Legalizing or decriminalizing pot is catching headlines across the country, and Saskatchewan is no different. The Leader-Post published a recent article proclaiming “Pot prohibition has proven a bust.” Is this the future?

Canada cannot just decide to make marijuana legal. As a signatory nation in an international convention, Canada would need to make significant provisions before marijuana could be legalized and remain in accordance with the agreement. Change may be in the air, but it can't happen overnight regardless of the public debate encouraged by media.

Teen Challenge understands that the majority of our supporters would like to see marijuana remain on the prohibited substance list. Studies have proven that continued use of marijuana by youth leads to mental disorders (like schizophrenia), life-long battles with depression and other disorders.

Teen Challenge encourages those supporters who have an informed opinion on the topic of drug prohibition, legalization and decriminalization, to add their voice — write to their Member of Parliament, comment on relevant articles online. Let the debate be balanced. Teen Challenge, as a ministry, focuses on reaching out to those already trapped in an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Pray for those in the government faced with making these tough decisions.

Read the article below. For more information on marijuana, click here.

Pot prohibition has proven a bust

The front page of the March 9 Leader-Post reported the government can't even keep drugs out of prisons. Given that prisons are purposely designed to be secure, this news may be a good prompt for asking whether it's rational to try and prohibit cannabis from an entire country, which happens to be the world's second largest and the most sparsely populated. Regardless of whether it succeeds in preventing cannabis use, does the prohibition cure have side effects worse than the drug disease?

Indeed, cannabis law reform has enjoyed open minded publicity in specialist publications recently, from the conservative C2C Journal to the neo-Marxist This magazine. In a thoughtful C2C article entitled "the price of pot prohibition" Peter Jaworski gives a feel for the dimensions of cannabis prohibition and finds it to be a highly irrational policy.

A 2002 Senate special report found that around 800 tonnes of cannabis circulate in Canada, yet authorities seized only 50 tonnes, or six per cent, in 2006. Notwithstanding the possibility there was some dramatic change in the

circulation numbers in 2006 as compared to 2002, it seems that prohibition is to the cannabis trade as flies are to elephants: annoying, but mostly irrelevant.

Indeed, 17 per cent of adult Canadians report having used cannabis in the past year, despite it being illegal. For perspective, cigarettes are available at every corner store and the tobacco smoking rate is reported by the Canadian cancer society at 18 per cent. Prohibition is not stopping people from using cannabis.

"Aha," the prohibitionist camp will say, "if that's how many people smoke pot now, imagine if it was legal!" The point is, one supposes, that people look to the state for moral guidance and prohibition may be the only thing keeping us from total societal melt-down.

Then again, the international evidence suggests that drug use is driven by factors other than the attitude of the law. The United States (where

12.2 per cent use cannabis) is the home of the war on drugs and has an estimated half million people in prison for drug offenses.

Meanwhile in The Netherlands (5.4 per cent), people are able to legally buy and smoke cannabis in public.

Not only is prohibition ineffectual though, it is also damaging. The cannabis business is fundamentally different to legal parts of the economy because the people in it can't access the police and court system to enforce contracts and protect their property. You can hardly go to the police and report that your runner made off with your cannabis, or go to court and tell a judge that your grower has breached his contract. As a result, contracts and property rights in the drug business are enforced in much the same way as they are in the wider economy of Somalia; people take the law into their own hands.

Worse still, that burden of lawlessness is not spread evenly across society. While it may comfort parents in south Regina to know that drugs are illegal, it is the parents in North Central who see their kids tempted by gangs

riding high with profits from the dangerous but lucrative business of dealing drugs outside the law. If illegal activity is most appealing to those with the least to lose in the formal economy, then creating a dangerous black market through prohibition is not only harmful, it is inequitably harmful.

Finally, economic projections are notoriously inaccurate, but the best ones we have suggest prohibition is a bad deal. Based on current usage and values, Jaworski estimates that tax on legal cannabis could generate between one and three billion dollars, plus half a billion dollars saved from not having to enforce prohibition. For perspective, raising the GST by one percentage point would raise about $3 billion.

Based on work by the Canadian Centre for Substance abuse, the "social" costs of health care and lost productivity from cannabis can be estimated at approximately half a billion dollars currently. Even if legalization doubled usage (since Canada already has the highest usage rates in the industrialized world, this seems unlikely), the country would still be richer thanks to the tax revenue and enforcement reductions.

Tuesday's revelation from the Leader Post might just be a prompt that it's time to kill this sacred public policy cow. The preferred method? Stoning.

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