Legalizing pot will achieve one thing: a tax windfall for Ottawa

Government performs a balancing act by sanctioning the sale of a drug

Smoking marijuana can impair one’s thought processes, but all the federal government needs to do is talk about it to achieve a state of surreal confusion.

Consider the situation today. Marijuana will be legalized next year. Cool. In the meantime, illegal pot stores are proliferating across the country under the guise of offering medical marijuana. Since they are illegal, and theoretically don’t exist, they are unaffected by zoning regulations and business licence requirements.

Little is known about the quality of what they sell. When Health Canada received a report about dangerous toxins in marijuana sold in dispensaries in Vancouver, it sat on it and did nothing. Police don’t know what to do about all of this and in Ottawa, they are not enforcing the existing law.

The government has promised a new regime that will be all about public health, protection of children, regulation and fighting organized crime. Instead, it has delivered its own form of reefer madness, where anything goes. Not to worry, though. The government’s expert task force will have worked out all the details by November and new legislation is coming by spring.

That’s seen as slow, but in reality, legalizing marijuana is easy to promise, hard to execute. There might be a reason why Uruguay is the only country in the world that has done it.

The government’s own discussion paper demonstrates the conflicting, perhaps irreconcilable, goals of the Liberal plan.

The government wants to make marijuana legal and widely available without normalizing its use or letting young people get their hands on it. It also wants to control production and sale of the product and tax it without making the price so high that organized crime will still dominate the market.

Realistically, how does government sanction the sale of a drug, maybe even become the vendor, without normalizing its use?

Three-quarters of Canadians older than 15 drink alcohol, freely available from your local government-approved outlet, but just 11 per cent use marijuana.

Might that have something to do with it being illegal?

Marijuana demand is concentrated among young people aged 15 to 24, with 25 per cent using the drug. According to a 2013 UNICEF report, that rate is the highest in the world.

Surely, the Liberal government doesn’t want to make that number larger, but if it imposes strict age restrictions, it will leave a big market for drug dealers.

The worry over increasing drug use among youth isn’t just some kind of fuddy-duddy concern.

The Canadian Medical Association recommends a minimum age of 21 for legal marijuana purchase because of the effects the drug can have on developing brains.

People who enjoyed the product back in the 1970s might scoff at that, but the marijuana sold now has THC levels of 12 to 15 per cent. Back in the day, it was a far less potent three per cent.

At first glance, legalizing marijuana would seem to end the much-reviled war on drugs, but it doesn’t even deliver that benefit.

Instead, it would shift the focus to rooting out producers who operate outside the governmentsanctioned system. As well, all the laws against stronger drugs would remain in place.

The only real benefit of legalization would be to end criminal penalties for people who are guilty of nothing more than bad judgment. That makes perfect sense, but it’s a goal that can be easily accomplished by decriminalization rather than legalization.

It’s possible to have the uneasy feeling that the government’s enthusiasm for legal marijuana has something to do with the anticipated tax windfall.

Marijuana is said to be a $7-billion industry in Canada. The government will charge fees for producers and retailers, the GST, and whatever additional taxes it deems fit. Legal marijuana will allow governments to get their beaks very wet indeed.

It’s all enough to make a reasonable person ask what we really hope to gain by legalizing marijuana, and if we have any prospect of accomplishing those goals.