STONED HELPS CLEAR THE AIR OF HY-POT-CRISY

If Canada ever decriminalized marijuana, there wouldn't be an unmolested bag
of Doritos left in the country.

And that's just about the worst thing one can say about the weed, as Stoned:
Hemp Nation On Trial attests.

This fast-paced documentary, which first aired last year on Newsworld as the
Ross Rebagliati scandale was firing up, gets another run tonight, on Channel
57 at 8.

It's the story of Chris Clay, the London, Ont., man who, in 1995, was
arrested in his head shop after selling marijuana plant cuttings to an
undercover cop. His inventory was confiscated, his staff busted too.

Clay, who never hurt more than a panful of fudge brownies, was looking at a
life sentence for trafficking.

Meanwhile, an armed robbery was going down at a nearby bank but the police
were too preoccupied with rounding up a bunch of potheads and their hemp
t-shirt inventory than gunmen.

And so it goes with the marijuana laws in this country, despite the 1972
LeDain Commission report which, according to the University of Western
Ontario's associate dean of law Robert Solomon "debunked the mythology" of
pot leading to harder drug use, forcing up the crime rate, etc.

To drive home the point, filmmakers Russell Bennett and Sarah Jane Flynn cut
their film with clips from the hilarious 1936 anti-pot flick, Reefer
Madness, which depicts women selling their bodies in return for a doobie.

Stoned boasts some impressive interviews, including those with
pharmacologists, criminologists and even the judge in the Clay case, all of
whom agree that marijuana is not only less addictive than caffeine or
nicotine but results in less destructive behaviour than alcohol.

Of course Stoned is one-sided. Only one politician is shown saying that
marijuana is a menace to society.

But maybe the reason for that apparent one-sidedness is that there's little
evidence that the laughing cabbage will hurt you more than make you forget
what you meant to say at the start of your sentence.

And, since the Addiction Research Foundation helped fund this film, you have
to figure that not many facts were left out.

Fact is, at least according to Stoned, the only thing standing between
Canadians and legal cannabis is a lack of legislative will.

No politician has the gumption to lobby for ganja.

Now if only all the politicians, journalists and boomer-age parents in this
country stood up and admitted to having inhaled, the air in Canada would be
a whole lot clearer.