Lighten up on pot growers, Canada's on a roll
By: Ben Rayner, Toronto Star, 01/18/04

An increasingly common greeting among Canadians abroad, I've observed in recent years, is the knowing wink and the universal sign language for "puff, puff."

It's been a fairly common greeting for this Canadian abroad, in any case.

And while I confess the occasional dim glaze in my eyes might betray an affinity for certain untoward habits, I'm not given to wearing Phish tie-dyes, flip-flops, a long beard or other signifiers of the "stoner" species when travelling outside the country - especially when travelling outside the country involves going anywhere near the United States. A crewcut, a Bible and a Stars-'n'-Stripes lapel pin are best advised these days, unless you fancy a date with a rubber glove and a ticket to Guantanamo Bay.

I am thus forced to conclude there's a grain of truth to this talk of Canada being one of the world's largest exporters of marijuana.

Hard to quantify this sort of thing, of course, since there aren't a lot of records kept and police and customs officials tend to exaggerate "seizure" statistics for their own purposes. But I do know of a great deal of anecdotal international evidence to support the claim that Canada produces really good weed. And the size and scale of the two massive grow operations uncovered in Barrie last week suggest that the amount of pot being produced in southern Ontario far outstrips local demand.

Still, let's be honest, it's better to be known for exporting weed than for exporting troops, high-tech military hardware and political xenophobia, isn't it?

This is why I disagree with the observations of folks like CTV's Lloyd Robertson, who early last week proclaimed on the evening newscast that this was "the growth industry our country doesn't need" and a trend sending our national reputation "up in smoke." Same with the police spin on the matter, which asserts that marijuana usage and production in this country are at "epidemic" proportions and that the best solution is to ratchet up the legal penalties - and, as usual, to put more cops on the beat to deal with the scourge.

I even disagree with the Liberal government's current, tentatively permissive stance on pot, which isn't that permissive, really.

The marijuana-reform legislation left in Prime Minister Paul Martin's hands by Jean Chrétien might propose imposing a small fine only for possession of small amounts of pot, but it also falls right in line with hard-line police demands when it comes to growing and trafficking.

Just let it go, folks. Have the guts to admit that the nearly century-long effort to persuade the average Canadian of marijuana's evils has been buried by its inherent inability to be particularly evil. It's somewhat counterproductive, certainly, probably best not used in tandem with a motor vehicle or heavy machinery, and not exactly great for your health (inhaling smoke of any kind rarely is). But neither is beer - the product that was previously made, legally and taxably and according to government standards, in the Molson Brewery site where the largest marijuana cache in Canadian history was unearthed last weekend.

Our farmers are chronically disenchanted, several of our fisheries have no fish and the cattle industry is about to nosedive; here, we have a lucrative cash crop that'll grow in ditches.

But if we don't have the legislative guts to acknowledge the relative harmlessness of legalized marijuana - "legal" tobacco is responsible for 71 per cent of the world's seven million annual "drug-related deaths," according to the Swiss Addiction Research Institute, while alcohol takes care of another 26 per cent - and to establish some kind of state-monitored apparatus for getting our huge pot crop to consumers, then let's at least agree to informally look the other way so a sizeable chunk of the population can go about its daily business of buying, selling and growing pot without fear of legal reprisal. It's obviously not discouraging anyone, anyway.

True, the U.S. government is something of an obstacle. This is an administration so hung up on its wholly disastrous War on Drugs that it's willing to unleash a "pathogenic fungus fusarium oxysporum" - essentially one of those biological weapons the Americans were supposed to find in Iraq - on coca crops in Colombia, untested and with no thought for the local health or agricultural consequences, to arrest the flow of cocaine through its borders. The White House stopped making sense about drugs a long time ago.

There's no better way to teach than by example, though. If the streets of a marijuana-friendly Canada aren't regularly strafed by gunfire and peopled with zombified heroin addicts lured through the weed "gateway" in five or 10 years, and instead are just a bit mellower, maaan, than they were before, the States and others of that mindset will have precious little ammunition for anti-pot policies.

There's already a growing chorus of Americans who think their country might benefit from being a little more like its neighbour to the north.

"Those crazy Canadians. They're so gay! As they should be. Really, why wouldn't you be gay if you were Canadian? You've got good music television, socialized medicine, legal marijuana, homosexual marriage and a government that's not insane," remarked a Village Voice writer last August - somewhat erroneously, but with heart in the right place - in a piece on Toronto's "gay church folk orchestra" the Hidden Cameras. "Man, if I lived in Canada right now, I'd be so gay all the time, nothing would be able to bring me down. Except maybe SARS."

What's wrong with being known as a progressive, peace-loving (if slightly dazed) nation that trusts its citizens' judgment enough to let them make their own decisions about what they will or will not put into their bodies?

And while we're thinking progressively, why not put the 30,000 high-grade hydrophonic plants seized during last week's Barrie raids to good use? Rather than burying them or incinerating them, why not supply the thousands of Canadians who would benefit from medicinal marijuana, yet who have consistently been failed by the Liberals' own dodgy Manitoba growing operations and legal muddling of the matter.

That is, if dumping the pile in Nathan Phillips Square and looking the other way for half an hour isn't an option.

It's not an option, is it?