Canada and Other Matters of Opinion by Rex Murphy

Author:Rex Murphy [Murphy, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37248-2
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2009-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

A JOINT IS A SMOKE | Novemeber 27, 2004

Social pressure accounts for the decline of smoking. It is surely not the risible Health Canada public-service messages, or the extravagantly inane scare pictures on cigarette packs, that have worked.

These latter are wildly over the top. There’s one picture of a carious mouth, a portrait of such dental horror that it must have been lifted from some mummy comic book.

If two-year-olds were ardent smokers, this campaign would have its perfect audience. Mix it up with a health-service warning from the tooth fairy and there wouldn’t be a two-year-old lighting up anywhere.

No, it isn’t the official stuff that cut down on the tobacco habit. It’s the frown of acquaintances, the increasing chill that ever-so-superior non-smokers send out to the last wastrel of their set who dares to take out the Player’s Light pack. It’s really very simple. Social opprobrium is the scourge that reforms. The only thing stronger than nicotine is the fear of friends’ disapproval.

Alas, reform is never a straight line. Just when it might be thought the art of inhaling was going the way of the hula hoop and the dodo, we have a report this week that there is something of a renaissance of pot smoking. Hemp is hip again.

Since 1994, the number of people smoking pot in this country has doubled. Even more impressive, a key component of the population—the very element most government campaigns are most urgent about “saving,” namely the young—has taken to pot with a vengeance. The same study also revealed that almost 30 per cent of 15-to 17-year-olds and 47 per cent of 18-and 19-year-olds used marijuana in the past year.

It went further, reporting—and I’m really glad to hear it—that “It’s easier to get marijuana on a school ground today than it is to get alcohol or cigarettes.”

(Just as a footnote here, I can’t remember when it was ever particularly easy to get booze on a playground, but then, I grew up in circumscribed and difficult times. The Most Holy Rosary Parish School of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, had few supplements to the basic curriculum, and tots of vodka or rum during recess were most definitely not among them. It might have helped. There were problems in trigonometry that definitely needed some form of remedial lubrication.)

I think what we’re seeing here is another illustration of that wonderful irony that goes under the rubric of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Peer pressure and remorseless rudeness (driving smokers out of doors) has whittled away at the cohort that looked to tobacco for a friendly lift during each day’s many mortifications. But vague signals of approval toward marijuana as an alternate solace, its much-hyped value as a “medicinal” tool (remember the tired line from every party, “I only drink for medicinal purposes”) and the official moves to decriminalize pot have worked to celebrate the mellowing weed.

No one is going to frown at a pot smoker. She may be mollifying a pain. She is certainly not to be branded as a slave to Big Tobacco.

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