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Quebec, a friend in deed
By Hempology | July 20, 2007
Edmonton Sun, AB
19 Jul 2007
Lyn Cockburn
CANADA GOES TO POT
Dieu merci. Thank God for Quebec. They’ve gotten us anglos off the hook yet again.
First, they obligingly claimed the highest rate of opposition in Canada to our country’s mission in Afghanistan, thus letting the rest of us feel properly patriotic.
Never mind that some 200 Royal 22nd Regiment ( Van Doos ) from CFB Valcartier just took off for the land of the poppy — with 2,000 more to follow during the summer. In fact, by September, soldiers from Valcartier will have replaced the majority of our existing troops in Afghanistan.
Now, in a spectacular gesture of rapprochement with Canada’s other nine provinces and three territories, they’ve admitted to doing more pot than the rest of us.
For an upsetting week there, as the result of the United Nations 2007 World Drug Report, it looked like all of Canada was full of smoke — from the marijuana herb, that is, not the Nicotiania tabacum plant.
The UN report stated that Canadians use marijuana four times more than people in any other developed country. Some 16.8 per cent of Canadians between 15 and 64 used pot in 2006.
By comparison, the figure is 12.6 per cent in the U.S., 8.7 per cent in Britain and 0.1 per cent in Japan.
In all, we came in first in the Marijuana Olympics among industrialized nations and fifth overall ( a far better result than we managed in the FIFA Under-20 World Cup in which we didn’t even manage to score a goal ).
To put it all in perspective, people in Jamaica evidently smoke 6.1-per-cent less pot than do Canadians, although anyone who visits the Bob Marley museum in Kingston may sniff the air and come to the conclusion there’s enough ganja in that one location alone to win any contest going.
Anyway, those figures stirred up a lot of discussion in Canada.
“Are we a nation of potheads?” asked the newscaster on my TV, and “Do Canadians smoke too much marijuana?” demanded a radio talk show host.
One caller had the perfect solution — 10 lashes at noon every Friday on the Parliament grounds in Ottawa for anyone caught smoking a joint.
But not to worry. A breakdown of the figures supplied by Quebec to the UN for its report shows that 32 per cent of their students in Grades 7 to 9 have toked up at least once in the past year.
And on Tuesday, Quebecers kindly owned up to this fact, leaving B.C. in the dust at 18 per cent and Ontario at 11 per cent. Overall, marijuana use in Quebec runs 12- per-cent higher than the national average.
In fact, if Quebec were a sovereign nation, it would have finished first in pot use among industrial nations, well ahead of Canada. It is not known at this point whether pro-or anti-sovereigntists will use this figure to their advantage.
By the way, the Netherlands, which has decriminalized marijuana use, came in at a trifling 6.1 per cent, a figure which, of course, turned on the Canadian proponents of decriminalization.
Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer who specializes in drug policy issues, noted: “The criminal law does not prevent people from using marijuana, nor does legalization force people to use it.”
Oscapella no doubt approved of the previous Liberal government’s 2003 bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.
However, Stephen Harper, unaware that Quebec was the main culprit, killed the bill when his Conservatives came to power in 2006.
All in all though, thanks to Quebec, nine provinces and three territories can stop worrying about their marijuana consumption.
We need wait no longer to exhale.
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