FINE BALANCE

IN THE United States, the religious right claims to speak for the "moral
majority" when it campaigns against liberal values.

In Canada, the "quiet consensus" is invoked, not to stop liberalization,
but to justify it. Up here, the "quiet consensus" is the Gulf Stream of the
political climate, progressively warming our leaders to social change -
from Sunday shopping all the way to gay rights and tolerance of abortion.

Drug policy is no exception. When Justice Minister Martin Cauchon unveiled
his plan this week to decriminalize possession of small amounts of
marijuana, he drew from the age-old well of the silent majority, saying
"most Canadians" believe our pot laws are outdated.

No doubt, this is true - some surveys have shown up to 70 per cent of
Canadians support modernizing drug laws; a generation ago, it was a 50-50
split. Strangely, the existence of a vague consensus does not appear to
have made Mr. Cauchon's plan any less contentious.

Caught between critics who think Ottawa has gone too far and those say it
hasn't gone far enough, he is finding it lonely in the middle. But we
believe he has struck a fine balance.

There is nothing in Mr. Cauchon's bill that encourages cannabis abuse.
Marijuana possession is still illegal. Possession of 15 grams or less is
punishable by a fine, a heftier one if you're an adult. If you have between
15 and 30 grams on you, you could be either ticketed or charged, and face
up to six months in jail. Graded offences would also apply to pot growers.
Cultivating one to three plants at home is subject to a $5,000 fine or a
12-month jail sentence. The current penalty can be as much as seven years
in jail, but the revised one remains too harsh in the sense that
do-it-yourselfers risk less by buying it from the black market. However,
under the new law, cultivating 50 plants or more could now net you a
maximum of 14 years.

This is hardly the free-for-all that opponents have been howling about.
With such deterrents and trafficking penalties jacked up, we fail to see
how Canada has declared a pot-smoking holiday or issued an open invitation
for youth to get tokin'.

While pot smokers may quibble with the threshold - they say 15 grams is too
low and 30 grams doesn't make you a trafficker - the line had to be drawn
somewhere. What's important is folks will be spared criminal records for a
relatively harmless indulgence - a mark of Cain that can dog them for the
rest of their lives. Authorities are also being spared the expense of
prosecuting such cases, of which there are too many, and of jailing offenders.

What this bill does not address is the problem of the uneven application of
the law. Urban police have traditionally been more lenient towards pot
smokers, letting them off with a warning, and their rural counterparts less
so. With these reforms, police are given an enormous amount of discretion,
not only over the severity of the fine, but over whether criminal charges
should be laid.

It's not just the urban/rural dichotomy which is a concern here, but class
divisions. "History tells us that the disadvantaged and minorities will
disproportionately suffer under a regime of that nature," York University
professor Alan Young told the Globe and Mail recently, and he's right.

The government has also proven a bit wobbly on the prevention side of
things. To counteract its softer line towards small-time cannabis
afficionados, it's pouring $245 million over five years into programs aimed
at education, research and rehabilitation. It had promised to spend twice
as much. Which goes to show that when governments relax social controls -
whether it's on gambling or drug use - their initial enthusiasm for
prevention and assistance programs quickly wanes in the face of budgetary
pressures. As time wears on, addicts increasingly get left to their own
devices.

But on balance, Mr. Cauchon's package is a good one. By giving users more
leeway, it addresses the domestic reality that one-third of Canadians have
smoked pot, and that making criminals out of them is futile and unfair. But
by jacking up the penalties for traffickers, it also sends a message to the
zero-tolerance Americans, who could make life miserable for us, that we're
serious about nailing the real criminals: grow-ops that export billions in
potent weed across our shared border.