MARIJUANA : TIME TO STUDY THE LONG TERM EFFECTS

As part of the Conservative minority government's anti-drug strategy,
announced in 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly announced
through a press release that $550,000 will be used to examine a
potential link between marijuana use and the development of
schizophrenia. This style of political maneuvering has become
commonplace during Harper's reign.

He takes a relatively small amount of money out of a larger budget
(the government's anti-drug budget is $30 million) and uses it to fund
a study that could well be damaging for the endeavours of marijuana
activists.

Of course, at face value, doing such a study may not be a terrible
idea. After all, if smoking pot greatly increases the chances of
schizophrenia, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to find
that out. However, in typical Harper fashion, he has shown that his
emphasis is not simply what type of research gets funding, but what
type of person gets to be in charge of said research.

In this case, the money has been handed over to Chris Summerville, CEO
of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada. The problem?

Summerville is not a scientist.

Summerville is not a doctor.

He is, however, an ordained evangelical pastor.

Now, does this mean he is unable to lead a successful study on the
link between marijuana and schizophrenia? Not necessarily. Here is a
quick run down of some of his church's beliefs: all humans are
depraved; we are all sinners; all non-Christians are lost souls;
humans "fell" after eating forbidden fruit from an actual forbidden
tree; Satan is an actual person who needs to be committed to an actual
Lake of Fire. This, combined with a stance against marijuana use, is a
dangerous foundation of unwavering, non-scientific belief for the head
of a supposedly empirical research project to hold. This creates two
main problems for this study.

Firstly, Pastor Summerville may be unable to separate his beliefs from
his research, and the results will be flawed, turning into more anti-
marijuana propaganda to prolong the long, futile battle against its
use. Or the studies results may display a genuine, problematic link
between marijuana use and schizophrenia. Since Harper chose to appoint
an evangelical pastor to lead the project, even legitimate results
will fail to gain traction within much of the populace, who will write
off the work as being done by an ideologically, religiously-driven
nut. That would be unfortunate for Summerville and the study at large,
but would be likely, and would go great lengths to ensure that
consensus on such issues would not be possible.

Stephen Harper has operated on a foundation of what I would call soft
radicalism. Starting in his first campaign victory, he placed gag
orders on his party's members, forbidding discussion of religious and
social positions.

Marijuana, abortion, gay marriage, and evolution were all ignored as
the Conservatives managed to become the sitting government. Harper has
clearly realized that such views are feared by many Canadians. A 2006
poll showed that support for an evangelical to serve as prime minister
had fallen 17 percent.

Only 63 per cent of people said they would vote for an evangelical,
compared with 68 per cent having no problem voting for a Muslim or an
atheist.

As a result, Harper and his evangelical cohorts have had to tread
carefully and quietly to implement a softer pro-religious agenda than
the sorts seen during the Bush years down south.

But the signs are there.

Take, for example, Cambridge MP Gary Goodyear. Despite only serving in
government for four years, he was named Minister of Science and
Technology. With all due respect for Goodyear, he was not qualified
for such an appointment. With little experience in either field (apart
from working as a chiropractor), he has been put in charge making huge
funding cuts in a critical department.

Perhaps Harper was pleased by Goodyear's religious background and
views on evolution.

When asked, Goodyear first described the question as inappropriate,
because he was religious.

Afterwards (perhaps realizing he was in charge of, you know, science),
he hedged, declaring that he did in fact believe in it. Biologist
Elizabeth Elle said of Goodyear's explanation, "I think it
demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution by
natural selection works." What does it say about Prime Minister Harper
that he is happy to appoint a man whose view on evolution is more
convoluted than a Rubik's Cube the size of the Rogers Centre to the
head of the department of Science and Technology?

If you are wondering if this is unfair on Goodyear, think again. Let
us look to America, where many people like to believe that religious
zealots run everything. The tables seem to be turning. Who runs
President Obama's Department of Energy and Science? Only Steven Chu, a
Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a former professor at Berkeley, a
famous advocate for alternative energies. Comparing the two is
embarrassing for Canada and once again reveals Harper's tendency to
eschew actual qualifications in favour of his personal agenda.

As Obama's administration increases spending in areas of science,
development, climate change and more, Harper and cabinet members like
Goodyear are cutting funding to important scientific endeavours such
as Genome Canada. It is quiet, it is soft, and it is difficult to pin
down as religiously-motivated (it cannot of course definitively be
said to be a religious quest).

However, it makes the jobs of this nation's scientists harder to do
and restricts Canada's ability to make its mark in the world of
science. As long as questions like these exist, it will be impossible
to take the scientific output of Summerville's marijuana study and
other similar projects all that seriously.