Up In Smoke

Surely the majority of Canadians think the sale and use of marijuana should be decriminalized.

(Edited excerpt from an essay that first appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of the Literary Review of Canada; www.reviewcanada.ca)

"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." Bill Clinton's famous obfuscation was reported by Gwen Ifill in The New York Times on March 30, 1992.

Clinton was in England from 1968 to 1970, studying at Oxford University. He and I overlapped as students at Oxford, although I never met him. Myself, I did not experiment with marijuana even "a time or two" when I was in England.

Things might have been different for Bill and me if we had been hanging out in downtown Toronto's Yorkville district. In Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the Marijuana Question, 1961-1975 (printed, it proclaims without a hint of humour, on acid-free paper), Marcel Martel writes that Yorkville at that time "became the visible manifestation of the counterculture movement ..." Needless to say, in those days being a member of the counter-culture and clashing with the establishment meant smoking a lot of dope.

If Bill and I had wandered through Yorkville then, we might have bumped into that counterculture figure, Pierre Berton. Shortly before he died in 2004, Berton told the Toronto Star that he had been a recreational marijuana user since the 1960s. At around the same time as he gave that interview, Berton was introduced on Rick Mercer's satirical CBC television program Monday Report as a "marijuana connoisseur" and gave step-by-step advice on how to roll a joint. He stressed the importance of a "good rolling surface," and advised that a joint should be rolled "firm, but not too firm." Thus did one of Canada's most popular and respected authors, 84 years old, holder of 12 honourary degrees and a companion of the Order of Canada, appear on the government-owned television network to give instructions on the proper use of an illegal drug. Hooray for Canada!

Martel's book analyzes marijuana as a topic of social debate and conflict in the Canada of the 1960s. Baby boomers, he tells us, smoked marijuana to defy mainstream values. Meanwhile, opponents of marijuana use maintained that the drug undermined "the traditional understanding of the acceptable way to function in society. People on drugs ... constitute a threat to society but also to themselves by becoming emotionally unstable, by escaping daily reality, and by promoting unrealistic views about the meaning of life. Furthermore, drug users lack productivity." Lack of productivity was, no doubt, seen as the most dangerous threat of all to the Canadian way of life.

Martel reports that the marijuana debate of those days was dominated by two loose coalitions. One supported existing drug legislation, and was composed principally of government representatives and agencies of various kinds, including most addiction research foundations, the federal Department of Justice and police forces. The second coalition, which wanted legal penalties reduced, was an even looser array of individuals and organizations, and included the Canadian Medical Association and the Department of National Health and Welfare.

The debate culminated with the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (1969-1973), chaired by the mercurial Gerald Le Dain, then dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and later a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada. The Le Dain Commission was appointed for the usual dubious reasons. "With the creation of the Commission," writes Martel, "the federal government had gained some time, and hoped that this would help to overcome its own internal divisions on marijuana, since major decisions would, of course, have to wait until the Commission submitted its conclusions."

The Le Dain Commission rejected the legalization of marijuana use, but suggested that penalties, particularly for simple possession, be substantially reduced.

But no one cared very much by the time these conclusions were offered up in the early 1970s. Members of the counterculture had now found other enjoyable ways to defy mainstream values -- sexual promiscuity, for example. The Department of National Health and Welfare had decided that alcohol abuse was the real worry. The federal government, in a precarious minority position, decided not to stir the pot and proposed no significant changes to drug legislation.

Not This Time is burdened by the usual ponderous apparatus that attends an academic study. Bud Inc., by journalist Ian Mulgrew (legal affairs columnist for the Vancouver Sun and a self--confessed "long-time consumer" of marijuana), is quite a different matter. It skips along in a lively and prejudiced manner (Mulgrew strongly favours legalization of pot), jumping from one undocumented anecdote to another, nary a footnote or reference in sight. Mulgrew picks up where Martel leaves off, describing what has happened in Canada since the Le Dain Commission. According to Mulgrew, marijuana has become Canada's most valuable agricultural product, with its cultivation spurred on by the arrival of counterculture Americans in British Columbia in the 1970s. In his words, "Bud Inc. is a hardly invisible going concern worth billions of dollars."

Mulgrew's argument is that cannabis prohibition is a public policy disaster and a legal quagmire. He writes: "The damage prohibition causes is exacerbated by the violence endemic to the pernicious black market it spawns, eroding confidence in law enforcement and respect for the courts."

Why all the fuss? Surely the overwhelming majority of Canadians, and not just the chattering classes of Toronto and members of the British Columbia counterculture, regard it as self-evident that the sale and use of marijuana should, at the very least, be decriminalized.

Recent Liberal governments started to take a very small step in the right direction, introducing legislation that decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, replacing criminal charges with a fine. (Regrettably, this proposed legislation also doubled sentences for growing and trafficking.) The bill died on the order paper when Paul Martin called an election for June 2004. It was reintroduced by the minority Liberal government in November 2004, but once again an election got in the way, and the Liberals were defeated in January 2006.

This extremely modest decriminalization proposal was strongly criticized right from the start by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. The Canadian correspondent for The New York Times reported that "American officials had warned that the proposed legislation would force the United States to increase inspections at the border and thereby risk creating more delays for trade and tourists." It was also viewed by American officials as a harmful symbol when the Canadian marijuana industry "is spreading across the country and exporting widely in the United States."

It came as little surprise on April 3 of this year when the new Conservative Prime Minister, fresh from his first meeting with President Bush (at the Mexico summit), announced that his government would not reintroduce this modest reform into the new Parliament. On the same day that the Stephen Harper made this announcement, the Toronto Star reported on its front page that "police forces across the GTA [Greater Toronto Area], taking their cue from the new federal Conservative government, are again cracking down on the simple possession of marijuana."

Will no one rid us of this tiresome issue? It would be easy to despair at the new government's apparently timid tack, and yet one can anticipate what might agitate those tortured souls sitting at the Cabinet table. If marijuana is decriminalized but not legalized, will that just make operations easier for what were previously criminal syndicates, while continuing to deprive law-abiding citizens of lucrative investment opportunities and the government of tax revenue? If marijuana is legalized, could this country become even more of a staging post for the export to the United States of drugs that are illegal in that country, making Canada nothing more than another Colombia in the steely blue eyes of our American neighbours? Just how much freedom does Canada have to diverge from the United States on important matters of public policy?