capriciously. The sum of all of these social harms outweighs the threats
posed by the object of prohibition itself -- and that prohibition is
manifestly ineffective. Even under the war on drugs, they are readily
available in any North American city. And though marijuana is dangerous,
exactly how dangerous is it?

According to the World Health Organization, every year tobacco kills
3.5-million people directly or indirectly. Alcohol kills another 750,000.
How many are killed by marijuana?

None. Almost none anyway.

According to The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, "there are no
confirmed published cases worldwide of human deaths from cannabis poisoning
... the most serious possible consequence of acute cannabis use is a
road-traffic accident if a user drives while intoxicated."

Marijuana, moreover, is not addictive and, unlike alcohol, does not promote
aggressive behaviour.

In a report on the medicinal uses of marijuana commissioned by the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Institute of Medicine
concluded last year that "except for the harms associated with smoking, the
adverse effects of marijuana are within the range tolerated for other
medications."

Yet Canadian police departments spend millions on the criminal campaign
against this substance.

Almost three out of every four drug arrests involve cannabis. Cannabis
possession alone accounts for almost half of all offences. Some sufferers of
cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and epilepsy who rely on
marijuana to effectively palliate their symptoms are prosecuted as
criminals -- or hamstrung with maddening bureaucratic roadblocks. And all
the while, cigarettes are sold over the counter in pharmacies and
convenience stores; and alcohol is on the menu at Red Lobster.

We try to contain the ill effects of alcohol and tobacco by public
education, labelling requirements, strict quality control, restricting
access to minors, and so on. Over the centuries our society has developed
cultural safeguards and social conventions that help us to use alcohol
wisely. And we distinguish between the use and abuse of these socially
acceptable drugs in a way that we have not yet learned to do toward
marijuana.

Marijuana legalization has long been the subject of academic debate.

The time has come to turn conjecture into law. Canada's police, judges and
prosecutors have better things to do with their time than track down those
who produce and consume a substance no more dangerous than alcohol and
tobacco. We should begin the decriminalization of marijuana by immediately
reducing the punishments that can be imposed for its possession to modest
fines -- and start thinking about how to regulate its use.