IS IT HIGH TIME TO LEGALIZE POT?

I love the concept of the tipping point -- the idea that there can be
a single moment in time when one last critical molecule of resistance
crumbles and the whole damn mountainside comes down.

Egypt recently found its political tipping point. Rosa Parks was a
tipping point for racial discrimination in America.

I believe another tipping point was reached last month in Missoula
County, Montana.

A kid by the name of Touray Cornell faced a felony charge: possession
of an illegal substance punishable by serious prison time. The
substance: marijuana, found by a police raid on his home. The amount:
1/16th of an ounce.

One-sixteenth of an ounce equals less than two grams. Too little to
roll in a cigarette paper. You could be carrying 1/16th of an ounce
of pot around in your pant cuff right now and not even know it. But
Touray Cornell was charged and he was going down, just as soon as
Dusty Deschamps, District Judge for Missoula County could select a jury.

Er ... small problem. When each prospective juror learned what the
case was about and how much 'drug' was involved, they refused to
serve. Juror after juror told the judge they would refuse to convict
anyone over such a miniscule amount of pot. Twenty-seven prospective
jurors were polled; twenty-two of them said that not only would they
not convict, but the whole farce was a waste of taxpayer money. "It's
a mutiny," wailed the District Attorney.

High time too. The war on marijuana has been going on for 100 years,
give or take. It is impossible to calculate the money, man hours and
human grief it has cost, but the price tag is surely in the hundreds
of billions of dollars.

And the result? When I was a youth you pretty much had to be on a
first-name basis with a jazz musician if you wanted to score some
pot. Nowadays? Just hang out around any schoolyard or shopping mall
and look interested. The Grade Eight connection will find you.

Historians in the future will shake their heads to learn there was a
time when people could spend years behind bars for possession of a
barnyard weed. Get caught with a baggie in your backpack in
jurisdictions like Texas and life as you know it is over, but even in
B.C. Bud-happy Canada you pay a heavy price.

There are three people in my life who have criminal records and hence
cannot cross the U.S./Canada border. Ever. Their offence? They were
caught -- three or four decades ago -- with a joint in their pocket
or a couple of roaches in the car ashtray.

Most of the blame for Canadian hysteria over marijuana can be laid at
the feet of a single Albertan, Ms. Emily F. Murphy of Edmonton. Ms.
Murphy, a juvenile court judge back in the 1920s wrote under the pen
name Janey Canuck for Maclean's Magazine. And she spewed some truly
astounding crap. She wrote -- and Maclean's published -- that all
marijuana users were "non-white and non-Christian, wanting only to
seduce white women."

"Behind these dregs of humanity," she wrote, "is an international
conspiracy of yellow and black drug pushers whose ultimate goal is
the domination of the bright-browed races of the world."

Murphy's Palinesque ravings turned into a best-selling book and --
incredibly -- influenced Canadian law. Marijuana was declared
illegal; its possession punishable by jail time.

"A decision was made without any scientific basis, nor even any real
sense of urgency, placing cannabis on the same basis as the opiate
narcotics, and it has remained so to this day."

So said Justice Gerald LeDain in his Royal Commission of 1972. That's
nearly 40 years ago. Canadians can still get a record for pot possession.

I wonder if we'll ever become as brave as those jurors in Missoula County.