OUR OWN AND NATIVE WEED

It's been a great week for Big Weed.

I thought Kyoto and its ratification were going to be the last big news out
of Ottawa before our diligent parliamentarians retired for Christmas.
Putting the planet on the path to repair, arresting the whiplash of drought
and flood and the melting of the icecaps -- these are big-ticket items. And
I can't wait for the windmills. I see a lot of Holland in our future.

But there was enough energy left over even after Kyoto, even after the
"terrific achievement" (as Allan Rock would have it) of the gun registry
program, to take up the cause of deep inhaling, and consider "relaxing" the
nation's pot-possession prohibitions.

The idea is to get simple possession off the criminal statutes, and to put
an end to the wicked enforcement protocols that saddle the mellow-minded
with jail terms and monstrous fines. They're aiming at 30 grams as the
ceiling for a reasonable stash.

I think it's a great idea. Other than the revival of Hair,or the Second or
Third Coming of the Grateful Dead, I can't think of anything more
progressive in our continual advance toward peace, order and good
government. One nation under Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Americans will fume, of course, but they're puritans at heart. They
fume, we toke -- it's a cultural thing. And once we legalize marijuana,
there are all sorts of benefits that have been obscured by our primitive
approach to date.

Marijuana is a $5-billion industry, according to some of the news reports
I've been reading this week. I can't imagine we won't tax marijuana once we
legalize it -- harvest the harvest -- and from just this one crop we'll
have the revenue for all kinds of worthy social programs. We could scrap
the gun registry we have and build a world-class, state-of-the-art one.

For a couple of billion, we could probably put GPS devices in the stock of
every rifle in the country, and equip it with voice recognition, e-mail
capacity, a fax machine and video conferencing technology. I see the day
when every duck hunter is his own miniature CN Tower. We not only will know
where every rifle is but, should we choose, we'll be able to play Scrabble
on-line with any .30-30 from Twillingate to Iqaluit.

There are a few wrinkles in the plan; it wouldn't be ointment if there
weren't a fly in it. While the current thinking is in the direction of
legalizing the possession of marijuana, I haven't heard very much on
whether it will be legal to smoke it. Smoking is bad, of course -- uncivil,
unclean, pernicious, pestiferous, obnoxious, toxic and untidy. The question
is: Is hemp just tobacco in smart dress?

Calling all Jesuits! Is smoking a joint "smoking"? Because if it is
smoking, then we will have to ban it tout de suite.

I'll be among the very first to toss out the family hookah if the
legalization of marijuana is the first crack in the windshield of our
country's peerless anti-tobacco laws. Canada hasn't spent the past decade
devising a legislative and social architecture that is the envy of the
world to make smoking a pastime with less panache than grave-robbing, only
to see it attacked at the stalk by the liberalization of marijuana. If Mary
Jane is in the living room, does du Maurier stay on the sidewalk?

There are real perils here as well as subtle questions. But maybe the
genius of compromise will rescue us. Maybe there is that beautiful place in
the still, quiet centre, that point of perfect equilibrium, where we can
signal our approval of marijuana and still exert all our powers to persuade
the citizenry not to use it. We've found that point on gambling -- the
government runs the lotteries and, with some of the revenue from those
lotteries, has done quite wonderful work on gambling addiction. Come to
think of it, the taxes on cigarettes finance some of the world's most
pungent anti-smoking commercials.

So what's the solution to legalizing marijuana? We should make simple
possession purely a matter of individual choice, but it should remain
illegal to buy it. You may roll your own, but you may not toke.

I must confess that, when this session of Parliament started, especially
with the Prime Minister caught in the coils of the leadership rebellion, I
didn't expect much from it. But any session that unfolded the miracle of
the gun registry and started to carve a path toward a sensible pot law
leaves me at its end quite breathless with wonder.