TIMID HALF-MEASURE WILL FAIL

A cutting-edge plan - if this was 1968: Replacing the criminal charge for
possession with a fine will change little, or nothing at all.

Marijuana reform has been debated on and off for 30 years, Justice Minister
Martin Cauchon said at a press conference yesterday. The research is in.
The reports are in. "Now is the time to act," the minister boldly declared.

Or at least it sounded bold. Certainly the minister would like Canadians to
think the government's plan is bold. And it would have been -- in 1968.

But this is not 1968. It's 2003, and for more than 20 years now, nations
across the western world have been drastically easing, or even scrapping,
marijuana prohibition. Next to these reforms, the government's bold plan
looks like little more than fresh polish on the police officer's boot.

Only in relation to the ludicrously punitive laws common in the United
States could the government's planned legislation be considered a
significant reform. And even from an American perspective there's reason to
snicker: Fines for possessing small amounts of marijuana have been in place
in a dozen states since the late 1970s; Mr. Cauchon's "modernization" of
marijuana laws puts us on the cutting edge of the Carter era.

Scratch that. Decriminalization wasn't cutting edge even in the days of
disco. Remember Canada's famous LeDain commission? After a massive amount
of research in the early 1970s, the commission called for the legalization
of the possession of small amounts. That was the cutting edge 30 years ago.
Apparently the simple idea of not punishing consenting adults for smoking a
joint in the privacy of their own home remains too radical for the Liberals
to contemplate.

Is it fear of the United States? Is it the alleged straitjacket of
international treaties? Is it worries about exploding use? None of these is
a legitimate objection. A string of European countries has ceased to punish
marijuana possession, and in each case there was no American backlash, no
international pariahdom, no spectacular leap in use.

European experience was a key reason the Senate committee on marijuana
recommended full legalization. Yesterday, Mr. Cauchon called the Senate
committee's report "wonderful." He's right. The Senate's 650-page report is
a masterpiece of thorough research. Too bad the government ignored it.

To understand just how disingenuous the government is being when it fobs
off this plan as major reform, bear in mind two facts about the status quo.
First, half of those currently caught with marijuana are let go with a
warning. Second, most small-amount marijuana possession charges today are
only incidental to other charges (an armed robber caught and found to have
a joint in his pocket will always get that extra little charge, for
whatever bizarre reason). Just about everyone in the justice system agrees
that possessing a small amount of marijuana is no reason to saddle an
ordinary kid with a criminal record or to send a law-abiding citizen to
jail -- which is why these things very rarely happen. So replacing the
criminal charge with a fine will change little or nothing.

There is one caveat on that, however. Criminologists have often found that
lowering, but not eliminating, a punishment results in more punishment.
It's called the "net-widening effect."

Replace charges with fines, and people the police would have let off with a
warning and a wave under the old system will instead by hit with a fine. In
other words, decriminalization could lead to more people being punished,
not fewer.

That's not what the majority of Canadians who support decriminalization
want or expect, but that may be what they're about to get. Hardliners might
think this is just fine on the theory that more punishment would cut use
and improve health and safety. Certainly that's the basic theory of drug
prohibition.

But as I've written before, a tall stack of research says otherwise -- the
most recent being a report by a blue-ribbon panel of American scientists
commissioned by the U.S. drug czar. Does the government have any evidence
to the contrary? I've never seen any, and the ministers have presented
none. If Mr. Cauchon or Health Minister Anne McLellan have such evidence,
perhaps they would be so kind as to share it with the public.

Still more intellectually bankrupt are the government's plans for the
marijuana trade. With tougher punishments and more money for enforcement,
said Mr. Cauchon, "we will decrease the supply of marijuana by targeting
the source."

Here the government has latched onto cutting edge thinking circa 1955. At
that time, a series of drug hysterias in Canada and the U.S. led to the
passage of brutal punishments in both countries. This was followed by an
explosion of drug use, trafficking and cultivation in the 1960.

In the 1970s, most of the draconian punishments were dropped when
legislators finally acknowledged what had become spectacularly obvious:
Tough punishments just don't work. Of course that lesson was quickly
forgotten, but all the contemporary evidence suggests it's as valid as ever.

As I wrote recently, the U.S. spends roughly $40 billion U.S. a year
fighting drugs, and it has truly savage penalties for growing and
trafficking marijuana -- yet 97 per cent of law enforcement agencies rate
marijuana availability as "high" or "medium." Marijuana cultivation in the
United States is so massive that the U.S. is its own largest source of
marijuana.

Do Mr. Cauchon and his colleagues seriously think Canadian police officers
can succeed where the entire American war on drugs failed?

To be honest, I don't think they do. If they did, after all, why wouldn't
they apply the same policies to tobacco? Marijuana and tobacco are both
plants, after all. They both contain drugs. In fact, by any measure,
tobacco is vastly more harmful than marijuana. So if the government is
convinced that criminal prohibition is such a brilliant way to protect
public health and safety from marijuana, why not do exactly the same with
tobacco?

Ms. McLellan took a shot at answering this in the press conference. "In all
honesty, knowing what we know today about tobacco and its health effects,
if one could go back and re-write the script, one might take different
approaches. But that's not where we're at. We have an illegal substance. We
know it has deleterious health effects. It remains an illegal substance."

What was, is. And what is, remains. So goes the government's bold new
thinking on marijuana.