Pubdate: Tue, 15 Nov 2005
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Ottawa Citizen
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: William Watson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Note: William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.

IN QUEBEC, COCAINE'S OK, MARGARINE IS NOT

We have an interesting approach to the law in Quebec.

The balloting doesn't end until tonight but it looks as if the Parti 
Quebecois is about to elect as its leader and, the way the polls are 
running these days, Quebec's next premier, a 39-year-old, Andre 
Boisclair, who admits to having used cocaine as recently as seven 
years ago, while he was a cabinet minister in Lucien Bouchard's government.

Now, the use of cocaine was at the time and still is illegal. People 
presumably are being incarcerated for it even as you read this. 
They're certainly being incarcerated for selling cocaine. (That's 
always been a puzzle: If buying marijuana, say, is no longer a crime, 
why should selling marijuana be one?) But, if anything, the 
revelation of Mr. Boisclair's drug use actually seemed to help his 
campaign. In the short run, at least, he seemed a victim of the 
boisterous press scrum at which he first addressed his former habits.

A cabinet minister admits to having broken the law, knowingly and 
recklessly, and the public gets all bothered about the press being 
rude, which admittedly the press often is, though usually not often 
enough. Civility is a fine thing, but what does it say about our 
values that his interrogators' rudeness won Mr. Boisclair more 
sympathy than his own admitted law-breaking earned him contempt? Drug 
use is supposed to be a victimless crime, but here's Mr. Boisclair 
turned into a victim.

We like to think of ourselves as a sophisticated bunch in Quebec. 
Yes, maybe cocaine use is illegal, but, hey, doesn't everybody do it? 
Or at least doesn't everybody who counts do it? If you've got money, 
if you disdain the slow lane, if you're famous, it seems you're 
almost obliged to do it.

In this culture, being against recreational drug use, particularly of 
a designer drug like cocaine, means not being cool. Sure, the 
thinking goes, using cocaine may be against law, but it's a bad law: 
We shouldn't be harassing people for their lifestyle choices. What 
they do on their own time -- even ministers of the Crown -- is their 
own business.

Except, it seems, if what they're doing on their own time in the 
privacy of their own homes is -- I know this is a family newspaper 
but in the interests of good journalism this disgusting act must be 
described in its full details -- spreading margarine that is the same 
colour as butter onto their toast or mashed potatoes or pancakes or 
Brussels sprouts. And then -- brace yourself for this -- ingesting.

Some substance abuse clearly will not be tolerated, not even in 
Quebec. For at the height of the PQ leadership campaign, when legal 
relativism about cocaine was making the airwaves buzz, agents of the 
Quebec Ministry of Agriculture raided four Quebec City Wal-Marts and 
confiscated 72 tubs of illegal margarine. Street value: $179.28.

In this province, margarine gets to be illegal by being the wrong 
colour. It can be any colour it wants, except the same colour as 
butter. Yes, Virginia, our government employs people to police the 
colour of margarine.

The rationale is that this protects consumers from unscrupulous 
margarine dealers who will try to pass off their edible vegetable 
product as real butter, which supposedly is the status all margarine 
aspires to. "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is the actual name of 
one margarine Unilever produces.

But of course consumers aren't actually that stupid. The real reason 
for the law is to make margarine more expensive to produce. Having to 
stop the machines and change colour for the batch destined for Quebec 
costs money. And white margarine is less attractive, which raises the 
demand for butter.

Finally, there's the popular psychodrama of the poor Quebec dairy 
farm pitted against the foreign giant Wal-Mart. If it ever came out 
that M. Boisclair got his drugs from a foreign multinational, well, 
that would change everything.

We Quebecers evidently think we're smart enough to make our own 
choices about narcotics. It's just margarines we can't be trusted with.

Maybe the law against cocaine use is a stupid law. We can debate 
that, and probably should. I expect we'd get opinions on both sides.

But everybody who doesn't have his own dairy herd understands the 
margarine law really is a stupid law. But no politician will say the 
emperor has no clothes and get rid of it.

With laws like that on the books, is it any wonder even cabinet 
ministers feel they can pick and choose exactly which laws they'll obey?
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MAP posted-by: Beth