THE GREAT MARIJUANA DEBATE

Outspoken Law Professor at Forefront of Crusade to Reform Canada's Pot Laws

Made Career Out of Challenging State's Power

The word "liberty" is scrawled on the blackboard as Alan Young
launches into one of his asides.

Did you know, he asks his students at the University of Toronto, that
commercials for a well-known sexual performance-boosting drug could be
illegal?

A section of the Criminal Code bans advertising drugs intended to
promote sexual virility, he explains.

"Don't try telling me they're not promoting virility -- the guy's
dancing," says Young, the outspoken law professor at the forefront of
the crusade to reform Canada's drug laws.

A decisive moment in the battle is expected Tuesday when the Supreme
Court of Canada rules on whether banning recreational pot smoking is
unconstitutional. Young is a long-time lawyer for one of three men at
the centre of the fight.

Under the circumstances, it seems entirely appropriate that Young is
getting ready to show a movie called Grass. But first he takes the
class through a discussion of other hot-button topics, including
assisted suicide, abortion and a nasty case involving a group of
amorous blood relatives in Nova Scotia who went to court to challenge
the country's incest laws.

Young wonders aloud if they didn't have a point about the government
butting out of their lives, even though he finds their pastime creepy
and "repulsive."

"There are enough sexual partners out there, I think, that you can
leave the family members alone," he says. "But does the state have the
right to ban it?"

Young's provocative manner is a hit with students.

"He's my favourite professor," says Elizabeth Pluss. "He makes it
interesting."

For Young, 46, pushing boundaries is standard fare.

From defending a dominatrix who ran a "bondage bungalow" to a
shopkeeper charged with selling "obscene" records, the
Harvard-educated, self-described "neurotic" has made a career out of
challenging the state's power to use the criminal law to intrude into
people's lives -- and a name for himself as a controversial scholar and
showman. Quite an accomplishment for someone who never wanted a career
in law.

Young's most recent case was a mixed success. Earlier this fall, the
Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the federal government was
unconstitutionally restricting the rights of medical marijuana users
and paved the way for large cannabis growing collectives.

But the court also recriminalized simple possession.

Young hasn't been above some high-profile shenanigans to focus
attention on the cause, including leading a "million marijuana march"
through downtown Toronto. While he enjoys the entertainment factor,
the merry-making usually has a purpose, according to those who know
him best.

Young is a "natural advocate" and "very bright" academic who thrives
on teaching himself and others about the law, says criminal lawyer
Marie Henein, a friend and former student.

And he is a great educator because he "can connect with any audience"
- -- young people especially, since he has a vast knowledge of pop
culture and loves showing it off, says defence lawyer Paul Burstein,
one of Young's closest friends.

Those teaching skills, in turn, make him a good courtroom lawyer
because, in essence, "he is educating the judiciary."

But is Young too talented for his own good? "There are those in the
profession who have very high regard for Alan" -- for the quality of
his work, his courtroom results and the countless hours he's devoted
to cases free of charge, Burstein says. But some "have very little
respect."

"With some of them, it's just politics," he says. "They don't like his
approach to the whole institution of law. They don't like him rocking
the boat.

"And this book is not going to help."

The book he is referring to is Young's newly published Justice
Defiled. In it, Young rips apart the entire "criminal justice
industrial complex." His most vicious criticism is reserved for law
schools, which he calls breeding grounds for "politically correct
little bastards."

He realizes that exposes him to charges of hypocrisy, since the
profession is how he's made his living, but says he wrote the book
while he was coming out of a difficult period personally and
professionally and considering leaving the law altogether.

Within the space of a couple of years, Young's marriage broke up, his
sister died of cancer, he was defrauded by a colleague and became the
target of a student harassment complaint, which ultimately wasn't
pursued. To cope, he took a leave of absence, moved into an apartment
with his Belgian Shepherd, Salem, and spent a year studying Japanese
flute and Shiatsu massage.

For a while he eased the pain by plunging into dozens of minor
criminal trials. When he was asked to write a book, it served "as a
bit of a purge."

In it, he urges ordinary people to "reclaim lost turf" through an
alternative justice system, one that would allow them to represent
themselves in many cases. They'd "get killed" doing that today because
the system is monopolized by a rude and abrasive "knowledge elite"
called lawyers, he says.

Where has it got us? The state is squandering resources prosecuting
cases involving little more than controversial "lifestyle choices" --
such as recreational drug use -- and not devoting enough attention to
serious crimes like home invasions or serial murders, he says. The
needs of victims often get overlooked, he adds.

Being a lawyer was never Young's ambition.He had always wanted to be a
writer, but eventually went to law school, in part, to please his parents.

He worked as a law clerk for Chief Justice Bora Laskin at the Supreme
Court of Canada and later landed a job with leading criminal lawyer
Alan Gold, who advised him that practising law "is a series of lows
punctuated by the occasional high."

Young says he considered the advice so important he's passed it along
to other young lawyers. But it's something he could never accept.

"Some lawyers will ride a jury acquittal for the rest of the year, but
it never worked for me," says Young, who reached a turning point in
1985, while representing one of several men charged in a huge
marijuana and hashish smuggling conspiracy. The ringleader was
sentenced to 18 years in prison. Young's client got 14 years.

Considering people "were going down for two years less a day" for
attempted murder, the outcome left Young feeling disillusioned and
angry.

He escaped into academia. As a professor at Osgoode Hall law school at
York University, Young made a speciality out of challenging laws he
saw as nothing more than "exercises in moral hygiene."

He says he's "seriously independent" by nature and the cases he's
taken on have "suited my personality," even though some might consider
them on the fringe. "Doing conventional murder and robbery cases
largely doesn't change the world."

He began to grow dispirited with teaching law in the mid-1990s. Part
of the problem, he says, was an atmosphere of political correctness
sweeping the school. He also came to believe the faculty valued only
academic research and didn't respect his work as a lawyer.

For the past four years, he has been on leave from Osgoode and
teaching first and third-year criminology students at U of T.

Last summer, he was quietly remarried, to a woman named Laura, who
contacted him after seeing him on TV. Surprising, he says, since he
vowed he would "never remarry." Sort of like how he has vowed to leave
the law? "The fact of the matter," says Henein, "is he loves the law."