Editorial

A WAR GONE TO POT

The words were hardly out of Justice Minister Martin Cauchon's mouth and
the United States was already making strange.

Last week, Mr. Cauchon said that if the House Committee on illegal drugs
recommended that the possession of marijuana for personal use be
decriminalized, his government would act quickly to implement that
recommendation.

It is an idea that makes eminent sense. Many Canadians, in fact, would
argue that it does not go far enough, that marijuana, a relatively harmless
and non-addictive drug should be legalized and regulated and sold in the
same way that alcohol and tobacco are sold today.

Many Americans would make the same arguments to their government if they
thought there was any hope it would listen. Some Canadians, some Americans,
would go even further and argue that the war on drugs, which both countries
spend billions of dollars a year waging, has long since been lost and that
money would be better spent elsewhere and that governments should take over
the sale and distribution and quality control of not just marijuana, but
narcotics as well.

That debate will not be held until some far distant day in either Canada or
the United States. As the drug culture has moved more and more into the
mainstream of North American society, North American governments have
dedicated themselves ever more vigorously to eradicating it.

The debate in Canada today -- the argument that has arisen between this
country and the U.S. -- is about the simple decriminalization of marijuana.
The issue seems like a no-brainer, but the fact is that intelligent and
informed people have strongly different views about it. Nowhere is the
opposing view more passionately held than in the United States, where the
war on drugs is waged most relentlessly, most expensively and least
successfully. Mr. Cauchon's musings about decriminalizing marijuana brought
a response from U.S. drug-war czar John Walters that would be hysterically
disproportionate if it were not taken in the context of Washington's
obsession with eradicating illegal drugs from American society.

Mr. Walters threatened that Mr. Cauchon's initiative would block, or at
least clog, the border between the two countries. Why that would happen, he
did not explain, perhaps because it cannot be explained. The
decriminalization of the personal use of marijuana in Canada changes
nothing in regard to the Canada-U.S. war on drugs; it neither will make
more marijuana available -- the market is flooded with it in any case --
nor will it change the fact that trying to take it across the border, in
either direction, is a serious criminal offence punishable by years of
imprisonment in both countries.

Mr. Walter's fulminations, in fact, are an attempt to impose a misguided
American sense of morality and reality on Canada. This country cannot
ignore American concerns, but neither should it cave in to this kind of
extra-territorial blackmail. Mr. Cauchon must explain carefully, in detail,
to the Americans that this change in Canadian law will make no difference
at all to their war on drugs. He might explain to them -- and to his own
government -- that the war on drugs cannot be won the way it is being
fought. After he has explained all that, he should pursue the
decriminalization of the personal use of marijuana regardless of what the
Americans threaten to do.