WHOSE ADDICTION?

Martin Cauchon Finally Brings A Sense Of Reality To Debate Over Marijuana.
Now How About Gambling?

Justice minister Martin Cauchon has smoked marijuana, and unlike Bill
Clinton, it appears he inhaled.

"I'm 39 years old," he told the CBC, "and, yes, of course I tried it
before, I mean obviously."

Imagine that: a politician who admits he behaves like normal people.

And he's also talking sense about grass. Thirty thousand Canadians were
arrested for possession of marijuana in 2000. Most of them were otherwise
law-abiding citizens who got criminal records for doing something which was
really their own damn business in the first place. The cost of churning
these folks through the justice system is enormous. Cauchon thinks it may
be time to decriminalize grass and stop wasting resources on this non-problem.

Yes indeed: long past time, in fact.

It's obvious by now that marijuana is a well-established feature of
Canadian life. Remarkably, however, all our elected officials have posed as
members of that prissy minority of people under 70 who haven't ever taken a
puff when a joint was passed around at a party. To a man (and a woman) our
legislators have represented themselves as hermits and goody-goodys,
without an ounce of curiosity or adventurousness. Jean Chretien says he's
never tried marijuana. I wish I could believe he was lying. I'm afraid he
may be telling the truth.

Committees of both the House and the Senate are now considering the drug
issue, and have found no real evidence that marijuana leads to harder
drugs. That's because it doesn't, as the federal government's LeDain
Committee concluded about 30 years ago. For many of us, the use of grass
doesn't even lead to the use of more grass. Those who like it, however,
testify that it leads to rumination, music appreciation, hot sex and warm
smiles, none of which seems like a major problem for the nation.

It's probably not healthy to smoke a lot of dope - or anything else - over
a long period of time. But dopers and smokers (and other addicts, for that
matter) have the right to go to hell in their own ways. The police, of
course, have their own drug addiction. Thirty thousand arrests will justify
a lot of police jobs, and a hefty piece of the fuzz budget.

However.

Canada does have three truly important addiction problems: alcohol, tobacco
and gambling. They're all legal, and in all three the government is a major
beneficiary. With gambling, government is the pusher.

I recently saw a TV interview with a prison inmate - a plump,
pleasant-looking woman in her forties who had spent 20 years in the military.

"I sat down at the poker machines," she said, "and when I got up I was
$200,000 poorer and 80 pounds heavier."

After losing her health and her life's savings, she was suicidal. She tried
to "hold up" a convenience store with a toy gun, hoping that a policeman
would shoot her. No such luck. Instead the police arrested her and sent her
to prison in Truro. She was interviewed for a show about a dog-training
program for prisoners. Nobody commented on the reason she was in prison -
her gambling addiction, which had rampaged through her life like a rogue
elephant.

Last year, the Province of Nova Scotia took in more than $178 million from
gambling, $4 million more than the previous year. Of this, $158 million
came lottery tickets and video lottery terminals. Every year, the casino in
Sydney sucks $30 million out of a traumatized ex-industrial community which
desperately needs new businesses and venture capital. Those numbers
represent an appalling toll in wrecked lives.

Among the worst gambling addicts are the federal and provincial
governments, whose sickening promotion of gambling encourages the lie that
wealth and success are not earned by character and effort, but by luck.
What kind of democracy seeks to corrupt and ruin its own citizens? The
public hates these things, particularly the VLTs, but governments won't
give them up.

In truth, they can't. The mania for cutting taxes, especially corporate
taxes, and for paying down the debt, leaves government too poor to pay for
essential public services. So it muscles in on gambling, traditionally the
territory of small local charities - bingo games to support fire
departments and arenas, raffles to buy school equipment. And now the fire
departments, community halls and PTAs are in trouble too.

Admittedly, there are what might be called "bingo abusers" - people who
play bingo every night, travelling from one hall to another, losing
substantial amounts of money. But it is impossible to lose at bingo games
the ruinous amounts of money people routinely drop in government-sponsored
VLTs and casinos.

Martin Cauchon, bless him, is right: it's time to stop fretting about
marijuana. Wouldn't it be heartening if he and his peers would now take on
the far more serious issue of gambling - and of the government's own
addiction to it?