CANADA UP IN SMOKE: STATSCAN

TORONTO -- It seems more Canadians than ever are going to pot --
smoking up, toking up and generally embracing the sweet weed.

In fact, the proportion of Canadians who admit to indulging in
marijuana or hashish almost doubled over 13 years -- and the highest
rates of use were among teens, a report released Wednesday by
Statistics Canada suggests.

That translates into about three million Canadians, or 12.2 per cent,
who used cannabis at least once in the previous year, the federal
agency said in its 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey. In 1989, the
figure was 6.5 per cent.

Despite the apparent upswing in pot usage, Prime Minister Paul Martin
said in Ottawa that his government remains committed to marijuana
decriminalization and will reintroduce legislation after Parliament
resumes in October.

And Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said that while he is concerned
about the reported rise in drug use, he's unsure arguments that
decriminalization would further increase marijuana use "have any validity."

"My view is that, if you make something illegal, some people are more
attracted to it," he said. "It's just the high in getting something in
a stealth(y) fashion ... If you allow people to possess it in small
quantities for personal use, the allure kind of disappears for some
people."

While the issue of decriminalizing cannabis has been much in the media
spotlight, the latest national figures don't reflect those
discussions: this survey was done in 2002, the year before an Ontario
court judge made a precedent-setting ruling that possessing a small
amount of pot was not illegal, and before Jean Chretien tried to ram
through a decriminalization bill before stepping down as prime minister.

The hike in marijuana's popularity comes as no surprise to Edward
Adlaf, a research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental
Health in Toronto, which has reported similar trends, particularly
from its surveys of Ontario students.

"We've been finding during the '90s among students -- and these are
seventh graders to 12th graders -- that fewer and fewer students
perceive great risk in using cannabis," said Adlaf, noting that about
three-quarters of Ontario students surveyed in the early '90s believed
marijuana or hash posed a danger of physical harm; by 2003, that
figure had plummeted to just over half.