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Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the Marijuana Question 1961-1975 (review)

In 1969 the Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (the Le Dain Commission) estimated that some 1.5 million Canadians had smoked marijuana at least once. A generation of young people appeared to be embracing the drug, prompting law-makers, bureaucrats, medical professionals, politicians, educators, and the police to re-examine their response to marijuana. Through a close examination of government documents, newspapers, and other contemporary sources, Marcel Martel attempts to unravel the complex debate that took place around marijuana between 1961 and 1975. Although his chief concern is the formulation of policy on marijuana, Martel also shows how marijuana use became part of a broader “drug problem,” encompassing the use of other substances such as LSD, glue, and, to a lesser extent, amphetamines and heroin. Yet it was marijuana that prompted the most concern and regulatory interest. Not only was marijuana being much more widely consumed in the 1960s and 1970s than it had been in the past, but it was also being taken by a broader section of the population. Previous moral panics had centred on drug use among racial minorities and the dispossessed, but in this period research consistently showed that young, white, middle-class people were taking marijuana. This kind of drug use posed a particular difficulty for legislators: did their own children really deserve a prison sentence for the possession of marijuana as stipulated under the Narcotic Control Act? To resolve this issue, policy-makers asked the advice of a series of groups and individuals. To their dismay, Canadian government officials found that opinion on the dangers of marijuana use was sharply divided. The medical profession, for example, could not agree on either the level of threat that marijuana posed to health or how to define what constituted drug “misuse.” Even the Canadian Psychiatric Association could not seem to make up its mind about drug use. On one hand, psychiatrists believed that drug users were sick individuals who required medical help; on the other, drug users were thought to be well aware of the dangers of drug use, implying that users were, to some extent, to blame for their condition. Other groups had yet other opinions. In a particularly interesting chapter, Martel explores how the creation of expertise around drugs and addiction interlocked with provincial politics. The response to marijuana offered by four provinces (Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island) was different in each: PEI and BC were categorically opposed to the legalization of marijuana (although for different reasons); the administration of Ontario was not wholly against the idea; and Quebec was more interested in defending provincial control of health and education policy than in dealing with marijuana use per se. Given these contradictory views and responses, it is perhaps not surprising that the Le Dain Commission, appointed in 1969 to report on the current state of knowledge on non-medical drug use, failed to reach a consensus. The Commission heard three conflicting arguments. The first, supported by young 298 Histoire sociale /Social History