IT TOOK DECADES TO CUT TOBACCO USE; DO WE REALLY WANT TO GO THERE AGAIN?
Fewer pot rules make for easy enforcement, but we shouldn’t promote smoking at all
Are you feeling a certain glow, Edmonton?
Well, you soon may. On Wednesday, the community and public services committee of city council voted unanimously to support some of the most liberal bylaws in North America when it comes to the public consumption of cannabis.
Presented with two possible models for regulating recreational marijuana, the committee opted for the version with far fewer restrictions.
Under the proposed regulations, Edmontonians would be able to light up a joint while walking down any city sidewalk, while strolling through the river valley, while chilling in a pocket park. They’d also be able to consume cannabis in designated toking areas at events such as the Edmonton Folk Festival and the Fringe.
That doesn’t mean people would be able to get high anywhere. The committee is recommending that smoking cannabis be banned in bars and restaurants and malls, and on outdoor patios. People would be forbidden from smoking the drug on buses or LRT cars, on any hospital or school property, and at cemeteries, golf courses, ski hills or off-leash dog parks.
Under the proposed regulations, you couldn’t smoke within 10 metres of any bus stop, LRT station, doorway or air intake. And people would also be banned from using pot within 30 metres of playgrounds, spray parks, outdoor pools, sports fields, outdoor theatres, skating rinks or skate parks.
You couldn’t get buzzed in Churchill Square. Nor would you be able to light up in Fort Edmonton, the Valley Zoo, the Muttart Conservatory or the John Janzen Nature Centre.
(The committee is also recommending council ban smoking of regular tobacco at Fort Edmonton and the Valley Zoo, too, to bring the rules into alignment.)
Those are a fair number of restrictions. But if the full council accepts the committee’s proposal, Edmonton’s pot laws would be far more liberal than Calgary’s, which is planning to ban all public consumption, with the possible exception of designated areas at festivals.
In Toronto, Ottawa and the rest of Ontario, all public consumption of cannabis will be banned. That will be the case in Winnipeg, too. Even American cities such as Denver and Portland, where marijuana has been legal for years, ban all public consumption.
In that context, Edmonton councillors are being particularly bold — bolder, perhaps, than the majority of Edmontonians.
According to city survey data presented to the committee on Wednesday, 62 per cent of respondents said they’d support the idea of designated cannabis smoking zones at summer festivals such as Folk Fest and the Fringe.
But only 37 per cent thought toking ought to be allowed in public parks, only 25 per cent favouring marijuana smoking on public sidewalks, while just 20 per cent supporting cannabis use in crowded pedestrian areas.
I am also ambivalent about the committee’s proposal.
When I was a kid, people could smoke in restaurants. On airplanes. On buses. Even in hospital rooms. At school, tobacco smoke billowed down the hall from the staff lounge.
It took decades of social activism to get us to the point where we have robust anti-smoking bylaws, I don’t want to smell sour skunky marijuana fumes as I go about my business, any more than I want to smell tobacco smoke.
Nor do I want to renormalize smoking as an acceptable public pastime just because cannabis smoke is somehow “cooler” than tobacco smoke.
And given we still don’t allow people to drink a glass of wine or a bottle of beer during a picnic in the park, it seems odd that we’re poised to allow people to get high at Hawrelak.
On the other hand, if we impose bylaws that ban pot smoking in virtually any public space, we run the risk of effectively re-criminalizing it, of creating a messy situation wherein peace officers and park rangers are handing out nuisance bylaw tickets by the fistful — or where there are so many scofflaws no one can keep up with them all.
Here’s the bottom line. The federal government is legalizing marijuana. It’s not the city’s job to debate the moral or medical consequences. It’s the city’s job to regulate public behaviour, to reduce the nuisance impact of this change.
When we’ve fought so long to reduce public smoking, I hate to see us granting social licence to smoke a different kind of noxious weed, one that’s intoxicating to boot.
Yet I have to admire the courage of the committee members, who opted for the more enforceable, more logical, more controversial limitations. We’ll have to see if the rest of their council colleagues concur.