By G.D. Maxwell
It’ll be like trying to sell bibles to atheists. Big Macs to vegetarians. Abstinence to swingers.
I don’t know whether Little Marty Cauchon ever sold shoes or door-to-door magazine subscriptions for a living, but if there isn’t some traumatic sales job in his background he’s going to get eaten alive trying to sell decriminalized marijuana to this American Congress.
Marty – Minister of All Things Just and bag-holder for Sgt. Rock’s billion dollar baby, Canada’s gun registration – went south this week to ‘splain to the Americans why limp-wristed Canada was going to make simple possession of pot more or less equivalent to a traffic fine when the prevailing mood south of the border is to lock up potheads and throw away the key. And we’re not even talking a traffic fine like for drunk driving or vehicular homicide. The Liberals want to make possession kinda like speeding or failing to yield or maybe forgetting to renew your drivers license because you were too stoned to remember it was your birthday even though you remember eating leftover cake when you got the munchies the other night during Star Trek.
If there is any justice in the world, he got stripsearched crossing the border.
Decriminalizing pot is a cruel joke. It’s like loosening, but not removing, the screws in somebody’s crutches. It’s popping a child’s balloon, pocketing a dog’s ball, putting itching powder in your brother’s Jockeys when he has to give a big speech at school. Don’t ask about that last one.
On the plus side, it will keep some people out of jail who were stoned enough to get caught with their stash in their pockets and let them live their lives without the stigma of a criminal bust.
On the minus side, it’ll most likely result in more arrests for possession. There are at least three reasons busts will go up. Stoners will be less discrete knowing they’re only going to get fined. Of course, in an almost Darwinian move, they’ll probably have to sell a little pot to come up with the couple of hundred bucks for the fine and get charged with trafficking.
Cops will be less prone to turn a blind eye to simple possession. It’s just a traffic fine they’re laying on someone, not a life-ruining criminal rap.
And let’s not dismiss the cynical belief this is just another of the government’s favourite ploys – a tax on the dumb. Replace jailing someone with fining them, boost the number of busts and presto, a much better bottom line.
Decriminalization will also not move Canadian society away from the pointless, expensive and long-lost war on drugs. It will take neither the profit motive out of pot nor the quasi-organized thugs who attempt to control distribution. It will not bring the production and distribution of pot within the realm of legal – and taxed – commerce. It will offer no new opportunities or modalities for dealing with people who want to stop using drugs.
In short, it will fail to address any of the issues identified by the Canadian Senate a year ago when they delivered their exhaustive report on how a kinder, gentler, more enlightened country might go about tackling illegal drugs.
While no one ever expected the Liberal government to have the balls to run with the Senate’s recommendations, neither did most expect them to cower to the White House on the issue. And that’s pretty much what they’ve done with this half-assed stab at "decriminalization."
"The government wants to send a better message... that the use of cannabis is illegal in Canada," says Little Marty. So while walking around with a joint in your shirtpocket is more like running a red light than robbing a 7-Eleven, growing the stuff’ll get you 14 years in lockup, raising the always pertinent question of how you get what you possess in the first place.
The ironic thing is it won’t matter. Rummy, Mr. Homeland Security, Ashcroft and most of Congress are still having hissy fits and threatening to clog up the borders if Canada goes "soft" on drugs. Hence the trip to explain it to our neighbours before it’s even tabled in Parliament.
Like any good salesman, Marty needs selling points. Given the government’s lame attempt at dealing with the issue, I figured I’d better lend a hand. I do hope to be able to cross the border again some day without a cavity check so here’s the best reasons the US should get on board and stop worrying about Canada’s pointless attempt at drug reform.
• A stoned populace is a complacent populace. A variation on the Bread and Circuses trick, there can be little doubt a hazy-eyed public will mostly fail to notice – and will care even less – that the Liberals are willing to buy into the whole missile defense shield boondoggle. As an acid test, you can’t get much better than that. If they’ll let that idea slide past them, the sky’s the limit.
• Sell it as another opportunity for wealth transfer to well-placed, Republican friends. While we’ll be letting possessors walk, we’re doubling hard time for growers. We’ll need more prisons... maybe privatized prisons, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And if pushed, we might even invite the big US HMOs in to run the medicinal marijuana clinics.
• Here’s yet another area of commerce where the US can do what it enjoys doing most: slapping punitive tariffs on Canadian products. Not that any of that fabled B.C. bud is going to slip across the border, mind you. But maybe in the future, under NAFTA II.... Naw, way too far-fetched.
• The simple expedient of filthy lucre: offer to split the fine money coughed up by the knuckleheads who get caught for possession. Sure, it’s in Canadian dollars but what the heck, with the dollar testing new highs against the weakening Yankee greenback, it’s an offer that grows more attractive every day.
• Finally, explain to Bush’s advisors that by going slack on possession, Canada just might free up enough manpower to be able to muster up a few soldiers for the next war on terrorism. After all, it wasn’t that we really had an ideological problem with whupping Iraq, it’s just that our soldier was busy in March.
And if none of that is persuasive, maybe they’ll buy the truth. That this is just a cynical move by a tired government led by the lamest of ducks to give the appearance of progress without ever really leaving the failed experiment of the last century.
Roll another one, Marty, Star Trek’s coming on.
