REEFER MADNESS, AGAIN

The wonderful thing about having Canada as a neighbor was always
knowing that its Molson-drinking, "eh"-affixing, health-care-socializing
denizens were a mostly harmless bunch. Not any longer if you're U.S.
drug czar John Walters.

Wally is exercised about BC Bud, a high-grade, high-potency,
high-price marijuana that will get smokers giggling quicker than the
more mundane stuff grown in Mexico or that hollow out behind Uncle
Billy's shed in Eastern Kentucky. Walters apparently has it figured
that if the old-fashioned stuff could make the characters in "Reefer
Madness" act so insanely, this nuevo-reefer must be, well, as bad as
crack.

"Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana and it is a
dangerous problem," Walters told reporters in April, emphasizing the
pot's potency.

Walter's use of crack bugaboo makes sense. When most people think of
marijuana, they don't think of the end of the world. An annoying
problem, perhaps. Something they don't want their kids messing with,
typically. But nothing so horrifying as crack, which if you didn't
sleep through the latter half of the 1980s, you might recall was
basically considered a bigger threat to America than Soviet nukes.
Newsweek Editor In Chief Richard M. Smith even likened it to the Black
Death in a signed editorial.

It turned out the crack scare was mostly just that -- a scare. The
drug hardly makes headlines any longer, except when Jeb Bush's
daughter is caught in rehab with a rock or two. But people sure
remember that it was nasty stuff; ergo, Wally's use of the spurious
connection to BC Bud.

So how big of a problem is this stuff, really?

"It is one of the reasons why we believe ... we have seen a doubling
of emergency room cases involving marijuana in the last several years
from 60,000 to 120,000," Walters said.

This may not be putting my best forensics foot forward, but the
statistic Walters is referring to is problematic. Generated by the
Drug Abuse Warning Network, the DAWN stat only tracks an examiner's
mention of a patient's use of an illegal drug or misuse of a legal
one; it can't fix causation. Which is why Walters has to say
"involving" rather than "caused by" pot. Further, it's not like
examiners are asking patients if they're toking on BC Bud, Thai Gold,
Super Skunk, Hawaiian Indica, or whatever other strain of marijuana is
available. They could be smoking ditchweed for all anyone knows.

Next, for such a monstrous upsurge, you'd expect to find vast
quantities of BC Bud coming across the border and being huffed by the
bale.

Not so if interdiction numbers mean anything. "Ottawa has said that
Washington's own data shows that of all the illegal pot seized by U.S.
agents only 1.5 percent came from Canada," reports Reuters.

While Canadian-grown weed can be of higher quality and certainly of
higher price than the stuff stamped "hecho en Mexico," what our
Southern neighbors lack in quality, they make up for in quantity.
Using U.S. Customs data, Shannon McCaffrey of the St. Paul Pioneer
Press points out that in fiscal year 2002 authorities snagged 1.2
million pounds of pot coming from Mexico.

By comparison, authorities seized less than 20,000 pounds of Canadian
cannabis.

So which is a bigger problem: high-grade pot as cost-prohibitive as
powder cocaine from Canada or the doobie deluge from Mexico?

How about neither?

Instead, take this more cynical (but more realistic) picture for
whatever it's worth: Drug laws only have public support so long as
drugs are deemed extremely dangerous. Every time an effort to crack
down on drugs is made with new laws, politicians hype the threat
caused by narcotics and other psychoactive substances in an attempt to
whip the public into a frightened tangle of angst-ridden nerves.

More fear means more support for whatever is supposed to alleviate the
fear, and more support means bigger budgets. Every politician knows
how to exploit this peculiar form of calculus.

This doesn't mean that drug abuse does not cause problems. It only
means that pols have every incentive to inflate problems and stoke
dread to get what they want, namely tougher prohibition measures.

But as I argue in my forthcoming book, "Bad Trip," these measures
amplify every problem drugs are supposedly the cause of: crime,
corruption, destructive abuse, the whole nine kilos. It's a
bureaucratic make-work program -- a self-justifying and
self-perpetuating system that both deceives and bilks taxpayers to
keep going.

"We need to have political leadership in Canada that recognizes the
problem," Walters said.

Don't mistake this as an endorsement for Kerry, but given the wild
ideas about BC Bud coming out of Washington, I'd settle for political
leadership here that recognized the real problem: Itself.