Pubdate: Mon, 14 Jul 2003
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2003 The Gazette, a division of Southam Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Jody Patterson / Victoria Times Colonist
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

GET OFF THE POT

More Than Thirty Years after the LeDain Commission on Drugs, the Canadian 
Government Is Still Controlled by Reefer-Madness Zealots

Marijuana was just catching the interest of the Canadian public 34 years 
ago when the federal government asked law professor Gerald LeDain to head 
up an investigation into recreational drug use in the country.

A growing number of people were being caught with marijuana in their 
possession, and Ottawa wanted to know what to do about it. The reports that 
came out of the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs are 
still considered the gold standard on the subject, and its recommendations 
around cannabis are mocking reminders of how far we haven't come.

Whatever you might think of marijuana use, it's clear after reading the 
commission's cannabis report - you can find it on the Web - that three 
decades on, Canada's pot laws have failed everybody. We're running in place 
at great cost, and all because no government has had the guts to face down 
the small but vociferous reefer-madness crowd whose uninformed laments 
continue to shape drug policy.

So little has changed that the commission's recommendations from 1971 would 
be every bit as progressive if they were made today. Having looked under 
every rock, reviewed the literature and traced down all the historical 
references to cannabis, the LeDain commission concluded the risks posed by 
marijuana use simply didn't justify the extreme measures being taken by the 
state to prevent it.

Legalize simple possession and cultivation for personal use, it 
recommended, but crack down on trafficking and import/export. Don't suggest 
to people the drug is harmless when nobody knows for sure, but launch the 
longitudinal studies that will clarify that, one way or the other. 
Discourage its use among adolescents but not by arresting them.

(One commission member went even further, writing in a dissenting opinion 
that the government should regulate, produce and market marijuana.)

The aspects of criminalization that most concerned the LeDain commission 
have all come to pass. Young people are still being arrested in great 
numbers, and saddled with criminal records that hang over them for the rest 
of their lives. A drug that other studies had by then already deemed to be 
less dangerous and definitely less "criminogenic" than other drugs, 
including alcohol, remains lumped in with the worst of them.

The organized crime that was barely involved in the trade in those years, 
the tax dollars that were just beginning to be spent on policing and 
prosecutions - all of that has increased dramatically in the intervening 
years. The long-term health studies never did get started.

Nationwide, 8,389 people were arrested for possession in the year of the 
LeDain report; in 2001, more than 11,000 were arrested for the same offence 
in B.C. alone. Despite a common perception that nobody is jailed for 
marijuana possession in Canada anymore, about 2,000 people a year still 
are. Chasing and punishing illicit drug use now costs Canadians more than 
$400 million a year.

"Persons using this narcotic smoke the dry leaves of the plant, which has 
the effect of driving them insane," the Los Angeles chief of police told 
Maclean's magazine in the early 1920s. "The addict loses all sense of moral 
responsibility. Immune to pain, the raving maniacs are liable to kill using 
the most savage methods of cruelty."

The chief's comments figured heavily in the country's decision in 1923 to 
make marijuana use illegal. Some well-informed dissenting voices were 
already out there; a few European doctors were praising the health uses of 
marijuana as far back as the late 1700s, the LeDain report noted. But then, 
as now, government found itself in the sway of the scaremongers.

And here we are in 2003, a federal decriminalization bill dead on the order 
paper, and the debate still raging over what to do about marijuana. This 
country has received reasoned, thoughtful input on this subject time and 
again but still can't get it right.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager