MAYOR WANTS POT DECRIMINALIZED

The mayor of Vancouver and chairman of the police board says marijuana
should be decriminalized. If Philip Owen had his way, pot would be
available for sale the same way other drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, are.
He figures we'd all be better off for it.

Among major Canadian mayors, premiers and prime ministers, Owen is the
first to take this stand. But it's completely consistent with his drug
policy, which is based on harm reduction and recognizes drug addiction as a
medical problem, not a criminal activity.

Most politicians continue to duck the issue. Just over 30 years ago,
another Vancouver mayor, Tom Campbell, was so determined to stamp out pot
smoking and the hippies who promoted it that he whipped the city cops into
a riot against peaceful participants in a Gastown smoke-in.

Now about half of all Canadians think pot should be legalized, and a whole
range of baby boomer politicians are admitting they've lit up. In the
recent run for the Tory leadership of Ontario, no fewer than three
candidates, including the winner and new premier Ernie Eves, admitted to
turning on. One said he had "never exhaled."

Owen, by the way, says he has never smoked pot. "It just wasn't around"
when the now 69-year-old was in high school. His drug of choice was beer.
He says: "I never even heard about [marijuana] until I was married." He
didn't choose to explain the relationship between the two events.

Now he believes the public is ready for a debate over hard and soft drugs
and thinks the laws should be changed.

Drug cases have the court system as jammed up as an over-used bong. The war
on drugs has been an expensive failure. Owen estimates Vancouver police are
spending "in excess" of $1 million a year making pot busts with no apparent
impact on pot use.

The federal government was pressed by an Ontario Supreme Court ruling a
year ago to come up with regulations on the use of marijuana for medical
purposes. As a result of the ruling, a number of "compassion clubs" have
popped up across the country where people with doctors' certificates can
purchase pot and puff away.

But the feds are still fiddling around with proposed changes and cops are
continuing to bust club operators. Last week, Ted Smith, the fellow who
runs a club in Victoria, was hauled away by police. While he awaits a court
date and an inevitably light sentence, someone else has stepped in to deal
dope for him.

For those of you who are about to set your hair on fire at the prospect of
a tsunami of stoned school kids in the wake of more liberal drug laws, Owen
makes the point that in jurisdictions where pot is legal for sale, use of
the weed by kids is lower than where it's illegal.

He compares Amsterdam, where pot is legal, with San Francisco, where it's
not, and says twice as many high school students have smoked the weed in
the town where little cable cars go halfway to the stars as in the Dutch city.

Owen adds that marijuana possession was just made legal in Switzerland and
while the U.S. continues to wage war on the weed, possession is legal in
several states, including New York, California and Ohio (the state that's
round at both ends and high in the middle.)

One of Owen's main points to support his position on pot is that it will
get the crooks out of the business. That presumably will put an end to the
dangerous situation created by indoor grow-ops, which are too often little
more than fire traps run by biker thugs. He makes the same argument to
support safe injection sites and the limited distribution of heroin.

While there may be public support for Owen on this, political support is
less certain. His drug policy helped get him tossed out of the NPA. You
could say he's got nowhere to go but up.