CANADA GOES TO POT

Dieu merci. Thank God for Quebec. They've gotten us anglos off the
hook yet again.

First, they obligingly claimed the highest rate of opposition in
Canada to our country's mission in Afghanistan, thus letting the rest
of us feel properly patriotic.

Never mind that some 200 Royal 22nd Regiment (Van Doos) from CFB
Valcartier just took off for the land of the poppy -- with 2,000 more
to follow during the summer. In fact, by September, soldiers from
Valcartier will have replaced the majority of our existing troops in
Afghanistan.

Now, in a spectacular gesture of rapprochement with Canada's other
nine provinces and three territories, they've admitted to doing more
pot than the rest of us.

For an upsetting week there, as the result of the United Nations 2007
World Drug Report, it looked like all of Canada was full of smoke --
from the marijuana herb, that is, not the Nicotiania tabacum plant.

The UN report stated that Canadians use marijuana four times more
than people in any other developed country. Some 16.8 per cent of
Canadians between 15 and 64 used pot in 2006.

By comparison, the figure is 12.6 per cent in the U.S., 8.7 per cent
in Britain and 0.1 per cent in Japan.

In all, we came in first in the Marijuana Olympics among
industrialized nations and fifth overall (a far better result than we
managed in the FIFA Under-20 World Cup in which we didn't even manage
to score a goal).

To put it all in perspective, people in Jamaica evidently smoke
6.1-per-cent less pot than do Canadians, although anyone who visits
the Bob Marley museum in Kingston may sniff the air and come to the
conclusion there's enough ganja in that one location alone to win any
contest going.

Anyway, those figures stirred up a lot of discussion in Canada.

"Are we a nation of potheads?" asked the newscaster on my TV, and "Do
Canadians smoke too much marijuana?" demanded a radio talk show host.

One caller had the perfect solution -- 10 lashes at noon every Friday
on the Parliament grounds in Ottawa for anyone caught smoking a joint.

But not to worry. A breakdown of the figures supplied by Quebec to
the UN for its report shows that 32 per cent of their students in
Grades 7 to 9 have toked up at least once in the past year.

And on Tuesday, Quebecers kindly owned up to this fact, leaving B.C.
in the dust at 18 per cent and Ontario at 11 per cent. Overall,
marijuana use in Quebec runs 12- per-cent higher than the national average.

In fact, if Quebec were a sovereign nation, it would have finished
first in pot use among industrial nations, well ahead of Canada. It
is not known at this point whether pro-or anti-sovereigntists will
use this figure to their advantage.

By the way, the Netherlands, which has decriminalized marijuana use,
came in at a trifling 6.1 per cent, a figure which, of course, turned
on the Canadian proponents of decriminalization.

Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer who specializes in drug policy
issues, noted: "The criminal law does not prevent people from using
marijuana, nor does legalization force people to use it."

Oscapella no doubt approved of the previous Liberal government's 2003
bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.

However, Stephen Harper, unaware that Quebec was the main culprit,
killed the bill when his Conservatives came to power in 2006.

All in all though, thanks to Quebec, nine provinces and three
territories can stop worrying about their marijuana consumption.

We need wait no longer to exhale.