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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom