FOR SENSIBLE MARIJUANA POLICY, GO NORTH

Among American officeholders, there are two points of view about the drug
war. Some are for it, while others are really, really for it. In Canada,
though, Prime Minister Jean Chretien has said something no American
politician would ever say: Marijuana users should no longer be treated like
criminals.

Given Canada's opposition to American policy on Iraq, you may wonder why
those puzzling people up north are so out of step on everything. Maybe
there's a reason they put the loon on their coins. Actually, the drug war
has some things in common with the Iraq war: The United States has found
itself without many allies, facing vocal disagreement in many countries. The
big difference is that we don't have a prayer of winning the war against
drugs.

The Bush administration is clearly unhappy about the Canadians' habit of
thinking for themselves. John Walters, director of the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, expressed deep disappointment: "You expect
your friends to stop the movement of poison to your neighborhood." He may be
forgetting that the Canadian government controls only its own neighborhood
- -- unlike the U.S. government, which aspires to rule a lot of the world
beyond its borders.

U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci warned that decriminalization might force
American customs agents to spend more time checking out Canadians entering
the U.S. Well, of course. I mean, our law enforcement officers have never
had to worry about people smuggling pot into the country before, have they?

But decriminalization in Canada wouldn't have much effect on drug use in
America. How do I know? Because decriminalization in America hasn't had much
effect on drug use in America.

Yes, it has been tried here -- and not, as you might expect, in just a few
locales that are still stuck in the '60s. According to The National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 13 states no longer make a
habit of putting people in jail for smoking a joint, including such funky
places as Nebraska and Mississippi.

What happens when a state decriminalizes marijuana? People immediately seize
the opportunity to go on behaving exactly as they had behaved before. A 1999
study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences found that marijuana
use in states that relaxed their laws was no different from states that
didn't.

The Netherlands has gone further still. Though cannabis is technically
against the law, the government allows it to be openly sold and consumed. In
their 2001 book "Drug War Heresies," Robert MacCoun of the University of
California at Berkeley and Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland noted
that by effectively legalizing pot, "the Dutch have significantly reduced
the monetary and human costs of incarcerating cannabis offenders with no
apparent effects on levels of use."

If you looked at just the comparative popularity of marijuana, you might
assume we were the ones with the permissive laws. Dutch teenagers are less
likely to smoke pot than American kids. In fact, a survey of teens in 30
European countries found that all of them have lower rates of cannabis use
than we do. Conservatives often warn about the unintended consequences of
liberal schemes, but they haven't noticed that our pot laws seem to be
fostering drug use instead of preventing it.

Maybe the Canadians understand that. Or maybe they're just quicker to
recognize the stupidity of giving someone a criminal record for doing
something that an awful lot of people have done without hurting anyone else.
Nearly 80 million Americans have tried marijuana -- including the last
president of the United States and, apparently, the current one, who doesn't
deny youthful drug use. Only the unlucky ones get collared.

But their numbers are still pretty big. More than 600,000 people are
arrested each year in this country for possession of small amounts of
cannabis. Arresting people to protect them from the effects of marijuana is
like imprisoning William Bennett to keep him from squandering money on the
slots.

For that matter, the dangers of pot are mostly imaginary. The respected
medical journal The Lancet concluded a few years ago, "The smoking of
cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health." Not all experts are
quite so sanguine, especially when adolescents are involved, but the health
hazards of getting arrested are clearly much greater than the health hazards
of getting high.

Everyone knows that marijuana is not a menace to public health or morals.
The marvel is not that Canadians may finally act on that knowledge, but that
Americans still tolerate the waste of police time and tax money arresting
people for an innocent vice. What are we smoking?