CANNABIS: TIME TO STONE A SACRED COW

Seventeen per cent of Canadians report having used cannabis in the
past year, despite it being illegal. Prohibition, it seems, is hardly
stopping people from using cannabis.

For perspective, cigarettes are available at every corner store and
the Canadian Cancer Society reports that tobacco use stands at 18 per
cent.

When I was in university, one of my favourite people was a Member of
Parliament who represented a very conservative riding yet held very
liberal views on cannabis law reform. On the one hand, he would
maintain that "Your mind is how you experience the world and I can't
see why anyone would allow chemicals to dull the one chance they get
to experience it." But then he would turn on a dime: "Let's be honest,
this government I'm serving can't even keep cannabis out of prisons.
Even in a tiny area guarded with guns, barbed wire, and four metre
high concrete walls, we can't enforce the drug laws. Who here really
thinks we can keep cannabis out of our sparsely populated country
while respecting peoples' privacy and freedom of movement?"

His comments were reinforced recently when the Saskatchewan media
reported actual examples of governments failing to keep cannabis out
of prisons. This news, given that prisons are purposely designed to be
secure, should prompt us to ask whether we are being rational in our
attempts to prohibit cannabis from an entire country that is the
world's second largest and most sparsely populated. We must further
ask if the "cure" - prohibition - has side effects that are worse than
the drug disease.

The conservative C2C Journal to the neo-Marxist This magazine have
recently published arguments similar to that made by the Member of
Parliament. In a thoughtful C2C article entitled "The Price of Pot
Prohibition," Peter Jaworski gives a picture of the difficulties
inherent in a attempting to prohibit cannabis use.

In fact, a 2002 Senate Special Report found that, in 2006, authorities
seized only 50 tonnes, or six per cent, of an estimated 800 tonnes of
cannabis which circulated in Canada, which would seem to indicate that
prohibition is to the cannabis trade as flies are to elephants:
annoying but mostly irrelevant.

But, prohibitionists may maintain, if 17 per cent of Canadians smoke
pot now, imagine if it was legal! Legislation decriminalizing cannabis
use would be an implicit endorsement by the state, and the problem
would get much worse than it is already.

However, the facts say otherwise: In the US, famous for its War on
Drugs and with an estimated half million people in prison for drug
offenses, 12.2 per cent use cannabis, while in the Netherlands, where
people are able to legally buy and smoke cannabis in public, 5.4 per
cent are users.

Further, so long as cannabis is illegal but in common use, an industry
exists in which people can't access the police and court system for
the enforcement of contracts and protection of their property. You can
hardly report to the police that your runner ran off with your
cannabis, or tell a judge that your grower has breached his contract.
As a result, contracts and property rights in the drug business are
enforced in much the same way as they are in the wider economy of
Somalia; by people taking the law into their own hands.

Worse still, the burden of such lawlessness in not evenly spread
across society. While middle-class parents may take some comfort from
knowing that drugs are illegal, it is less well-to-do kids who are
tempted by gangs enjoying the high profits associated with the
dangerous but lucrative business of dealing drugs outside the law.

Finally, while economic projections are notoriously inaccurate, the
best ones we have suggest that prohibition is a bad deal. Based on
current usage and values, Jaworski estimates that a tax on legal
cannabis could generate between $1 and $3 billion, plus half a billion
dollars saved from not having to enforce prohibition. For perspective,
raising the GST by one percentage point would raise about three
billion dollars.

Based on work by the Canadian Centre for Substance abuse, the "social"
costs of healthcare and lost productivity from cannabis is currently
estimated at approximately half a billion dollars. While legislation
legalizing cannabis could double usage (although this seems unlikely
as Canada already has the highest usage rates in the industrialised
world), the country would still be richer thanks to the tax revenue
and enforcement reductions.

It may just be time to kill the sacred cow of prohibition.

David Seymour directs the Saskatchewan office of the Frontier Centre.