National Post (July 11, 2007) -- If you had to guess which of the world's countries consumed a lot of marijuana, and you had only crude, tabular economic information instead of facts about culture to work from, you would probably look for a physically huge land mass with a long open border that was parcelled out into hundreds of thousands of privately owned agricultural tracts: farms full of brush and little stands of trees that no policeman would ever set foot in more than once every hundred years. And you'd be right on the money.

The latest report on trends in international drug use from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime reveals that Canada leads the industrialized world in cannabis consumption.

Worldwide, about 3.8% of members of the human species between the ages of 15 and 64 are thought to have used marijuana or hashish at least once during 2005. In Asia the figure is just 1.9%; in Europe, 5.6%; in the United States, a sobering 12.6%; but in Canada, it reaches a remarkable 16.8%, or more than one in six adults under pension age. Our proportion of pot users is virtually double that of England (8.7%) or France (8.6%) and, in a truly eyebrow-raising development, is nearly triple that of the famously libertine Netherlands (6.1%), a rather remarkable signal that cannabis would not necessarily become ubiquitous if it became available legally at the corner coffee shop. We apparently even have more THC tokers than Jamaica (10.1%). Only a handful of countries in Africa and the Pacific can rival us in affection for hemp-based smokeables.

Is this a cause for concern? For those opposed to marijuana usage as a matter of principle, the report offers some encouraging news. The numbers provided to the UN by our police agencies suggest that overall marijuana and hashish production stabilized and possibly even declined in 2005, reflecting global trends, after a period of ferocious growth that saw the harvest double between 2000 and 2004. Trafficking to the United States is also down, and youth use within Canada seems to be declining rather quickly; the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's measurements of cannabis use among junior-high and high-school students in Ontario show a 19% falloff in the proportion of onetime users between 2003 and 2005. It may be that we have reached a state of relatively comfortable equilibrium among law enforcement, cultural attitudes towards marijuana, protection of our children and the pure aggregate black-market demand for the product.

What's really remarkable about Canada's status as a cannabis capital is that if you were to set out looking for reasons to worry about it -- reasons that do not amount to disliking it for its own sake -- you would have an awfully hard time finding them. If Canada had rates of alcohol consumption that were more than four times the world average, the fact would be written in fire in dozens of different tables of medical and social statistics. You could tell from our auto-accident rates, from our rates of cirrhosis of the liver or even from family violence statistics, that we had a propensity for a very dangerous and nasty substance. If Canada had four times as many tobacco smokers as the average country, you could easily extract the news and quantify it to two decimal places from our statistics on cancer and cardiac health, or indeed from overall life-expectancy figures.

But where is the health "footprint" of our love for the weed? Maybe it's hidden in our labour productivity statistics; it certainly doesn't seem to have any impact on our life expectancy or our other measurable health outcomes. Despite dauntingly high ostensible rates of use, and despite the hazards of adulteration and intensification that are attendant upon cannabis's illegal status, we don't seem to be doing ourselves any major harm from a long experiment in comparative weed tolerance.

This is a strong datum in favour of the view that marijuana is fundamentally innocuous compared with the "historical" drugs of abuse that enjoy broad social and legal acceptance, and a blow to those who contend that it is a "gateway" to harder drugs, since there is nothing in the UN data on those drugs to suggest that we are passing through that gate in particularly large numbers. That would seem to leave very little, aside from the omnipresent trade and travel considerations that come from being a neighbour of the U.S., to stand logically in the way of decriminalization.