Legalizing pot: the debate can't be left to Beaver
By: Gary Mason, Globe and Mail (Canada), 06-11-05


VANCOUVER -- At the risk of sounding like Ward Cleaver and living in a fantasy world inhabited with boys named Beaver and Wally, let me say this about Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell's call for the legalization of marijuana.

Is he nuts?

Well, let me say that was my first reaction. Why would Mayor Campbell want to risk exacerbating a drug problem with which the city is already struggling to cope? Now let me tell you what my second reaction was: you hypocritical s.o.b.

Yes, in the past I inhaled, as did my entire circle of friends back in Sarnia, Ont., in the early 1970s. We were products of the Cheech and Chong era after all. (Who could forget their album containing the jumbo-sized rolling paper?) We smoked a little, we drank a little and none of us seemed to end up the worse for it.

Some of my friends continued to smoke pot occasionally as they got older, some of us did not. It was simply personal preference. Having said that, it's amazing how conservative most of us became when we had children.

I didn't want my kids using drugs, even if it was only pot. And like most parents of my generation, I wanted my children to avoid every mistake, every bad life experience I had growing up.

My friends and I knew the sermons we were delivering to our kids were inconsistent with our past, but we also knew we'd been in cars with kids so stoned they should never have been driving, been in classrooms where every word the teacher said was shrouded in fog because of the condition of our drug-addled brain.

Many of us felt it was a miracle we were still alive.

I didn't believe marijuana automatically led to heroin, but I knew it was not something you wanted to mix with school, certainly not if you wanted to pursue good grades or legitimate post-high school opportunities, whether it was university or college or decent job. And honestly, as a parent I didn't want to get a call from the principal saying our son had been nabbed smoking up during lunch. I didn't care how hypocritical that made me.

With one son still a couple years away from graduating, I guess I reacted first as a parent when this week I heard Vancouver's mayor calling for the legalization of marijuana.

I couldn't imagine how making something easier to obtain was going to result in less use. The mayor claimed legalizing the drug would make it easier to regulate, would pull the rug out from underneath organized criminals and end grow-ops. To my mind, legalizing marijuana would only prompt more people to grow it at home.

There was another thing. Today's pot was not your mother's wacky-tobaccy. The THC (the active drug element in marijuana) content in some joints nowadays is as much as 20 per cent. Back in the '70s it was maybe 2 or 3, unless you got your hands on some Moroccan gold, which was a few per cent more.

I thought of that car accident in Surrey, B.C., a few years ago, where a 16-year-old stoned out of his skull lost control of the Mustang he was driving, killing his two buddies inside. With pot as potent as it is today, was it any wonder?

And now legalizing it was going to reduce our problems? The whole idea seemed counterintuitive to me, which, as I said off the top, makes me sound like a 21st century version of Ward Cleaver, and a two-faced one at that.

I decided to bounce Mr. Campbell's idea off someone for whom I have enormous respect, Dr. John Blatherwick, chief medical health officer of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Every time there is some kind of medical crisis in this neck of the woods, it's always Dr. Blatherwick that the public looks to for information and assurance.

Honestly, I expected him to say the idea of legalizing marijuana was ridiculous.

"I'm in support of the idea and so is our association," he told me. "What's being done now isn't working. [Pot] couldn't get in the hands of more kids than it is right now. People have no idea how many kids are using marijuana or how freely available it is or how pervasive it is in our society. It couldn't be more available than it is right now."

He talked about the proliferation of grow-ops and how muddled the law around marijuana is and said that it was time we, as a society, began to rethink our approach to it all.

When I hung up, I was more confused than assured.

Maybe he's right. Maybe pot is so accessible now that making it legal wouldn't create more users. But as I say that, I also think legalizing it might encourage kids to use it more. That the move toward legalization would be perceived as a tacit endorsement of the drug.

Honestly, it's just the kids I worry about. An adult smoking a joint in his own backyard on the weekend? Fill your boots. A 16-year-old smoking a doobie between classes or after school and then hopping in a car with a bunch of buddies? Not so much.

I know what Ward Cleaver would say about all this but then his wife, June, had all the brains in the family.

gmason@globeandmail.ca

© 2005 H.U.M.A.N.: Hemp Users Medical Access Network - Toronto Medical Marijuana