In Depth

'...persons using this narcotic smoke the dry leaves...driving them
completely insane.' - Janey Canuck

CANADA AND CANNABIS: A POT HISTORY

- -Nation and marijuana have checkered past

- -Early settlers used 'locoweed' as clothing fiber

- -"In Canada, knowledge of patterns and contexts of cannabis use verges
on the abysmal." - Senate report

There's no agreement on how the pot plant came to North America, but
there's absolutely no doubt that it's presence here has been
controversial from almost the very beginning.

Just consider the description from an early Canadian "non fiction" book,
The Black Candle, by Janey Canuck:

"...persons using this narcotic smoke the dry leaves...driving them
completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility.
Addicts to this drug, while under it's influence, are immune to pain.
While in this condition they become raving maniacs and are liable to
kill or indulge in any forms of violence to other persons using the
most savage methods of cruelty without, as I said before, any sense of
moral responsibility."

Janey Canuck - in real life Emily Murphy, Canada's first female police
magistrate and a leader of the Orange Order - was quoting a Los
Angeles chief of police. And when she published the book in 1922, it
almost immediately became a prime weapon in a drive by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police to have the drug made illegal.

"Unfortunately, the debate surrounding this drug has, in North
America, surrounded by histrionics," said one retired Mountie. "just
look at Reefer Madness," he said, referring to the 1936 movie that
painted marijuana as the devils secret weapon. "we've always gone
after it as if it's the original killer weed.

"And it's not."

Yesterday a parliamentary committee recommended fines, rather than
criminal convictions, for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

The history of cannabis is a long one. It was being cultivated more
than 8000 years ago as a fiber plant, widely used as a source for
fibers used in weaving. It turns up next in Chinese literature, some
of the references dating back 6000 years. According to report of the
Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, cannabis eventually made
it's way from China to India, then to Middle East and Africa, and
eventually to Mexico, South America, and the United States and Canada.

The growth of cannabis sativa was especially encouraged during North
America's colonial governments allowed it to be a way of paying taxes.

The development of cotton and other plants used for clothing fiber
eventually displaced marijuana as a widely cultivated crop, and before
long it was generally regarded as a weed - loco-weed, to the farmers
and ranchers who saw their cattle and horses go crazy after grazing on
the plants, which towered 6 meters and more above the landscape.

And, by 1923, Janey Canuck's propaganda had done it's work - Canada's
Opium and Narcotic Drug Act of 1908 was amended to include marijuana.

For the next 30 years or so, the marijuana question percolated on the
back burner as the world turned to more weighty matters - the Great
Depression, World War II - but by 1954, Canada's parliament was again
making it more difficult to obtain killer weed.

The new law imposed a minimum prison sentence of seven years for
persons convicted of trafficking in marijuana. But that wasn't a big
enough stick, apparently, since parliament re-visited the question
just a year later, doubling the minimum term to 14 years.

During the remainder of the 50's, a federation of welfare agencies
supported by the British Columbia Medical Association lobbied Ottawa
to lighten up. At the very least, Canada should make a distinction
between the so-called "hard drugs" - heroin, cocaine - and "soft"
drugs like marijuana. But without the endorsement of the National and
other provincial medical associations, the issue died a slow death.

But attitudes didn't ease.

By 1961, Canada's narcotic laws were amended to increase the minimum
penalty for marijuana cultivation to seven years, and that for
importation and exportation to a minimum of 14 years.

Then came the hippy generation of the 60's. Marijuana was adopted as
the recreational drug of choice and Timothy Leary's injunction to
"turn on, tune in, drop out" had as much currency here as it did south
of the border.

It was also the time of Canada's La Dain Commission, which studied the
various aspects of cannabis and ended up recommending that possession
of small amounts of the drug be decriminalized.

Like yesterdays recommendations on recreational marijuana use, the La
Dain Commission did not recommend that criminal sanctions on
trafficking be lifted.

For the next few years the issue of decriminalization - or even
legalizing - marijuana popped up from time to time, and it didn't hurt
to have a prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, who was seen as being
generally sympathetic to social change.

But nothing happened and by 1980, Ronald Regan's election in the
United States put an end to legalizing drugs, soft or hard.

And his wife Nancy's phenomenally successful "just say no" campaign
against drug use helped keep it that way for years.

Even in Canada, talk of decriminalization petered out.

"THE Canadian government halted plans to legalize marijuana out of
deference to the American position, not wishing to create any conflict
with our great neighbor to the south" the B.C. Marijuana Party
observes in it's timeline of marijuana use. "The holding pattern has
continued to this day.

In 1992, Umberto Iorfida, president of NORML Canada - the Canadian
chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws,
which has chapters worldwide - was charged under section 462.2 of the
criminal code with glamorizing and promoting the use of illicit drugs
after police seized several marijuana related publications from his
home, including a work titled, "The Art And Science Of Cooking With
Cannabis."

But two years later, in 1994, the case was thrown out by Madam Justice
Ellen Macdonald of the Ontario Court, general division, who ruled
section 462.2 was an infringement of free speech and, therefore,
unconstitutional.

Ottawa made several efforts during the 1990's to introduce stiffer
penalties for marijuana use, but nothing ever came of them. And there
were signs of a different climate emerging.

In 1994, Ontario farmer Joe Srobel was granted a license to grow 10
acres of marijuana for research into it's agricultural potential.
Police in many centers in British Columbia, a hothouse of marijuana
use, stopped charging people found with small quantities of marijuana
and, in Vancouver, open use in a "coffee shop" was tolerated.

So-called "compassion clubs" opened up across the country to provide a
source of medical marijuana for those who could produce a doctors
prescription.

Even the federal government began, half-heartedly, to contemplate
legal uses of marijuana. It issued licenses to a limited number of
Canadians whose doctor recommended marijuana as a viable therapy and
allowed marijuana to be grown deep underground in a mine in Flin Flon,
Man.

However, the crop has never been released for use by those licensed to
use it.

[sidebar]

HISTORY OF MARIJUANA *

Early Sumeria: K(a)N(a)B(a) the Sumerian/Babylonian word for cannabis hemp,
enters the Indo-Semitic-European language family base, making it one of
humankinds longest surviving root words.

2700 B.C.: The first written record of cannabis use is made in the
pharmacopoeia of Shen Nung, one of the fathers of Chinese medicine.

550 B.C.: The Persian profit Zoroaster writes the Zend- Avesta, a sacred
text, which lists more than 10,000 medicinal plants. Hemp is at the top of
the list.

800: Islamic prophet Mohammed permits cannabis use, but forbids alcohol.

1484: Pope Innocent VIII labels cannabis as an unholy sacrament of the
satanic mass and issues a papal ban on cannabis medicines.

1798 Napoleon discovers that much of the Egyptian lower class habitually
uses hashish. He declares a total prohibition. Soldiers returning to France
bring the tradition with them.

1937: Cannabis made federally illegal in the U.S. with the passage of the
Marijuana Tax Act.

1942: Marijuana was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia because it was
believed to be a harmful and addictive drug, causing psychotic episodes.

1995: Introduction of hashish-making equipment and appearance of locally
produced hashish in Amsterdam coffee shops.

July, 2001: Canada becomes the first country in the world to legalize the
use of marijuana by people suffering from terminal illnesses and chronic
conditions.

*SOURCE - www.Erowid.org

Compiled by Toronto Star Library