Canadian Lawmakers Rethink Marijuana Laws

Marijuana should be legalized, and its production, distribution, and consumption should be regulated as part of an integrated drug policy, a committee of the Canadian Senate has recommended.

The call for legalization—only one of many recommendations in a lengthy report issued last month—garnered a flurry of media attention in the United States and elsewhere, and seemed to push the issue beyond even where many advocates of decriminalization have recommended.

Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin, chair of the Canadian Senate’s Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, was quoted last month by CBC-Canada (a radio and television broadcast corporation) as saying that the Canadian government should wipe clean the records of anyone convicted of marijuana possession and that cannabis should be “from here on in legal and of restricted use so that Canadians can choose whether to consume or not in security.”

The Senate committee’s report states, “Billions of dollars have been sunk into enforcement without any greater effect. There are more consumers, more regular users, and more regular adolescent users. Billions of dollars have been poured into enforcement in an effort to reduce supply, without any greater effect. Cannabis is more available than ever, it is cultivated on a large scale, even exported, swelling coffers and making organized crime more powerful. And there have been tens of thousands of arrests and convictions for the possession of cannabis, and thousands of people have been incarcerated.”

The report goes on to say that “the data we have collected on cannabis and its derivatives provide sufficient grounds for our general conclusion that the regulation of the production, distribution, and consumption of cannabis, inasmuch as it is part of an integrated and adaptable public policy, is best able to respond to the principles of autonomy, governance that fosters human responsibility, and limitation of penal law to situations where there is demonstrable harm to others.”

According to the Senate committee report, regulatory system for cannabis should permit, specifically, these activities:

• More effective targeting of illegal traffic and a reduction in the role played by organized crime.

• Prevention programs better adapted to the real world and better able to prevent and detect at-risk behavior.

• Enhanced monitoring of products, quality, and properties.

• Better user information and education.

• Respect for individual and collective freedoms, and legislation more in tune with the behavior of Canadians.

Harm Reduction ‘Lacks Teeth’

Nady El-Guebaly, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Calgary and president of the International Society of Addiction Medicine, said much of the media attention has focused exclusively on the recommendation to legalize—one that is unlikely to be adopted as law.

“There is a growing consensus in Canada that the possession of marijuana should be decriminalized, and most physicians are in support of that,” said El-Guebaly, who is also a past president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. “But the report is going a step forward with claims that the dangers of marijuana are no more than those of alcohol. In some ways, it was helpful that [the report] went that far, but in some ways it was a shock to the country.”

Actually, El-Guebaly said that the general direction of Canada’s drug policy has been one of “harm reduction”—a strategy that would emphasize preventing the biophysiological and social harm of drug use. In contrast to supply reduction—the strategy pursued in the U.S.’s “war on drugs”—harm reduction would focus resources on demand reduction, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation.

But El-Guebaly said that the strategy of harm reduction lacks teeth. Decriminalization would be a first step toward giving that strategy some substance, he said. In the meantime, he emphasized the importance of formulating a comprehensive national drug policy.

Medicinal Uses

Related to the debate around decriminalization is the subject of the medical uses of smoked marijuana (as opposed to the use of its active ingredient in pill form). El-Guebaly said that debate originally revolved around the use of smoked marijuana for the management of pain, glaucoma, and the nausea caused by chemotherapy. In time, however, some groups began claiming medicinal uses for depression and anxiety.

Many experts agree that the active ingredient in cannabis can be administered as effectively in pill form. And studies of the medicinal uses of marijuana have consistently found that for every disorder for which marijuana might be useful, there is another comparably effective drug.

The Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine has issued the following statement on the use of medical marijuana. “Currently, available scientific information and clinical practice experience indicate that overall there is more risk than benefit in the use of cannabis products for medicinal purposes. Ongoing well-designed clinical research on the possible medicinal uses of cannabis products is essential, using the same rigorous standards that are applied to any therapeutic agent prior to its introduction into general clinical practice.”

At least one other addiction expert strongly denounced legalization of marijuana. Herbert Kleber, M.D., a member of APA’s Council on Addiction Psychiatry and a former deputy director in the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the first Bush administration, told Psychiatric News that the Canadian report is a move in precisely the wrong direction.

Kleber said he believes that drug use is connected to three kinds of availability: physical, economic, and psychological. “Anything that makes it more available for adults will increase its physical availability for adolescents. Anything that makes it more available for adults legally is going to decrease its cost and make it more available economically. And anything that changes its legal status is going to make it more psychologically available.

“To pass a law that in a sense encourages marijuana use by destigmatizing it and thereby making it easier to obtain seems to be going in exactly the wrong way at this time.” He added that there has been an increasing accumulation of knowledge about the dangers of marijuana use and that the drug is no longer believed to be the “harmless giggle” that John Lennon was reported to have called it.

“There are hundreds of thousands of individuals in the United States who seek treatment because they have been unable to stop their marijuana use on their own,” Kleber said.

The techniques of growing marijuana, he said, have become more sophisticated, making the drug typically used today far more potent than it was 30 years ago. And a single marijuana cigarette has been shown to have as much or more carcinogenic tar as nicotine cigarettes.

Finally, Kleber said that marijuana use in many places in the United States is already all but decriminalized. “Most of the people in jail for crimes related to marijuana are there not for simple possession but for possession of very large amounts,” he said. “In many places possession of small amounts is not even a misdemeanor.”

A summary of the report, “Cannabis: Our Position for a Canadian Public Policy: Report of the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs,” is posted on the Canadian parliament’s site at www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/com-e/ille-e/rep-e/summary-e.htm. The CBC news report and additional information are posted on the Web at http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/09/04/pot_committee020904. ▪