What people are left with is a cast of stereotypic characters and stock ideas to be conjured whenever, in the course of a busy life, it becomes necessary to consider matters relating to crime or drug policy. Elite groups build support for their agenda by exploiting the manner in which people process and recall information to ensure that considerations supportive of their position are primed and selected over competing interpretations. Public attitudes and opinions on these matters, then, do not stand on a rock of empirical data and objective consideration, but rather float in a sea of symbols and metaphors. Let us turn our attention now to the symbolic undercurrents of Canada’s drug policy.

SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF LAW

In the context of attitude formation, the law itself carries out an important symbolic function. Each nation, like a family, has its deeply embedded dramas that are played and re-played in a myriad of forms and venues. Even with the best of intentions, feelings and resentments toward the black sheep, prodigals and scapegoats come bubbling to the surface over and over again in vast, unresolved and recurring contests. According to conflict theory, in the melee of competing interests that characterizes modern democracy, powerful interest groups mobilize these cultural themes to designate acts as criminal or undesirable--most often to condemn those who are doing them than to stop whatever harm they allegedly cause. From this standpoint then, the criminal law is a symbolic system acting out deep-seated, internal conflicts between groups. To an alien anthropologist visiting from a distant planet, humankind’s law codes could be viewed as a guide to who is on top and who is at the bottom of any given social system.

Within this context, legislation itself becomes an important symbol that goes beyond the declarative effects of denunciation. Written in the carefully coded language of law, it plays an important part in the process by scripting some of these deep-seated conflicts in ways that reach far beyond the ostensible intentions of the lawmakers and their supporters. Law plays an important framing function in society, determining the parameters and terms that govern how we think about an issue. In the case of illicit drugs it has played a pivotal role framing the issue as one of law rather than of public health or recreation, to name but two alternatives, that are used commonly to frame discussions of tobacco or alcohol.

As the Senate Committee in its 2002 report to Parliament points out:

…when it comes to illegal drugs, criminal legislation occupies a symbolic and determinative place. It is as if this legislation is the backbone of our public policy. Public discussions of cannabis do not deal so much with such matters as public health, user health, prevention of at-risk or excessive use, but with such questions as the pros and cons of decriminalization, establishing civil offence or maintaining a criminal offence, or possible legalization and the extent thereof (Senate Committee 2002:33).

Notwithstanding its importance in framing an issue, the analyst must look beyond the narrow sphere of legislation to take an accurate measure of a nation’s stand on a given issue. Law is after all one message among many, albeit a powerful one, about the aspirations, values and priorities of a people. It follows that if public policy is “a course of action or inaction chosen by public authorities to address a problem” (Pal 2001) then legislation is clearly a subset of the larger category of public policy that flows from some overriding, defining vision or principle that reflects or reflects on the national character.