earn 6 — Friday, February 20, 1998 — North Shore News H i HISTLER welcomed home its Olympic hero on Tuesday. Snowboarder Ross Rebagliati brought home more than gold follow- ing the run of his life at Nagano. The controversy ignited by the discovery of 17.8 billionths of a gram of marijuana in his system has sparked a worthwhile debate on the issue of how Canadian society treats the weed and those who smoke it. Naturally there are strong opinions to be found on either side of the issue. The RCMP for example ventured into the fray this week with a press release headlined “Straight facts about marijuana that every parent should know.” Despite some mainstream medical information to the contrary, the police perspective is relentlessly bleak. Among the police-sanctioned facts: north shore news _ VIEWPOINT marijuana users are six times morxe likely to develop schizophrenia or other mental! illnesses than are non- users; the tar in marijuana cigarettes is 50% to 100% greater than that of tobacco; studies suggest marijuana is more addictive than alcohol. Meanwhile, decidedly police-friend- ly organizations like North Vanceuver District council are on record urging the B.C. Union of Municipalities to support the decriminalization of pot possession and use. In typically Canadian fashion, our broader collective ambivalence is revealed sharply when one looks at how Ross is being received back on his home turf. He is being claimed as a poster boy by both pro-marijuana and anti-mari- juana advocates. It’s high time we talk about pot. SO HERES MY PLAN: You PAX MORE TAXES To SUBSIDIZE MY EDUCATION | So i DON'T END UP INA CRAPPY, DEAD END JoR LIKE mailbox —______ War declared on WV schoo! board A doubie standard is applied to dope Dear Editor: Pot should be decriminalized and regulated like alco- hol. This would remove billions of dollars from criminal organizations. It would allow police to focus on real crimes. . The government would have the funds to deal with all drug problems and really educate people and the youth on all drugs including alcohol. It would remove pot from the streets since the price would drop thus reducing access for youth. _ It. would remove associating marijuana with criminal activity and the hard drugs-such as cocaine and heroin which is misleading to youth. It would allow parents to truthfully deal with the issue of marijuana when discussing it instead of trying to explain why alcohol is legal and mar- juana is not. . Youth would no longer lose respect for the police and the law. Perhaps we would have more pot smokers and less alcohol users which would be a plus. Why should 2.5 million Canadians be called criminals arbitrarily over an issue which is nothing more than politics since we know that marijuana is far less harmful than the legal drug alcohol? . If you are looking for blame for what happened at the Olympics, then look at our politicians, for they have avoid- ed this issuc for decades. Calling Canadians criminals for using marijuana docs more damage to socicty than having it legal. I am not condoning the use of any drugs. Drugs and mainly alcohol destroy a lot of lives. 1 believe, however, that there is a double standard here with marijuana and alcohol and a real cost to society, a real injustice. Kevin Allan North Vancouver kyallan@intouch.be.ca north shore orth Shorg News founded in 1969 as an independent suburtan newspaper and quakfied under Schedule 111, Paragraph 911 of he Excise Tax Act, is pubkshed each Wednesday. Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press {td and cestnbuted to every doar on the North Shore. Canada Post Canadian Pubbcations Mai Sales Product Agreement No. 0087238 Mailing rates avadabie on request. Sa MECIMEBIERRRS SN Distribution Ma 986-1337 (124) 3.582 {average orculatin:. Wednesday. Friday 8 Sunday) WE interrupt what would have been today’s column to announce that I am mobilizing my personal Opinion. Pm declaring war on West Van School Board's decision to accept the McCleary Centre Society’s updated 1998 version of a 1992 survey that asks stu- dents as young as 12 (or, as a checkbox indicates, 12 or younger) about their sexual, drug, drink- ing and other activities, including suicide attempts. North Vancouver School Board narrowly rejected the invi- tation to use the 1998 survey — as it, and more than a third of B.C. schcol boards, did in 1992. West Van’s board accepted it, 3-2. For: Erica Bell-Lowther, Jean Ferguson, Ken Haycock. Against: chairman Clive Bird, David Stevenson. I call the survey an intrusive, insidious jacking around of children too young to appreciate that it’s an invasion of their intimate feelings and actions. Then there’s the suspect methodology. The 1992 survey posed what lawyers call “leading questions” — detined by the classic “Have you stopped beating your wife?” My former Vancouver Sun colleague Jamie Lamb wrote at the time: “It is only when you read the questions, and how they are phrased — not ‘have you ever tried marijuana?’ but Show oid were you when you tried marijuana?” — that parental hackles go up.” Dr. Roger Tonkin, a UBC professor 4 Ces Dhaliwal ‘Human Resources Manager 965-2131 (17) PETER SPECK Publisher 985-2131 (101) Valeria Photography Manager Classified Manager 986-2131 (160) (202) “Baug Foot Comptrotier 985-2131 (133) Entire contents © 1997 North Shore Free Press Ltd. All rights reserved, emeritus and S1]-a-year executive director of tiny McCleary (statt of four), acknow!- edged that the format was changed for 1998 because “there was a lot of pressure put on us” by the education ministry and some parents’ groups. (That was traceable to Lamb, who, he declared, ““misrepresented the sur- vey for the purposes of his column.”) But — this shook me — he doesn’t retrospectively think the in-your-face 1992 method was mis- taken. He personally pre- ferred it: “Kids liked the fact that the questions were asked in a straightforward manner.” The 1998 version introduces “skip patterns.” That's jargon for ... well, an illustration is worth a thousand rants. Example, cach question followed by mul- tiple choices: “73. Have you ever had sexual inter- course (‘gone all the way’)? Yes — Answer all questions in the blue box. No — Do not answer questions in the blue box (go to No. 83). “74. How oid were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time? *75. During your life, with how many people bave you had sexual intercourse? “76. During the fast three months, with how many people have you had sex- ual intercourse? “77. Did you drink alcohol or use drugs before you had sexual intercourse the last time? *78. The last time you had sexual intercourse, did your partner use a con- dom?” And so on, Question 55, about drug usc, helpful- lv provides lists for those unschooled in the matter. It asks if the respondent has ever used “cocaine (coke, crack, toot, snow); hallucinogens (LSD, ecstasy, acid, - PCP, dust, mescaline)”, and so forth. My cold conclusion: This reeks of being iatrogenic. (Webster's: “(A disease] induced inadvertently by a physician or a surgeon or by medical treatment or by diagnostic procedures.”) As is witheringly said of psychiatry, it’s the disease that it purports to treat. If kids of [2 don’t know this bad stuff betore the survey, they do afterwards. The. McCreary apologists doubtless would stress that the respondents are unidentitied and that nobody is forced to take the survey. Parents: You know that children are | the most cusformist tribe in the world. They will not want to stand out as 50 urcool as to reject it. And they will feel, even more uncoc!l if in fact they aren’t doing those things. That's youth. -~ Remember? ae Dr. Tonkin generously gave me almost two hours of his time and postponed din- ner for an interview, , I can’t do justice to his explanations in | this space. But they puzzled me. He made clear his conviction that the prohib- itive approach to youth — don’t take = ’ drugs, don’t do this, don’t do that — has failed. Damned if ] could figure out exactly whar his centre tries to replace it with. - 1 call this a srate-sanctioned violation of my children’s privacy ~ and for mud- dled, pseudo-scientific ends. Feel similar- ly? Let the board know. [ have. Loudly. 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