CANADA'S POT VIEWS WORRYING NEIGHBOR

Rising Leniency Could Defeat U.S. Drug War

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The door-kicking has stopped, as have the
asset forfeitures and harassment. Chris Bennett hasn't been arrested in
weeks, nor have any of his friends.

Still, Bennett, 40, isn't inclined to say the battle is won.

He's seen the police relax before. He's seen marijuana achieve a tenuous
level of respectability when a more liberal-minded mayor or police chief
takes over. And, he's seen the subsequent backlash.

"Every time we talk to the press, something happens," he said, sitting in
the store he manages, the Marijuana Party Headquarters.

The store is three blocks from one of Vancouver's toniest shopping
districts. While talking, Bennett selects a handful of sticky green cannabis
buds from a dense cluster the size of a hoagie. Pungent bluish haze hangs in
the air, and customers casually put flame to pipe as they flip through books
about hydroponics.

"I've had friends arrested the next day after talking to reporters about
pot. So you can see why I'm nervous," he said.

Nervous but willing to talk. In spite of Bennett's concern, the likelihood
of marijuana legalization in Canada never has been stronger -- despite
strong U.S. government objections and opposition from within the country.

A medical marijuana law is in place nationally. In official reports late
last year, both the House of Commons and Canadian Senate endorsed some form
of pot legalization, as have the justice and prime ministers.

Indeed, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon recently promised to ease marijuana
laws in 2003. He wants to make punishment for possessing a small amount
equivalent to that of a parking ticket.

In Vancouver, this has happened, if not in law, then in practice. Although
cannabis remains illegal and its possession is a criminal offense, the city
effectively has decriminalized it. Cops rarely bust the dozens of dealers
selling grams of pot and hashish on East Hastings Street. On a Sunday
afternoon, pot is nearly as easy to buy as a six-pack of beer.

"Dude, the cookies rock," said Justin B., a 24-year-old Seattle resident
sitting at a cribbage board in the Blunt Bros. cafe while his buddies were
lighting up in the cafe's rear-corner smoking booth. For understandable
reasons, Justin didn't want his full name used.

Standing against a backdrop of Grateful Dead iconography, dozens of
centerfold-style posters of pot plants and cases of translucent glass pipes,
Justin said he loves Vancouver because the police let pot smokers be. This
is what U.S. federal and Washington state authorities fear.

U.S. drug czar John Walters, fresh from a recent trip to Vancouver to
explain to the Canadians how wrongheaded their drug permissiveness is, has
said he believes that not only will Americans flock to Canada for drug
vacations, but that more pot will find its way into the United States.

"Nothing gets better with more drug use," Walters said in a recent
interview.

Walters' point: According to statistics from his office, pot, not alcohol,
is the No. 1 drug treatment issue among U.S. residents under age 18. Nearly
95 percent of the potent pot grown in British Columbia, known broadly as
B.C. bud, is sold in the United States, a $4-billion annual industry.

Even the medical claims of pot's usefulness largely are spurious, he added
- -- a statement hotly disputed by the medical marijuana community.

"I was told by a Canadian official they are sure pot doesn't create
dependency. That's archaic in the absurd," Walters said. "You can walk down
the streets in Vancouver, and the streets are swarming with the openly
addicted."

U.S. drug investigators agree. They point to a tent-city on East Hastings
that started as a protest to encourage low-income housing. But, in the past
month, it has become an open-air drug bazaar.

Dave Rodriguez, who runs the drug intelligence unit Northwest High Intensity
Drug Trafficking Area team, based in Seattle, said drug busts on the
U.S.-Canadian border are rising faster than on the Mexican border or along
the West Coast.

A decade ago, investigators seized 11,000 pounds of Canadian pot annually.
Last year, agents confiscated 44,000 pounds.

But Canadian officials, including Kash Heed, the officer in charge of the
Vancouver police vice division, wonder what Walters sees in Vancouver that
is so different from Seattle.

"Exactly what benefit has harsher penalties and 'Just Say No' brought?" Heed
said. "They have addiction at the same rates we do. For some things, we are
lower."

Experts on all sides of the issue say the pot market in Canada is driven by
U.S. demand and that many of the addicts in Canada are U.S. citizens.

Peter Ditchfield, who runs the British Columbia Organized Crime Agency, said
pot is what alcohol was during the U.S. Prohibition -- readily available and
largely run by organized crime.

"It becomes a question of what a society is willing to absorb," he said.
Canada, he said, always has been a more tolerant society than the United
States.