UP IN SMOKE

Surely the Majority of Canadians Think the Sale and Use of Marijuana
Should Be Decriminalized

'When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two,
and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." Bill
Clinton's famous obfuscation was reported by Gwen Ifill in The New
York Times on March 30, 1992.

Clinton was in England from 1968 to 1970, studying at Oxford
University. He and I overlapped as students at Oxford, although I
never met him. Myself, I did not experiment with marijuana even "a
time or two" when I was in England.

Things might have been different for Bill and me if we had been
hanging out in downtown Toronto's Yorkville district. In Not This
Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the Marijuana Question, 1961-1975
(printed, it proclaims without a hint of humour, on acid-free paper),
Marcel Martel writes that Yorkville at that time "became the visible
manifestation of the counterculture movement ..." Needless to say, in
those days being a member of the counter-culture and clashing with
the establishment meant smoking a lot of dope.

If Bill and I had wandered through Yorkville then, we might have
bumped into that counterculture figure, Pierre Berton. Shortly before
he died in 2004, Berton told the Toronto Star that he had been a
recreational marijuana user since the 1960s. At around the same time
as he gave that interview, Berton was introduced on Rick Mercer's
satirical CBC television program Monday Report as a "marijuana
connoisseur" and gave step-by-step advice on how to roll a joint. He
stressed the importance of a "good rolling surface," and advised that
a joint should be rolled "firm, but not too firm." Thus did one of
Canada's most popular and respected authors, 84 years old, holder of
12 honourary degrees and a companion of the Order of Canada, appear
on the government-owned television network to give instructions on
the proper use of an illegal drug. Hooray for Canada!

Martel's book analyzes marijuana as a topic of social debate and
conflict in the Canada of the 1960s. Baby boomers, he tells us,
smoked marijuana to defy mainstream values. Meanwhile, opponents of
marijuana use maintained that the drug undermined "the traditional
understanding of the acceptable way to function in society. People on
drugs ... constitute a threat to society but also to themselves by
becoming emotionally unstable, by escaping daily reality, and by
promoting unrealistic views about the meaning of life. Furthermore,
drug users lack productivity." Lack of productivity was, no doubt,
seen as the most dangerous threat of all to the Canadian way of life.

Martel reports that the marijuana debate of those days was dominated
by two loose coalitions. One supported existing drug legislation, and
was composed principally of government representatives and agencies
of various kinds, including most addiction research foundations, the
federal Department of Justice and police forces. The second
coalition, which wanted legal penalties reduced, was an even looser
array of individuals and organizations, and included the Canadian
Medical Association and the Department of National Health and Welfare.

The debate culminated with the Commission of Inquiry into the
Non-Medical Use of Drugs (1969-1973), chaired by the mercurial Gerald
Le Dain, then dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and later a judge of
the Supreme Court of Canada. The Le Dain Commission was appointed for
the usual dubious reasons. "With the creation of the Commission,"
writes Martel, "the federal government had gained some time, and
hoped that this would help to overcome its own internal divisions on
marijuana, since major decisions would, of course, have to wait until
the Commission submitted its conclusions."

The Le Dain Commission rejected the legalization of marijuana use,
but suggested that penalties, particularly for simple possession, be
substantially reduced.

But no one cared very much by the time these conclusions were offered
up in the early 1970s. Members of the counterculture had now found
other enjoyable ways to defy mainstream values -- sexual promiscuity,
for example. The Department of National Health and Welfare had
decided that alcohol abuse was the real worry. The federal
government, in a precarious minority position, decided not to stir
the pot and proposed no significant changes to drug legislation.

Not This Time is burdened by the usual ponderous apparatus that
attends an academic study. Bud Inc., by journalist Ian Mulgrew (legal
affairs columnist for the Vancouver Sun and a self--confessed
"long-time consumer" of marijuana), is quite a different matter. It
skips along in a lively and prejudiced manner (Mulgrew strongly
favours legalization of pot), jumping from one undocumented anecdote
to another, nary a footnote or reference in sight. Mulgrew picks up
where Martel leaves off, describing what has happened in Canada since
the Le Dain Commission. According to Mulgrew, marijuana has become
Canada's most valuable agricultural product, with its cultivation
spurred on by the arrival of counterculture Americans in British
Columbia in the 1970s. In his words, "Bud Inc. is a hardly invisible
going concern worth billions of dollars."

Mulgrew's argument is that cannabis prohibition is a public policy
disaster and a legal quagmire. He writes: "The damage prohibition
causes is exacerbated by the violence endemic to the pernicious black
market it spawns, eroding confidence in law enforcement and respect
for the courts."

Why all the fuss? Surely the overwhelming majority of Canadians, and
not just the chattering classes of Toronto and members of the British
Columbia counterculture, regard it as self-evident that the sale and
use of marijuana should, at the very least, be decriminalized.

Recent Liberal governments started to take a very small step in the
right direction, introducing legislation that decriminalized
possession of small amounts of marijuana, replacing criminal charges
with a fine. (Regrettably, this proposed legislation also doubled
sentences for growing and trafficking.) The bill died on the order
paper when Paul Martin called an election for June 2004. It was
reintroduced by the minority Liberal government in November 2004, but
once again an election got in the way, and the Liberals were defeated
in January 2006.

This extremely modest decriminalization proposal was strongly
criticized right from the start by the administration of U.S.
President George W. Bush. The Canadian correspondent for The New York
Times reported that "American officials had warned that the proposed
legislation would force the United States to increase inspections at
the border and thereby risk creating more delays for trade and
tourists." It was also viewed by American officials as a harmful
symbol when the Canadian marijuana industry "is spreading across the
country and exporting widely in the United States."

It came as little surprise on April 3 of this year when the new
Conservative Prime Minister, fresh from his first meeting with
President Bush (at the Mexico summit), announced that his government
would not reintroduce this modest reform into the new Parliament. On
the same day that the Stephen Harper made this announcement, the
Toronto Star reported on its front page that "police forces across
the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], taking their cue from the new federal
Conservative government, are again cracking down on the simple
possession of marijuana."

Will no one rid us of this tiresome issue? It would be easy to
despair at the new government's apparently timid tack, and yet one
can anticipate what might agitate those tortured souls sitting at the
Cabinet table. If marijuana is decriminalized but not legalized, will
that just make operations easier for what were previously criminal
syndicates, while continuing to deprive law-abiding citizens of
lucrative investment opportunities and the government of tax revenue?
If marijuana is legalized, could this country become even more of a
staging post for the export to the United States of drugs that are
illegal in that country, making Canada nothing more than another
Colombia in the steely blue eyes of our American neighbours? Just how
much freedom does Canada have to diverge from the United States on
important matters of public policy?