Thank you.
The point about prohibition is that until 1967 we only had 1,000 convictions per year for possession, distribution, and cultivation of all illegal drugs combined. So one has to ask, why was it so different? Why, by 1976, did we have 40,000 convictions for marijuana possession alone?
The way to understand that is to understand global travel. Only the wealthy could travel globally until the mid- to late 1960s. People went to countries like Thailand and Colombia and they brought back the drugs of the third world.
We've always had our first world drugs, alcohol and tobacco. In fact, when we criminalized smoking opium in 1908, it was not because we had any informed debate about the harm. The law itself was introduced by the Minister of Labour and he said in the House of Commons, “We will get some good out of this riot yet.” There was a very virulent anti-Asiatic riot in the fall of 1907 that led to the criminalization of smoking opium.
Smoking opium had been a part of British Columbia for 40 years, sold in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster. And in fact, in 1885 a Supreme Court inquiry into local business concluded that it was much less harmful than alcohol. The inquiry found that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which was formed to combat beatings by drunken husbands, was on the right track to focus on alcohol as a more serious problem in British Columbia than smoking opium.
So this is my point about how we've come to make certain drugs legal and certain drugs illegal. It's not because of informed public debate about health consequences but because of history, politics, culture, and economics. It's about good first world drugs. There used to be a doctor clad in a lab coat and stethoscope: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” was an ad in Life magazine. And a life expectancy table appeared on the side, demonstrating that since the twenties and the advent of the modern cigarette, life expectancy had improved. You couldn't put that forward today as credible. So we've used a regulatory model towards tobacco--aggressive public health education, non-smokers rights and issues--and we've accomplished a great deal.
My point, then, about prohibition is this. The biggest issue there is really cannabis. It's 10 to 20 times the market of all the other illegal drugs combined. The market for heroin use and cocaine use.... Many of the countries that have innovative approaches in western Europe are finding that heroin use, with prescription and supervised consumption and so forth, is declining among young people. It's not a glamour drug any more.
So I think we have to make distinctions around drugs and have to think carefully. We've done that around alcohol and tobacco. We still have a lot of work to do around alcohol. You look at ads.... Anyway, I'm rambling.