CANADA DESERVES A FULL DEBATE ABOUT MARIJUANA, BUT WHY DO MEDIA CASE
PROHIBITION AS A FAILURE?

Prohibition has a bad name, though Canadians never run out of things
they'd like to prohibit. Ironic, no?

Politicians and editorial writers cry for the abolition of trans fats,
put bulls, plastic bags, bank fees, SUVs, telemarketers, leg hold
traps, overnight parking, and beer on Sunday. Yet, attempt a serious
discussion on prohibition of marijuana and we're reduced to sputtering
about "a state that does not dictate what should be consumed," as a
pro-cannabis Senate committee put it in 2002.

Advocates of decriminalizing marijuana were buoyed by recent reports
that Canada rates among the world's highest pot users, according to
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and surveys showed
arrests for pot possession last year rose 20 per cent or more.

Media's verdict was nearly unanimous: the pot ban must go. "It's
difficult to understand why possession of marijuana for personal use
remains a criminal offence," wrote The Montreal Gazette.

"There is no sense saddling otherwise law-abiding Canadians with
criminal records for smoking pot," agreed The Globe and Mail.

"The only way to control the purity of the product - and thereby
protect the health of the user - is through regulation of the growth
and sale of marijuana," said The Vancouver Sun.

Edmonton Sun columnist Mindelle Jacobs lamented the "costly and
fruitless attempt to use the law as a whip to scare people off illicit
drugs."

The Hill Times last week published a commentary by British Columbia
Liberal Senator Larry Campbell who wrote, "There is absolutely no
reason that a 15-year old high school student experimenting with
marijuana for the first time should face the prospect of a criminal
record."

Well, there is one reason. Smoking marijuana remains a crime because
well-intentioned people believe if it were not, more children would
smoke it, and everyone agrees smoking is unhealthy. The Senate
Special Committee on Illegal Drugs that advocated legalizing marijuana
five years ago acknowledged, "An exemption regime making cannabis
available to those over the age of 16 could probably lead to an
increase in cannabis use for a certain period." When Jean Chretien
joked about pot in 2003 -- "I will have my money for my fine and a
joint in the other hand," he said -- there were protests from parents.
"As a mother, I am appalled at Prime Minister Chretien," a woman
wrote the Vancouver Sun. "Children are watching you."

Opponents of the pot ban assert history is on their side in claiming
prohibition is "folly" (Winnipeg Sun) by those who are "blind to
history" (Edmonton Sun). A Global TV documentary Damage Done asked,
"Should law enforcement officers be expected to enforce laws that
don't make sense?"

Toronto Star columnist Jim Coyle cited the prohibition of liquor and
winked, "History records how well that worked out."

In fact, it worked out beautifully. Prohibition in Canada is proven
to have discouraged drinking and lowered the crime rate. Historians
rate it a big success.

By 1917, every province but Quebec and New Brunswick was dry. Crime
in Edmonton fell 78 per cent, according to the 1917 Canadian Annual
Review. Prohibition-era Calgary had so little crime it laid off half
the police department. Historian James Gray, in his 1972 chronicle
Booze, documented declines of 50 per cent in crime rates in
Saskatchewan and Manitoba. "If all the liquor involved in all the
lawbreaking reported in a month was gathered in one spot it would
hardly have equaled the booze sold by a single city bar on a single
payday in the pre-Prohibition decade," Gray wrote.

In Ontario, police credited dry laws for a 20 per cent decline in the
prison population. "Prohibition Is A Success From Every Standpoint,"
read a 1917 Globe headline.

Nor was it a uniquely Canadian success. Wartime prohibitionists
successfully abolished beer in Germany, vodka in Russia and absinthe
in France. A 58 per cent decline in alcohol consumption in Britain
between 1914 and 1918 was due to restrictions on pub sales that put
"demon drink demonstrably on the run," journalist E.S. Turner wrote in
his wartime history Dear Old Blighty.

Why does the media cast prohibition as a failure? It mirrors the
popular image of the U.S. experience dramatized in Depression-era films.
Say 'prohibition' and we think of gangland shootings in Chicago, not
police layoffs in Calgary. Yet reasons for prohibition's failure in the
U.S. are often obscured. The repeal of dry laws in 1933 followed inept
enforcement by a federal Prohibition Bureau that was understaffed and
underfunded. The bureau required $300-million U.S. a year and instead
received a fraction as much, as little as $5-million. The entire
country had only 1,500 prohibition agents -- so few that "the statistics
made each prohibition agent responsible for 12 miles of border, 2000
square miles of interior and 70,000 people," noted historian Andrew
Sinclair. Agents were exempt from civil service examinations and
attracted so many grafters and ex-convicts that "corruption in the
Prohibition Bureau became a national scandal," wrote Sinclair in his
1962 history Prohibition: The Era of Excess.

Canada deserves a full debate about marijuana. But it serves no
purpose to malign prohibition per es as simple-minded. Most people
are law-abiding. When the law prohibits pot or liquor, millions are
content to do as they're told.

Now, about those trans fats.