TOO HIGH TO FIGHT?

I Usually Offer To Help Soldiers Fail Drug Tests - Not Pass Them

I got some weird and crazy e-mail recently. Among the updates from war
resisters groups and pot legalizers was a letter from the wife of a
Canadian Forces soldier. The distraught woman was writing to ask my
advice because her husband had failed his urine test and was being
prevented from deploying to Afghanistan.

Talk about a moral dilemma. Oddly, just this month, writing for
Cannabis Culture, I urged service personnel not wanting to wage war to
get stoned and flunk the Department of National Defence's recently
resumed pee test. If any CF soldier doesn't want to deploy, I'm
offering to puff pot in their face all day or send them peace cookies.
No reason to go AWOL.

So here I was being asked to help a soldier convince his superiors to
retest him so he could deploy. I have no clout at DND, of course.
However, it turns out that my anonymous soldier is one of 89 service
personnel who popped positive out of the 2,276 tested before leaving
for Afghanistan.

Two soldiers have been fired, three were able to show they had a
narcotic prescription and five more were sent to counselling. There
are 79 more administrative reviews to go.

According to Commander Denise Laviolette, the military has a very hard
line on THC showing up in a soldier's urine. The thinking, she says,
is that "You could've come for help before we caught you. There's
personal responsibility. There's no second chance."

Odd, because I'd just read a DND directive emphasizing retention and
rehabilitation for test flunkers, not dismissal. It reads, "A CF
member shall normally be retained and placed on Counselling and Probation."

Laviolette bristles when I try to quote her the policy. That's until
she looks up the directive herself and agrees that the criteria allow
for grunts to defend themselves by arguing it's their first offence,
the intake didn't happen on duty, it didn't impair operations and
they're unlikely to reoffend.

Pee tests were reinstated in May, Laviolette says, because an increase
in Taliban activity had General Rick Hillier wanting to ensure that
everyone is shooting straight as an arrow. The decision, she says,
"has nothing to do" with the kind of crops that fuel the Afghani
economy. Or the report, carried on BBC a few months back of Canuck
forces battling 10-foot-tall marijuana forest hiding insurgents.

When interviewed by the media, Hillier admitted at least one crew used
cannabis to camouflage their vehicle. All efforts to down the indica
thicket using white phosphorus and diesel fuel bombardment failed, he
said. But when a small patch did ignite there were other problems: a
section of soldiers downwind had "some ill effects."

The United Nations Office of Drug Control estimates the Afghan
cannabis crop at 30,000 acres, one-third of the world supply. The
resinous strain packs that classic skunk smell and would be a terrible
reefer toke, but it's pressed into hashish and transported to world
markets. You can come across it in Toronto.

Are soldiers retested to make sure they're straight once they've
settled into Kandahar? I can't help querying. "Where would they get
the drugs from? In the mail?" Laviolette asks.

"The soldiers are in an enclosed environment. They're not even allowed
to drink alcohol except for two beers on Christmas Day," minister of
defence spokesperson Isabel Bouchard reassures. "The military always
needs to be ready. This is Canada, we respect the Afghan way of life
and are their invited guests," she says.

Interesting, because a little reefer recreation is great for treating
post-traumatic stress trauma that can take place when the party hosts
start shooting at the invited guests as an impolite way of asking them
to leave now, please.