CANADA'S POT VIEWS WORRYING NEIGHBOR

Rising Leniency Could Defeat U.S. Drug War

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The door-kicking has stopped, as have the asset forfeitures and harassment. Chris Bennett hasn't been arrested in weeks, nor have any of his friends.

Still, Bennett, 40, isn't inclined to say the battle is won.

He's seen the police relax before. He's seen marijuana achieve a tenuous level of respectability when a more liberal-minded mayor or police chief takes over. And, he's seen the subsequent backlash.

"Every time we talk to the press, something happens," he said, sitting in the store he manages, the Marijuana Party Headquarters.

The store is three blocks from one of Vancouver's toniest shopping districts. While talking, Bennett selects a handful of sticky green cannabis buds from a dense cluster the size of a hoagie. Pungent bluish haze hangs in the air, and customers casually put flame to pipe as they flip through books about hydroponics.

"I've had friends arrested the next day after talking to reporters about pot. So you can see why I'm nervous," he said.

Nervous but willing to talk. In spite of Bennett's concern, the likelihood of marijuana legalization in Canada never has been stronger -- despite strong U.S. government objections and opposition from within the country.

A medical marijuana law is in place nationally. In official reports late last year, both the House of Commons and Canadian Senate endorsed some form of pot legalization, as have the justice and prime ministers.

Indeed, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon recently promised to ease marijuana laws in 2003. He wants to make punishment for possessing a small amount equivalent to that of a parking ticket.

In Vancouver, this has happened, if not in law, then in practice. Although cannabis remains illegal and its possession is a criminal offense, the city effectively has decriminalized it. Cops rarely bust the dozens of dealers selling grams of pot and hashish on East Hastings Street. On a Sunday afternoon, pot is nearly as easy to buy as a six-pack of beer.

"Dude, the cookies rock," said Justin B., a 24-year-old Seattle resident sitting at a cribbage board in the Blunt Bros. cafe while his buddies were lighting up in the cafe's rear-corner smoking booth. For understandable reasons, Justin didn't want his full name used.

Standing against a backdrop of Grateful Dead iconography, dozens of centerfold-style posters of pot plants and cases of translucent glass pipes, Justin said he loves Vancouver because the police let pot smokers be. This is what U.S. federal and Washington state authorities fear.

U.S. drug czar John Walters, fresh from a recent trip to Vancouver to explain to the Canadians how wrongheaded their drug permissiveness is, has said he believes that not only will Americans flock to Canada for drug vacations, but that more pot will find its way into the United States.

"Nothing gets better with more drug use," Walters said in a recent interview.

Walters' point: According to statistics from his office, pot, not alcohol, is the No. 1 drug treatment issue among U.S. residents under age 18. Nearly 95 percent of the potent pot grown in British Columbia, known broadly as B.C. bud, is sold in the United States, a $4-billion annual industry.

Even the medical claims of pot's usefulness largely are spurious, he added - -- a statement hotly disputed by the medical marijuana community.

"I was told by a Canadian official they are sure pot doesn't create dependency. That's archaic in the absurd," Walters said. "You can walk down the streets in Vancouver, and the streets are swarming with the openly addicted."

U.S. drug investigators agree. They point to a tent-city on East Hastings that started as a protest to encourage low-income housing. But, in the past month, it has become an open-air drug bazaar.

Dave Rodriguez, who runs the drug intelligence unit Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area team, based in Seattle, said drug busts on the U.S.-Canadian border are rising faster than on the Mexican border or along the West Coast.

A decade ago, investigators seized 11,000 pounds of Canadian pot annually. Last year, agents confiscated 44,000 pounds.

But Canadian officials, including Kash Heed, the officer in charge of the Vancouver police vice division, wonder what Walters sees in Vancouver that is so different from Seattle.

"Exactly what benefit has harsher penalties and 'Just Say No' brought?" Heed said. "They have addiction at the same rates we do. For some things, we are lower."

Experts on all sides of the issue say the pot market in Canada is driven by U.S. demand and that many of the addicts in Canada are U.S. citizens.

Peter Ditchfield, who runs the British Columbia Organized Crime Agency, said pot is what alcohol was during the U.S. Prohibition -- readily available and largely run by organized crime.

"It becomes a question of what a society is willing to absorb," he said. Canada, he said, always has been a more tolerant society than the United States.


Pubdate: Thu, 9 Jan 2003
Source: Detroit Free Press (MI)
Contact: letters@freepress.com
Copyright: 2003 Detroit Free Press
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