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Canadian cannabis: marijuana as an irritant/problem in Canada-U.S. relations.

Article Excerpt
The electronic, peer-reviewed Occasional Papers on Public Policy series, published at acsus.org by the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, is designed to highlight ongoing research in Canadian domestic and foreign policy at the federal, provincial, and city levels. ACSUS invites submissions on issues of public policy that pertain to cross-border relations between Canada and the United States, or policies in one of these countries that have implications for the other.

As with ARCS, the e-journal is multidisciplinary and encourages submissions from all fields of policy inquiry. Ideally, papers will be four to eight pages in length (double-spaced) and should be submitted electronically to: Professor Michael Lusztig, Department of Political Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275; mlusztig@smu.edu.

The first "volume" in the Occasional Papers on Public Policy series is published in the pages that follow. The four occasional papers in this volume address a wide range of matters important to both the United States and Canada.

In a recent survey of the Canada-U.S. relationship, Munroe Eagles noted that the "popular impression" for many Americans was that Canadians were "out of step with their more conservative neighbor to the south" (Eagles 2006, 821). John Herd Thompson made a similar claim in his review of the bilateral relationship over the 1994-2003 period, writing that Canadians are perceived by some Americans as being "left wing wimps" (Thompson 2003, 17). One area in which Canada may be regarded as out of step with the United States, and Canadians as left wing wimps, is the issue of marijuana. There are real and noticeable differences between Canada and the U.S. in the way each side deals with the issue of marijuana. The following pages examine the marijuana issue in terms of the growing volume of the drug being smuggled into the United States from Canada, the increased potency of the strains of marijuana grown in Canada, and the differences in judicial deterrents adopted to penalize possession and cultivation. This is followed by a look at a couple of possibilities that have the potential to transform the marijuana irritant into the marijuana problem in Canada-U.S. relations.

The amount of marijuana being produced in Canada and then illegally exported...