HARPER'S YOUTUBE COMMENTS OFF BASE ON MARIJUANA

A Stephen Harper fan and supporter, I applaud his foray into new
media on YouTube last week answering a selection chosen by
Google/YouTube producers from 1.800-odd questions pre-submitted by
the online video service's users.

However, I disagree with the prime minister's take on the dominant
topic addressed - marijuana legalization - which he categorically
dismissed, affirming he's personally been fortunate to live a
drug-free life, and as a parent, drug use is the last thing he'd want
for his own or anyone else's children.

Fair enough. I also prefer and advocate avoiding drug use - not only
recreational use of illegal substances like marijuana, but also the
legal recreational drugs tobacco and alcohol, and both prescription
and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. I part company with Mr. Harper
on his singling out marijuana as a particularly objectionable and
harmful form of drug use.

There's considerable irony in another major news story last week, on
a study by the Canadian Institute for Health Information which found
nearly two-thirds of Canadians aged 65 and older take five or more
prescription drugs on an ongoing basis; 20 per cent take 10 or more,
and six per cent 15 or more prescription medications. I find these
statistics much more alarming than that some 50 per cent of Canadians
have tried marijuana, and roughly 12 per cent (even 4.7 per cent of
armed forces members) are regular users. It's educational to
research the risks and side-effects associated with virtually all
prescription medication, many of them being far more harmful and
addictive than pot.

Here's where I'm coming from on this issue; for many years, I shunned
all sorts of drug use. I had to be in intense, prolonged distress
before I would even take over-the-counter painkillers. I don't drink
alcohol (used to in moderation, haven't for 21 years now), smoke (did
in my teens, quit in my early 20s), or use marijuana (save for
experimenting fewer than a half-dozen times in my teens more than 40
years ago). However, as with presumably a substantial proportion of
the heavy drug-user seniors referenced above, it's remarkable how
living with severe chronic pain 24/7 alters one's perspectives and
attitudes regarding drug utilization.

Being afflicted with progressively worsening fibromyalgia,
polyneuritis, and myofacial pain syndromes, my primary personal
interest in marijuana is medicinal, as a pain-killer, in hope it
would work better than the drugs (all legal) I've been using,
including prescription narcotics (sparingly).

While it's possible to become licensed to use pot medicinally in
Canada, it's a process fraught with bureaucratic and gatekeeping
obstacles, due to marijuana's legal status - lumped in with
indisputably harmful street drugs like crack cocaine, heroin and crystal meth.

I don't advocate or support recreational use of marijuana - or
alcohol, or tobacco - but of those three, I've become convinced that
the illegal one is less harmful than the two legal ones, and that its
negative impact on society derives mainly from its inclusion as a
major focus of the (selective) "war on drugs."

Former Canadian Alliance MP - now Liberal - Keith Martin has said
$150 million would be saved in court costs annually by
decriminalizing marijuana possession. Heath Canada estimates a
lethal dose of cannabis at 20,000 to 40,000 times the amount in one
marijuana cigarette. No other painkilling drug, including
over-the-counters like Tylenol and Aspirin, comes close to matching
marijuana for low-toxicity. Dependence risk is a relatively low nine
per cent, compared with 15 per cent for alcohol and 33 per cent for
tobacco, with marijuana withdrawal symptoms comparatively mild.

On YouTube, Mr. Harper explicitly linked marijuana to organized
crime, his cognitive disconnect being that it's the very
criminalization of marijuana (without parliamentary debate, in 1923)
that made its production and distribution a lucrative enterprise for,
as he put it, "criminal networks." Mr. Harper incorporated a fair bit
of boilerplate ideological rhetoric in his comments, declaring
without qualification that "the reason drugs are illegal is because
they are bad," and that even if legalized, he can "predict with a lot
of confidence" that marijuana would not be produced and sold by
"respectable businesses run by respectable people," and could never
be "a nice, wholesome industry," as opposed to, I suppose, the
tobacco and alcoholic beverage industries.

Whyever not? It's the criminal status of marijuana that makes it
"unwholesome," at least relative to the "wholesomeness" of legal
tobacco and booze.

I know folks who have used marijuana regularly for more than 40 years
while leading productive lives and contributing to the economy and
community. I can't recall any of them ever having hurt anyone,
committed a crime (aside from the marijuana usage itself), crashing a
car while high on grass, or dying of lung cancer. I wish I could say
the same about alcohol and tobacco users of my acquaintance.

Sorry Mr. Harper. There's simply no logic or reason behind "demon
weed" anti-marijuana hysteria.