TAKING THE HIGH ROAD

Canada is on the map. Yesterday's luminous but explosive report of the
Senate committee on illegal drugs will be heard like a cannon shot across
the world.

In a unanimous judgment, nine experienced senators told Canadians that
cannabis (a.k.a. hemp, pot, hashish, marijuana) should be made legal in
this country and that it should be readily purchasable by all Canadian
residents over 16, who would also be authorized to cultivate it for their
personal use. Commercial cultivation and distribution to the public would
be authorized under licence, according to conditions set by federal,
provincial and municipal governments.

Moreover, an amnesty should be declared for all who've been convicted of
simple possession. Pending charges for possession would be dropped. Those
in prison would be freed. The estimated 600,000 Canadians who now carry a
criminal record for possession would have their slates wiped clean.

These recommendations, if enacted, would make Canada the only civilized
country on Earth to rescind entirely the legal prohibition against
marijuana. Other countries, including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
Spain, Switzerland and Australia, have instituted regimes of tolerating
what is still illegal, or reducing penalties to the level of minor
infractions. But none has placed cannabis in a category similar to that of
alcohol.

The senators concluded that a regime of "tolerance" would merely
institutionalize hypocrisy. It wouldn't end control of production and
distribution by criminal gangs; it wouldn't enforce standards of safety or
limit the strength of the psychotropic ingredient. The senators recommend a
maximum THC content of 13 per cent for recreational use, but no limit for
therapeutic use.

Their report, in five volumes, is almost certainly the most comprehensive
survey of available knowledge on cannabis, including history, law,
epidemiology, pharmacology and international comparisons.

Two sets of statistics were particularly interesting. Research in Canada
indicates that, in the previous year, 10 per cent of Canadians over 18 have
tried cannabis. But, among those 12 to 17, the proportion was 40 per cent
- -- four times as high, for an estimated one million youngsters. Marijuana
is the drug primarily of teenies.

Second interesting figure: More than 25,000 charges for possession of
cannabis are laid each year. Enforcing the prohibition costs Canada -- in
policing, courts and prisons -- an estimated $1-billion. Couldn't that
money be better spent, say, in complying with the Kyoto Protocol?

The report will challenge governments, enlighten open-minded politicians
and the public, send some pious souls scuttling for holy water to sprinkle
on Satan's own weed, and surely unhinge police crusaders for prohibition.
What cautionary ghost stories will they now tell the youngsters when they
go into the schools to scare them (ineffectually) from trying pot?

It was 32 years ago that another body, the Le Dain commission, did a
thorough investigation and recommended: "No one should be liable to
imprisonment for simple possession of a psychotropic drug for non-medical
purposes." That wise counsel remained a dead letter because timorous
politicians feared that their superstitious constituents would turn against
them if they decriminalized pot.

Will we have the wisdom, at last, to exorcise our Canadian version of the
Inquisition? The Senate, when it votes on this report, must put its full
moral authority behind its recommendations. And let the House of Commons,
in a free vote, lead the world toward a new age of enlightenment on drugs.