Pubdate: Thu, 29 Sep 2016
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.ottawacitizen.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Randall Denley
Page: A9

WHAT'S REALLY TO BE GAINED FROM LEGALIZING POT?

An easy promise to make will be harder to pull off

Smoking marijuana can impair one's thought processes, but all the
federal government needs to do is talk about it to achieve a state of
surreal confusion.

Consider the situation today. Marijuana is going to be legalized next
year. Cool. In the meantime, illegal pot stores are proliferating
across the country under the guise of offering medical marijuana.
Since they are illegal, and theoretically don't exist, they are
unaffected by zoning regulations and business licence requirements.
Little is known about the quality of what they sell. When Health
Canada received a report about dangerous toxins in marijuana sold in
dispensaries in Vancouver, it sat on it and did nothing.

Police don't know what to do about all of this, and in Ottawa, they
are not enforcing the existing law.

The government has promised a new regime that will be all about public
health, protection of children, regulation and fighting organized
crime. Instead, it has delivered its own form of reefer madness, where
anything goes.

Not to worry, though. The government's expert task force will have
worked out all the legalization details by November and new
legislation is coming by spring.

That's seen as slow, but in reality, legalizing marijuana is easy to
promise, hard to execute. There might be a reason why Uruguay is the
only country in the world that has done it.

The government's own discussion paper demonstrates the conflicting,
perhaps irreconcilable, goals of the Liberal plan. The government
wants to make marijuana legal and widely available without normalizing
its use or letting young people get their hands on it. It also wants
to control production and sale of the product and tax it, without
making the price so high that organized crime will still dominate the
market.

Realistically, how does government sanction the sale of a drug, maybe
even become the vendor, without normalizing its use? Three-quarters of
Canadians older than 15 drink alcohol, freely available from your
local government outlet, but only 11 per cent use marijuana. Might
that have something to do with it being illegal?

Marijuana demand is concentrated among young people aged 15 to 24,
with 25 per cent using the drug. According to a 2013 UNICEF report,
that rate is the highest in the world. Surely the Liberal government
doesn't want to make that number larger, but if it imposes strict age
restrictions, it will leave a big market for drug dealers.

The worry over increasing drug use among youth isn't just some kind of
fuddy-duddy concern. The Canadian Medical Association recommends a
minimum age of 21 for legal marijuana purchase because of the effects
the drug can have on developing brains. People who enjoyed the product
back in the 1970s might scoff at that, but the marijuana sold now has
THC levels of 12 to 15 per cent. Back in the day, it was a far less
potent three per cent.

At first glance, legalizing marijuana would seem to end the
much-reviled war on drugs, but it doesn't even deliver that benefit.
Instead, it would shift the focus to rooting out producers who operate
outside the government-sanctioned system. As well, all the laws
against stronger drugs would remain in place.

The only real benefit of legalization would be to end criminal
penalties for people who are guilty of nothing more than bad judgment.
That makes perfect sense, but it's a goal that can be easily
accomplished by decriminalization rather than legalization.

It's possible to have the uneasy feeling that the government's
enthusiasm for legal marijuana has something to do with the
anticipated tax windfall. Marijuana is said to be a $7-billion
industry in Canada. Government will charge fees for producers and
retailers, the HST, and whatever additional taxes it deems fit. Legal
marijuana will allow governments to get their beaks very wet indeed.

It's all enough to make a reasonable person ask what we really hope to
gain by legalizing marijuana, and if we have any prospect of
accomplishing those goals.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa commentator, novelist and former Ontario PC 
candidate.
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MAP posted-by: Matt