POT DEBATE FINALLY REACHING A HIGH POINT

Forget Reefer Madness. What we're experiencing across North America
these days is Reefer Sanity. In an Angus-Reid poll conducted last
year, more than half of those Canadians asked said possession of
marijuana should be legalized. And in the U.S., California voters will
soon determine that very issue.

Reefer Madness was the name of a 1936 cautionary "documentary."
Originally called Tell Your Children, it was financed by a small
fundamentalist church group in the U.S. whose intent was to frighten
the beejezus out of parents regarding the dangers of marijuana use
among their children. Ostensibly narrated by a high school principal
whose hands-on experience with his charges made him an expert, it
depicted scenes of teenagers smoking pot, playing "evil" jazz music
and descending into insanity and murder lickety-split.

Then a far-thinking American producer, one Dwain Esper, bought the
rights to the film and recognized a gold mine disguised as a morality
tale. With some judicious cutting and pasting, he edited in a few
campily sexy scenes of little Lolitas vamping under the influence of
killer weed, risking honour and virtue while high.

Reefer Madness became a classic, finding a new audience among young
boomers with dime bags in the late 1960s who would toke up in
university bathrooms and giggle at screenings. Then they would go out
on cue and en masse, murdering and plundering while babbling madly and
enjoying carnal knowledge of one another in public. I made up most of
that last part.

Certainly, our parents freaked, to use the vernacular of the era. In
their minds, pot was grouped with highly addictive drugs such as
heroin or speed and indistinguishable from LSD.

The Canadian solution, inevitably, was to throw a royal commission at
the problem. In the early 1970s, articulate dropouts who

didn't want to panhandle for their daily bread made a handsome per
diem testifying before Gerald Le Dain, the man given the task of
conducting a study on the state of drug use in the country. Excerpts
from the report are instructive, if somewhat innocent-sounding, today.

"Modern drug use," the commission concluded, while estimating that
over a quarter of a million Canadian young people were turning on back
then, "would definitely seem to be related in some measure to the
collapse of religious values -- the ability to find a religious
meaning of life.

"The positive values that young people claim to find in the drug
experience bear a striking similarity to traditional religious values.
[These include] concern with the soul, or inner self, the spirit of
renunciation, the emphasis on openness and the closely knit community
. but there is definitely the sense of identification with something
larger, something to which one belongs as part of the human race.

"It may be an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the
manifestations of a genuine religious revival, but there does appear
to be a definite revival of interest in the religious or spiritual
attitude towards life. As one drug user put it: 'The whole culture is
saying: Where is God? I don't believe in your institutions, but now I
know [He's] there someplace.'"

Those were the days of Reefer Fantasies -- offering a
no-more-realistic account of the effects of cannabis than Reefer
Madness provided. It was sheer naivete to think that anyone could find
a value system, let alone the Supreme Being, in a sliver of hashish.

It took 40 years, but it now seems we're finally entering the era of
Reefer Sanity, with the debate about decriminalizing pot reaching a
high point, as it were.

As we boomers move into our dotage, many of us have taken a
philosophical approach to the use of the so-far illegal substance. By
now, we've worried our way through our kids' teenaged angst, when we
debated how much to tell them about our own misadventures as youths.
Some of us confessed wryly; others remained mum.

A few of us -- be honest -- still indulge in a toke or two from time
to time. But we have no illusions about its spiritual effects. Most us
have found our God or our values in the usual ways.

The bottom line: You can't legislate morality, any more than you can
derive morality out of a hit of weed. Sanity at last.