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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 28, 2004
Canada on drugs
We learned from the Canadian Addiction Survey this last week that the use of marijuana has nearly doubled in the last ten years. Perhaps no other single fact better explains the drift of Canadian politics. Indeed the report (sponsored by Health Canada and others) may offer a one-stop shop for those trying to account for a wide variety of political and social developments in Canada since Jean Chr?tien came to power. A figure now approaching half the population freely admit to having smoked dope and something like one-in-nine also admit to the use of hallucinogens. Ditto cocaine. On the other hand fewer than one-in-sixteen of your neighbours are on hoppers and less than one-in-twenty have done heroin and/or ecstasy. (Higher in cities.) The part that surprised me least was that pot-use "increases with education and income"; which is just what they say about the Liberal vote. It's been a long time since there was any correlation between formal education and learning or between high income and social utility; I therefore find no paradox to confront. The response of the Liberal Party has been to make efforts to decriminalize the recreational use of marijuana and who could blame them? They know their constituency. Whereas the NDP might be compared to the resin left at the bottom of the pipe after the leaves have all burned away. One thinks of the card distributed by Jack Layton supporters in the last election which showed the Great Helmsman's face superimposed upon a sprig of guess-what. It declared a real enthusiasm for legalizing marijuana and looked forward to the day when people would be able to smoke at their ease in their homes and "socially" in restaurants and so forth. Substitute tobacco for marijuana and I might be tempted to vote NDP. Well actually I just realized I have told a lie. The part that surprised me least in the addiction survey was not the stuff about education and income. The truth is I was even less surprised to learn that British Columbia led the other provinces in drug use. I've been to Vancouver several times in the last decade and was under the impression that it was not I but the whole city that was on some kind of trip. Even the bankers there seem -- let's say a little flighty. What can it all mean? Don't ask me man. I stopped doing drugs when I realized they make you crazy. It would be a serious lie to say that I never inhaled -- um anything. But that was in another era and as the saying goes if you remember the 'sixties you weren't there. I'm aware that I'm writing in the newspaper in which the semi-legendary Dan Gardner wrote innumerable series of award-winning articles arguing that the legalization of drugs would put an end to all associated organized crime and make the world safe for democracy. It's one of those issues about which even though I am a vocational pundit I have never had an opinion. But wait for it I'm about to come up with one. The flaw in the libertarian argument is that people don't need permission to misbehave. That is the part of human behaviour that comes naturally. Instead it takes a considerable amount of repressive tradition social stigma and legal threat to get anything good out of the species. And while there may be some tactical discussion of what is worth making illegal and what is not the idea that you can reduce crime by getting rid of laws is tautological. In this case the question of organized crime is tertiary. We have police to take care of that sort of thing and if there aren't enough then we need more. The secondary question is: Do we want to live in a country which is a magnet for all the superannuated hippies in the USA? While the Americans progressively close the border against drug shipments passing the other way? With consequences for all the dwindling number of Canadians who do not happen to be stoned out of their wee minds? But even on this level drug legalization would be merely an act of stupidity. The primary question is do we want the drug culture to become our public culture? For that is the unseen goal we now approach: in a word Holland. Call me square but it's yet another horror I would like to have shoved back in its closet and a bolt driven through the door. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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