KEEPING POT ILLEGAL IS REAL REEFER MADNESS

Health professionals, police officers and parents are deeply concerned
about Statistics Canada figures showing that marijuana use has doubled
over the past decade, from around 7% to 14%.

The 14% regularly using marijuana were too busy to comment because
they were desperately tearing through kitchen cupboards looking for
Doritos. Or Ruffles. Or peanuts. Or broken-up chunks of ceiling tile
dipped in mayonnaise.

Whatever. As long as it goes crunch.

That jump in pot smoking comes as police seized 400% more marijuana in
raids and boosted arrests by 80% over the same decade.

We can learn a few things from these figures.

1. People like to get high.

My generation didn't do dope to get high. My generation did dope to
expand personal consciousness.

Like the Jefferson Airplane sang: Feed your head. (Brief pause while
young people laugh at how self-deluded the baby-boom generation truly
was.)

But actually, that was one of the big selling points. So too the
gesture of rebellion, blah-blah-blah.

Eventually, people learned that smoking dope wasn't a political act of
defiance. It just made you hungry and allowed you to play Frisbee for
several hours without being tempted to do anything useful, or sit
through enough courses to get an undergraduate degree in English
literature without getting bored.

For that matter, it also allowed you to try to find patterns in a
stippled ceiling for an entire evening. I think it also explains the
popularity of the TV show Star Trek.

2. Cops can't stop it.

This shouldn't be a stop-the-presses revelation, given that the last
time we tried something this stupid -- prohibition of alcohol -- all
we managed to do was create giant organized crime syndicates run by
guys like Al Capone. Those crime syndicates are still with us, by the
way. Only now, we have new crime syndicates devoted to distributing
marijuana and cocaine.

3. The experts are morons.

Despite all the whining about how tolerating marijuana will cause us
all to become potheads, the stats tell the story. Of young teens age
15-17, 30% smoked dope in the last year; 47% of 18- to 19-year-olds
sparked up, with the figure falling to less than 10% among people 45
and older.

When you're 45 and older, it's pretty clear that party time is over.
They've been there, done that, have the T-shirt. At 45, your drug of
choice is Metamucil -- sad but true -- and a big night out is seeing
the SpongeBob Square Pants movie with your kids. (And just try to
muster the argument that the guys who write for that show did it
straight and sober. Go ahead. I'll wait.)

4. Marijuana use doesn't screw up your life. The survey shows that
people who smoke dope tend to have higher incomes and higher education
(Get it? Higher? Sometimes I break myself up.) than non-marijuana smokers.

And yes, this is a fact I plan to conceal from my children. When it
comes to parenting, no amount of hypocrisy is enough.

It's also time that we had cops enforcing laws that
matter.

This is a country where you can go to jail for screwing up the
paperwork on a firearm or smoking something that, if you let it, grows
wild in ditches. Let's put cops back where they belong: fighting real
crimes like rape, robbery, fraud, murder ... you know. Stuff like that.

Federal government plans to decriminalize marijuana for those caught
with small amounts are in keeping with the Liberal government's
penchant for never actually solving a problem.

Where do they think the dope comes from? It comes from criminal
syndicates in British Columbia and Colombia. Keeping the production
and distribution of marijuana -- or any other popular drug -- illegal
amounts to nothing more than government price supports for the
industry. Take away the price supports, and you take away the insane
profitability.

And any violence associated with the drug trade is a direct result of
its illegality. You don't see hit squads from Molson's trying to whack
the top guys at Labatt's now, do you?

If you could grow marijuana and sell it outside the black market, the
price would drop and the government could tax it, tax it again and
then tax it some more and it would still be cheaper than it is now.

Government could earn about $2 billion a year, according to the
right-wing think-tank the Fraser Institute.

That's a lot of MRI machines. That's a lot of teachers. That's a lot
of soldiers.

It turns out the only real reefer madness is the insistence on keeping
this stuff illegal.