Pubdate: Thu, 08 May 2003
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2003 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Steve Chapman

FOR SENSIBLE MARIJUANA POLICY, TRY HEADING NORTH

Among American officeholders, there are two points of view about the drug 
war. Some are for it, while others are really, really for it. In Canada, 
though, Prime Minister Jean Chretien has said something no American 
politician would ever say: Marijuana users should no longer be treated like 
criminals.

Given Canada's opposition to American policy on Iraq, you may wonder why 
those puzzling people up north are so out of step on everything. Maybe 
there's a reason they put the loon on their coins. Actually, the drug war 
has some things in common with the Iraq war: The United States has found 
itself without many allies, facing vocal disagreement in many countries. 
The big difference is that we don't have a prayer of winning the war 
against drugs.

The Bush administration is clearly unhappy about the Canadians' habit of 
thinking for themselves. John Walters, director of the White House Office 
of National Drug Control Policy, expressed deep disappointment: "You expect 
your friends to stop the movement of poison to your neighborhood." He may 
be forgetting that the Canadian government controls only its own 
neighborhood--unlike the U.S. government, which aspires to rule a lot of 
the world beyond its borders.

U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci warned that decriminalization might force 
American customs agents to spend more time checking out Canadians entering 
the U.S. Well, of course. I mean, our law enforcement officers have never 
had to worry about people smuggling pot into the country before, have they?

But decriminalization in Canada wouldn't have much effect on drug use in 
America. How do I know? Because decriminalization in America hasn't had 
much effect on drug use in America.

Yes, it has been tried here--and not, as you might expect, in just a few 
locales that are still stuck in the '60s. According to The National 
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, 12 states no longer make a 
habit of putting people in jail for smoking a joint, including such funky 
places as Nebraska and Mississippi.

What happens when a state decriminalizes marijuana? People immediately 
seize the opportunity to go on behaving exactly as they had behaved before. 
A 1999 study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences found that 
marijuana use in states that relaxed their laws was no different from 
states that didn't.

The Netherlands has gone further still. Though cannabis is technically 
against the law, the government allows it to be openly sold and consumed. 
In their 2001 book "Drug War Heresies," Robert MacCoun of the University of 
California at Berkeley and Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland noted 
that by effectively legalizing pot, "the Dutch have significantly reduced 
the monetary and human costs of incarcerating cannabis offenders with no 
apparent effects on levels of use."

If you looked at just the comparative popularity of marijuana, you might 
assume we were the ones with the permissive laws. Dutch teenagers are less 
likely to smoke pot than American kids. In fact, a survey of teens in 30 
European countries found that all of them have lower rates of cannabis use 
than we do. Conservatives often warn about the unintended consequences of 
liberal schemes, but they haven't noticed that our pot laws seem to be 
fostering drug use instead of preventing it.

Maybe the Canadians understand that. Or maybe they're just quicker to 
recognize the stupidity of giving someone a criminal record for doing 
something that an awful lot of people have done without hurting anyone 
else. Nearly 80 million Americans have tried marijuana--including the last 
president of the United States and, apparently, the current one, who 
doesn't deny youthful drug use. Only the unlucky ones get collared.

But their numbers are still pretty big. More than 600,000 people are 
arrested each year in this country for possession of small amounts of 
cannabis. Arresting people to protect them from the effects of marijuana is 
like imprisoning William Bennett to keep him from squandering money on the 
slots.

For that matter, the dangers of pot are mostly imaginary. The respected 
medical journal The Lancet concluded a few years ago, "The smoking of 
cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health." Not all experts are 
quite so sanguine, especially when adolescents are involved, but the health 
hazards of getting arrested are clearly much greater than the health 
hazards of getting high.

Everyone knows that marijuana is not a menace to public health or morals. 
The marvel is not that Canadians may finally act on that knowledge, but 
that Americans still tolerate the waste of police time and tax money 
arresting people for an innocent vice. What are we smoking?
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