Benedikt Fischer, a health sciences professor at Simon Fraser University, has just co-authored a new book evaluating current marijuana prohibition systems -- and considering alternatives that might actually work.

Last February, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his government's new anti-drug strategy. It amounted to a number of stricter penalties, including mandatory jail sentences for conducting large-scale grow-ops and an increase in maximum prison terms from seven to 14 years.

The message was a loud and clear reinforcement of the status-quo: Prohibition works.

Fischer disagrees.

"We have to be very aware of the limitations of policy," he said. "There's no reason to assume more regulatory framework has significant benefits. User rates have typically not gone up in countries that have liberalized their regimes."

A 2007 United Nations drug report suggests that 6.1 per cent of people aged 15-64 in the Netherlands, which has some of the most liberal drug policies in the world, smoked marijuana in the previous year.

By contrast, the report found that 16.8 of Canadians in the same demographic had smoked pot in 2006.

"Use is driven by other considerations," Fischer added. "When people make the decision to smoke a joint they do not think about the current systems of control. They are driven more by dynamics of subculture and fashion than by policy."

Fischer's book Cannabis Policy: Moving beyond stalemate, published last Thursday by the Oxford University Press, provides a comprehensive, up-to-date summary of the latest health and psychological research about marijuana, and outlines policy alternatives to prohibition.

One such alternative is for marijuana use to be penalized when it has the most potential to cause harm to the user or others around them, as is the case with drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.

"The case we're making is that with any psychoactive substance there are benefits and harms - and the harms you can target pretty specifically through specific interventions."

"It's not an innocuous drug. There are dangers. Smoking a joint and then getting into a car, for instance, is a bluntly stupid idea. So you make driving and smoking illegal."

Beyond prohibition being ineffective, the book argues it may be impossible. The ease of marijuana cultivation, the ability to grow it indoors or underground, would make it extremely difficult to abolish.

And between making billions of dollars for drug lords, costing hundreds of millions in police work and incarcerations and spurring battles between health authorities and governments over the medicinal benefits of marijuana for AIDS and chemotherapy patients, Fischer believes prohibition is doing more harm than good.

"We want the policy that governs cannabis use to be driven by public health principals, and that's certainly not the case. In fact, the policy we have is one that does a lot of harm to public health objectives."

The book is available at the Oxford University Press website and Amazon.ca.