ALCOHOL AND POT: OUR GUILTY PLEASURES

One's Legal, And One's Not, But Maybe Our Laws Have It Backwards

Summer and smoking pot. They go together like backyards and barbecues, and
it's usually when I'm in the former, huddled over the latter, that the
telltale smells come wafting up from the ravine behind the house. Or is
that the residual smell of garbage from T.O?

No matter. The pot smells have been pretty scarce lately. And no wonder,
what with the $95-million drug bust last week in Hamilton, and parts of
Quebec and Nova Scotia. Most of it was pot and marijuana plants, with some
cocaine and hash thrown in.

The bust took two years of investigation. Some marriages don't last that long.

So you have to credit the police for a job well done. Even if there are a
lot of highly distressed university students who'll have to get through
summer school without the frat house answer to Prozac.

Okay, that wasn't fair. I bet there are a lot of CEOs at major companies
who use drugs, too. (If not before, then certainly after all the scandals
broke.)

Abuse of rights

Not that we'll ever know. You see, on the day of the bust, the Canadian
Human Rights Commission declared that employee drug and alcohol tests (at
federally regulated companies or public services, anyway) are an abuse of
rights.

Who's to know when you had that joint? Was it on the job or off? And was it
even yours, or did you breathe in when the guy next to you exhaled?

Random drug testing won't tell you any of this. (A padded room with Britney
Spears piped in 24 hours a day, maybe.)

Alcohol is another matter, though. Tests do show whether it is present in
the body, which is a good thing to know if, say, you're sending someone off
to steer an oil tanker or pilot an airplane or oversee a nuclear reactor.
So alcohol testing - though only for safety sensitive jobs - can proceed.

For once, the commission did something sensible and for the right reasons.
Then it had to mess it all up with some truly cockamamie provisions. Like
the fact you can't be fired for being drunk while, say, testing
contaminants in the water. You have to be rehabilitated - then given your
job back.

It's a very charitable idea (positively Christian, in fact). But I tend to
take the zero tolerance approach to messing with hundreds of other people's
lives. One strike, and you're out of any jobs that involve public safety.
Go be a garbage collector. (Wait: that does involve public safety. Oh,
never mind.)

The Ontario Human Rights Code goes one better (for the employee). Drug and
alcohol abuse is considered a disability, so you can't be refused work
because of it.

Of course it's a disability; that's why people do it: to disable whatever
it is that's making them miserable. Or, as Paul Newman said in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof: "I drink till I get that 'click.'"

There are disabilities and then there are disabilities. The kind that
doesn't impair judgment - like you can't move your legs - shouldn't bar you
from safety sensitive work. The kind that does, should.

Meanwhile, as all this was happening last week, the Brits relaxed their
marijuana laws so users will only get a warning, while police focus on
harder drugs. Good for them.

But all this talk of drugs and alcohol (besides making me hungry and
thirsty) makes me think we English-speaking Judeo-Christian types are
awfully conflicted about our guilty pleasures.

We can't decide whether drug and alcohol use is a crime or a birth defect,
a medicinal aid or the biggest threat to public health and safety since the
inventions of poutine and takeout coffee in those really thin cardboard cups.

I'm not the my-genes-made-me-do-it type, but for consistency's sake, I'd
vote for legalized pot. It's far less harmful than alcohol, which is legal.

And anyway, for my money, I'd rather the cops spend their time tracking
down corporate criminals, and leave the boys in the ravine to their rites
of summer.