“A lot of the debate is not driven by good science; a lot of the debate is driven by value systems, ideologies, and people will see what they want to see through those filters,” says Dr. Stephen Rivers, psychiatrist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Rivers moderated a forum at the Ontario Science Centre on marijuana legalization, designed to empower citizens to make informed decisions through an examination of the political and scientific points of view of the topic.
Bill C-17 proposes to federally decriminalize personal use of marijuana while increasing the severity of penalties for growing and trafficking it. Though cannabis would still be illegal and dealt with through criminal law, possession of less than 15 grams of cannabis would be punishable with a relatively small fine.
The proposal to decriminalize was the result of two considerations, explained Patricia Begin of the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA). First, the number of people who have used marijuana has risen from 28.2 per cent in 1994 to 44.5 per cent in 2004. “The criminal justice approach was ineffective and extremely costly,” said Begin.
Second, rates of use are highest amongst youth, with 70 per cent of young adults having used cannabis. “There is an acceptance that there will be a certain level of use in society, particularly experimentation amongst young people,” says Begin. Given the negative implications of a permanent criminal record at an early point in life, the CCSA wanted an alternative to criminal law.
A professor of pharmacology at U of T, Dr. Harold Kalant is an expert in the health benefits and risks of cannabis, for which he has been made honorary fellow of the British Society for the Study of Addiction. In small doses, marijuana use enhances sensory experience and increases drowsiness, but at greater amounts, Kalant has found, the risks can increase to hallucinations and paranoia.
According to Kalant, who won the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Distinguished Scientist Award in 1995, the drug increases stress to the heart (of particular danger to older users), affects emotional and social maturation (of particular danger to teenagers), and is known to impair memory and learning (a danger to all). Psychiatric illnesses correlated with large doses of cannabis use include depression, anxiety and, when one is genetically predisposed to develop the disease, schizophrenia.
“All drugs are able to cause effects that can be potentially beneficial and others that are potentially harmful,” Kalant explains. It all depends on the amount, frequency and circumstances of use. He is therefore not opposed to medical marijuana, but stresses. “For all of [its] potential medical actions, cannabis is usually not the best drug; there are other drugs available that do a better job.” Kalant also questions the reasons for smoking marijuana when eating it, though not as immediate, has a more prolonged effect.
Marijuana smoke compounds the dangers of cannabis itself. “The composition of marijuana smoke is very similar to cigarette smoke and therefore it’s quite reasonable to expect that smoking marijuana could cause lung cancer and emphysema,” says Jack Uetrecht of the Department of Medicine at U of T. “All medical groups that have looked at the evidence feel that smoking marijuana is not a recommendable way of giving patients the benefits of medical uses of cannabinoids,” Kalant said in response to a medical marijuana advocate who is fighting for marijuana legalization and argues for individual experience and personal choice.
While individual experience is valuable in directing attention, conclusions about the safety and efficacy of marijuana must be based on quantitative methods, says Kalant. “When you’re talking about medical use you can’t base your policies on one person’s experience or ten people’s experiences; there are studies, called double blind studies, that look at large numbers of people, [where] neither the patient nor the physician knows who’s getting what. Then you can have enough data to draw conclusions on which medical science can make scientifically sound judgments.” This has so far not been done with marijuana.
Turning to politics, there was a general agreement on the panel that outright prohibition of marijuana is ineffective at preventing use. Eugene Oscapella of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy, a strong advocate of using regulations rather than criminal law for dealing with marijuana, was the strongest advocate of this opinion.
Oscapella argued that prohibition is ineffective, estimating that we only stop 10 per cent of drugs entering Canada. “Prohibition does not stop the production of this drug; it creates the incentive to produce [and] sell drugs because there is now so much money in this trade.” The drug trade finances worldwide terrorism, while being the greatest incentive to organized crime, according to the RCMP.
Once prohibition is removed, options include legalization or regulation, both of which have been experimented with in the Netherlands. Though not legal, marijuana use is regulated and tolerated in the Netherlands, where coffeehouses sell up to 5 grams of cannabis for personal consumption. While the rate of use did not significantly increase as a result of this policy, when the police subsequently announced they were dropping prosecution altogether, a defacto legalization, the result was a slow increase in the rate of use nearly to the same prevalence as in the United States.
“Limiting access to things is quite beneficial, [while] totally banning them I don’t think is quite so effective,” states Uetrecht. “On the other hand it’s also true that the highest rate of sclerosis is in France, and although most people in France use alcohol responsibly, if something is made too easily available there will be some individuals who have problems and the number of people who have problems will increase.” Uetrecht offered the example of gambling, which was first legalized and quickly promoted as a source of revenue, but led to problem gamblers.
A major complication to any legalization or regulation scheme is the black-market. “[Legalization] would only eliminate the black market if the price of legalized cannabis was lower than black market cannabis…but experience with a whole range of other drugs has shown that if it’s legal and cheap then use will go up,” explains Kalant.
Oscapella adds, “Taxation policies can raise the price of a drug but if you raise it too much you foster a black market.”
A growing issue is the impairment to driving performance that marijuana can cause. Detecting the presence of cannabis is much more difficult than alcohol. “Driving under the influence of cannabis is not detectable by a roadside breathalyzer test,” explains Begin, and yet indications of cannabis in the body remain up to a month after use. In April 2004 Parliament introduced Bill C-32, which would give police the ability to demand saliva and blood samples.
