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Seen from afar these days, the world must think Canadians are one toke over the 49th parallel.

According to UNICEF, Canadian teens lead the industrialized world in pot smoking, a million and a half of us have criminal records for toking up or possessing small amounts of marijuana, and we add about 50,000 a year to that number.

The Rob Ford crack pipe video story has gone viral internationally — partly due to disbelief, partly because it’s a knee-slapper. The comedians are loving it. A guy with man boobs who can actually make steam come out of his ears.

Now his brother, Toronto city councillor Doug Ford, has been accused by the Globe and Mail — in a massive special heavy on allegations, sketchier on evidence — of having once dealt hashish. The allegations are 30 years old and the alleged drug dealers and users it quotes were assigned pseudonyms.

You’d think the lawsuits would be dropping like Stephen Harper’s ratings. Actually, there was a lot of silence for quite a long time. Then came that curt, four-minute non-denial denial from the mayor of Toronto. At least it didn’t take his brother Doug nearly a week to utter his unequivocal rejection of the Globe’s claim that he was a parking lot pusher back in the day.

On radio yesterday, the Ford boys did the reverse tag team on the Globe, calling people in this business “a bunch of maggots.”

Drugs have always brought out the prude and the pothead in Canadians. Let’s start with the prudes. The Harper government is the only political party in Canada that says the use and production of marijuana should remain a criminal offence. I have it on good authority that they are, at least for the time being, still against putting people in stocks in the public square.

When Parliament sent C-10 to the Senate, a bill that created mandatory minimums for minor drug infractions, a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition urged the PM not to repeat the major mistakes of the U.S. war on drugs. Have you noticed how wars on nouns have a way of ending badly?

According to Ohio State associate law professor Michelle Alexander, the New York City Police Department spent 1 million hours between 2002 and 2012 leaving 440,000 people with criminal records for using marijuana. Guess what? Not only does that mean that they can now be legally discriminated against by employers, marijuana is as popular and available as it ever was. What was accomplished?

But the Harper government wasn’t listening. Sounding like Janey Canuck, the suffragist who wrote in the 1920s that the only way out of reefer madness was “insanity, death, or abandonment”, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson made it clear the government had “no intention to decriminalize or legalize” marijuana, and that the Tories remained “committed to ensuring that criminals are held fully accountable for their actions.”

The NDP has sent out mixed messages. The party has said that people should not be going to jail for using pot. But before he became leader, Thomas Mulcair was quoted on Global TV declaring that decriminalizing would be a mistake because the “marijuana on the market is extremely potent and can actually cause mental illness.”

When Parliament sent C-10 to the Senate, a bill that created mandatory minimums for minor drug infractions, a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition urged the PM not to repeat the major mistakes of the U.S. war on drugs. Have you noticed how wars on nouns have a way of ending badly?

Only the Liberal party believes in going whole hog — legalizing and regulating — as Washington and Colorado have done at the state level south of the border. As a party, the Liberals voted 77 per cent for that policy change. That’s in line with a recent Forum Research poll that showed that 65 percent of Canadians favoured either the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.

Anything would beat the crazy combination we currently have — harsher criminal penalties on the one hand, and Health Canada through the Medical Marijuana Access Division (MMAD) licensing 28,000 people to use marijuana and 21,000 of those to grow their own dope.

How bad is the current, on-its-way-out system? Doctors and cops have been dissing Health Canada as the arrests and abuses began to pile up. From the grow-ops in Abbotsford that had eight times more plants under cultivation than its license permitted, to the 12 people just arrested in Hamilton for obtaining several dozen licenses and allegedly distributing their “medicine” all the way to Newfoundland, the system has been a disaster. The PMO finally woke up.

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced a few months ago that Ottawa was moving to outlaw all personal production of “medical” marijuana and replace it with a new industry of licensed commercial producers. (Under the strictest of controls, of course — a promise that rings slightly hollow from the guys who just lost $3.1 billion.)

Allow me to walk you through how the old licensing system worked in practice in Health Canada as explained to me by department insiders:

The MMAD never really knew if the applicant existed or not.

The applicant’s address was verified, but not that the applicant actually lived there.

The doctor involved had his name verified, but Health Canada did not call the doctor unless the medical dose of marijuana was above 50 grams a day. Since the public has access on the web to the list of physicians and surgeons for each province, applicants could simply pick a name from that list.

The doctor’s address was not verified and in some cases the licence documents were sent to a post office box set up by the applicant/grower.

For the most part, growers were never checked to see if they were actually growing the amount they were licensed to use medically, whether they were growing near a day care or school, of if their operation was a fire risk. (One out of 22 of them actually goes up in smoke).

So I was not surprised when the reply to Access to Information requests came back the way it did. Two requests were put to Health Canada.

First: “The security procedures in place to ensure growers do not grow more than the amount stated in their application.”

Second: “The investigation procedures that are used to verify that an applicant is legitimate, has a medical necessity for growing Marihuana and has no criminal record.”

In both cases, the answer that came back from the Access to Information and Privacy Division of Health Canada was identical: “After a thorough search for the requested information, no records were located which respond to your request.”

If people persist in doing something in large numbers, what is the ultimate point of prohibition? Winning the moral arm-wrestling contest, while you puff on your ciggie and down your second double scotch?

That could mean a lot of things. But as with the Senate, it sounds like the honour system run amok to me.

It’s time to realize that it’s not 1923, the year that marijuana was added to the Confidential Restricted List in Canada. As author Garrett Peck has written, it’s time we learned from the Prohibition Hangover.

De-regulating the alcohol market was a disaster. As Garrett told the New York Times, when the booze business went black market, the mob made fortunes because people were not about to stop drinking. It’s just that they didn’t know what they were drinking — scotch or industrial alcohol with a little bit of caramel thrown in to make it look like the real thing.

Thomas Mulcair makes a good point as far as he goes. Today’s marijuana can be beyond powerful. That’s because, like Prohibition drinkers, the estimated 31 million users of marijuana in North America don’t really know what’s in it. And they don’t know what’s in it because there is no requirement for a drug dealer to sell his bag of dope with testing and labelling for chemical content, microbes, pesticides and heavy metals, as UCLA professor Mark Klieman has pointed out.

To be sure, there is a counter-case. Approximately nine per cent of marijuana users become addicted. (Nicotine is more addictive.) There can be profound physical consequences, as there have been with both alcohol and cigarettes. But there is always the bright neon question mark at the end of this controversy: If people persist in doing something in large numbers, what is the ultimate point of prohibition? Winning the moral arm-wrestling contest, while you puff on your ciggie and down your second double scotch?

Sooner or later, legalization — i.e., regulation of the marijuana market — will come. It happened with alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution and gambling; Mary Jane will join the list. Not only does legalization deal out the criminal element, it makes life a lot safer for the people who will use the drug anyway. And frankly, governments need the money, just as they did in 1933 when prohibition was abandoned in the United States.

Instead of giving criminal records to young people who smoke pot, and ceding huge drug proceeds to organized crime, government’s should legalize, regulate and yes, tax marijuana.

No society ever got on with the difficult things in life by denying reality.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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