TAKING POT SHOTS AT AMERICANS

I did not watch ABC's Barbara Walters interview of Monica Lewinksy. After
the event, a San Francisco Examiner columnist wrote, ``If you're a normal
American, you watched.'' So there you are.

Even more un-American, I suppose, is the fact I welcome Allan Rock's
decision to begin trials of marijuana use as medication for treating those
with chronic illnesses or for the terminally ill.

The announcement is something less than heroic - although enough, perhaps,
in military terms, for a mention in dispatches - and it is far from timely,
but a generation late. Still, it's a start toward dymystifying and
demythologizing the least dangerous and least addictive social drug we know.

Rock's cautious initiative will flutter the dovecoats, and stir the
pharmaceutical and tobacco lobbyists; this sort of thing can get out of
hand. The next we know, people will not only be smoking pot in saloons but
in salons.

Surely, there is something in the North American Free Trade Agreement to
prevent this. After all, the Americans lock people up for smoking marijuana.

At the very least, they would want us to give their immigration officials
the authority to drug-test and strip-search all Canadians seeking to fly to
the States, or motor to Buffalo, for signs of cannabis use.

While Canadian politicians are merely timid about legalizing marijuana,
American politicians are obsessed with the subject, and with the effort to
prohibit its sale and consumption.

They have become a world busybody, trying to keep the stuff from reaching
American consumers.

One of Rock's problems with his new policy is to find enough good grass to
complete his clinical trials.

He could grow his own - there are many Canadians happy to tell him how - or
he could buy it on the street in Ottawa, or from sources on Parliament Hill.

What he can't do is buy marijuana abroad because the Americans wouldn't
stand still for that.

St. Vincent in the Grenadines grows a good strain. An island with high
unemployment and considerable poverty, ganja farming has created hundreds
of island jobs and a reliable cash crop.

According to Carribean Today, a program carried on radio stations
throughout the Carribean, ``The figures for marijuana produced (on St.
Vincent) is much more than the national budget... Hundreds of households
have benefited tremendously from the marijuana trade. People who had shacks
now have very good houses. People who couldn't pay bus fare now own
vehicles.''

The island government, however, wants to destroy the plantations. ``U.S.
troops,'' the report says, ``are already on the island for the exercise
which is scheduled for next month (January, '99).

The ``exercise'' is one of destroying the crop by fire. In Nicaragua and
Columbia, the U.S. government also is destroying drug plantations, most of
them growing cocoa. In these cases, as with others, the Americans provide
alternative economic support: Farmers are provided funds for alternative
agriculture. The St. Vincent farmers get nothing.

According to Carribean Today's report, ``The Americans come, they burn, and
they go. And they create a lot of collateral damage, in that people's legal
agricultural crops are destroyed in the process.

``And there is no real clear indication to us that the chemicals which are
used in the destruction of marijuana plantations are not harmful to normal
agricultural production.''

The Americans, I fear, are becoming increasingly belligerant and pushy.

They refuse to support the world ban on land mines. They have gone simply
bananas while pushing their new biotechnology, even threatening New Zealand
- - another island - for its reluctance to overlook the concerns of its own
people on the subject of genetically modified foods and, instead, scurry to
support America's commercial interests.

Canada, not unexpectedly, has supported these pressure tactics, as has Tony
Blair's government. For shame.

And of course, the Americans sabotaged the world conference at Cartegena,
Columbia seeking a ``biosafety protocol'' to be represented by world
agreement on rules to regulate trade in genetically modified food and crops.

Such products are a multi-billion-dollar business, and the American
corporations own it. Our government is dutifully jogging along in support
of the Americans.

With Monica gone, perhaps we will be better informed about genetic
modification and about globalization, American-style, and the perils thereof.

In my most recent column, It's now obvious: Girls are smarter than boys, I
mistakenly identified benefactors of a national university scholarship
awards program; the true sponsor is Canada Trust.

Further to our subject, I learn that in the first two years of the program,
3,759 of the high school applicants were women and 1,145 men. In the past
three years, 46 Canada Trust scholarships were awarded to women, 15 to men.

Dalton Camp is a political commentator. His columns appear Sundays and
Wednesdays in The Star.