Pubdate: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU) Copyright: 2013 Canwest Publishing Inc. Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html Website: http://www.montrealgazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274 Author: Henry Aubin MAGICAL THINKING TRUDEAU'S Idea That Legalizing Pot Would Reduce Youth Use May Be Naive It's easy to understand Justin Trudeau's support last week for legalizing marijuana. The leader of the federal Liberals has been around pot a long time - his mom smoked it in 24 Sussex when he was a child. And the fact that he comes from Quebec, the second-toughest province when it comes to charging youths with possession of the drug (see table), may also help explain his distaste for severity. I appreciate, too, Trudeau's compassionate concern for the ill effects that marijuana can have on young people's health - "I certainly wouldn't want to encourage people to use it," he says. The idea that pot adversely affects brains that are still developing is indeed hardly Reefer Madness nonsense: As the New York Times reported earlier this year, studies show that "young adults who started smoking pot regularly before they were 16 performed significantly worse on cognitive tests of brain function than those who started later in adolescence." But what I do not understand is Trudeau's linkage of legalization of marijuana with decreased use by youths. He says of marijuana: "Tax it. Regulate it. It's one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids. ..." Huh? He makes isolating pot from kids seem so simple. He does not specify whether government stores or private ones would sell the product, but he expresses confidence young people would have a harder time buying it than today, when covert drug dealers are everywhere. Young people presumably would have to carry identification to show they were of a legal age, just as they do now when buying alcohol. No longer, Trudeau suggests, would kids be able to buy joints on the sly. But wait a minute. Is that a realistic expectation? And is it reasonable to say, as do many pot advocates, that legalization would put pot gangs out of business? If government made it hard for minors to buy pot legally, wouldn't they still want to buy from the street dealer? If, for health reasons, the legal product were not as strong as what is available on the illegal market, wouldn't consumers - including adults - seek illegal pot that gave a better high? And, finally, if the tax to which Trudeau refers were significant, wouldn't that drive consumers to a dealer offering cheaper stuff? The assumption that many pro-legalization people make that government-sanctioned weed would a) dry up the criminal element and b) bring an end to costly law-enforcement efforts could therefore be naive. To be sure, the overall demand for pot that exists today would decline, but gangs would still exist not only to serve this parallel market for marijuana but also to serve the more profitable demand for hard drugs (heroin, speed, crystal meth and other illegal fare). The war on drugs would hardly end. But let's get back to youths. They, not adults, belong at the heart of this debate. High schoolers, after all, are at an age when they need to deal with reality - they need to understand how the world works and how they can fit well into it. Drugs help avoid that reality. I've written before about how legalizing pot for adults would make its consumption more in the open than today and thus - as a forbidden fruit - more desirable to youngsters. After each column, many readers storm back. They concede that keeping kids away from pot is desirable, but they say it could be done via intensified education - "Warn them of the downsides." Excuse me. We warn and re-warn teenagers about the dangers of driving - - we even make them to take safety training. Yet though people aged 16 through 17 made up just 2.9 per cent of all Quebecers with drivers' licences or probationary permits, they were involved last year in 7.1 per cent of all fatal road accidents. Risk is often an irrelevant abstraction. This said, I'm not ideologically opposed to legalizing marijuana. Just because it would be difficult to keep a legalized drug from kids doesn't necessarily mean it would be impossible. We need to find a better way to keep them from pot than saddling them with criminal records, as the table shows that Quebec did 1,003 times last year. Canada might not have a lot to learn from the liberalization of drug laws in the Netherlands and Portugal, those Old World cultures being quite different from North America's. However, Colorado and Washington state have moved toward legalization of marijuana in recent months. Canada could usefully regard these as tests of whether Trudeau's pitch that legalized marijuana is reconcilable with reduced youth consumption is realistic - or, as I suspect, that it's magical thinking. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom