CANNABIS INDUSTRY MUST PLAY BY THE RULES: MCLELLAN.

Follow rules or risk backlash, weed industry told

SAINT JOHN, N.B. • The legalization of recreational marijuana is a fragile thing that could face a political backlash if not done right, the chair of the federal cannabis taskforce warned industry leaders Monday.

“The thing we heard in Colorado and Washington: Whatever your regime is, you’ve got to enforce it, or otherwise it implodes on itself, and you’ve got the Wild West,” Anne Mclellan told the first World Cannabis Congress, in Saint John, N.B. “And if it’s not enforced, you will lose societal support.”

Cannabis companies in the newly regulated industry may chafe against rules surrounding such things as brand and product promotion, said Mclellan. But they need to be willing to play by the rules or else they could face pushback from citizens and politicians alike, still adjusting to the idea of having cannabis sold legally in neighbourhoods across the country.

“I listen to a lot of the established players, the LPS, who’ve been in this business with medicinal, and they actually get this,” Mclellan, the former federal justice minister, said in an interview.

“Having said that, of course, within the rules, they will push. But my advice would be: Let’s not push all that hard at the beginning, let’s try and work together to get this up and running, in a way that we all can have confidence in.”

Mclellan’s comments come at a key moment for recreational cannabis legalization.

Last week, the Senate passed the Liberal government’s Cannabis Act after months of debate, sending it back to the House of Commons with more than 40 amendments. The government now must decide what amendments to accept or reject, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks.

After parliamentary approval, there will be a twoto three-month transition period to allow municipalities and the provinces and territories time to adjust to federal regulations. That means legal sales will likely begin sometime in September or October.

In the middle of this “major public policy transformation,” it’s not only private industry that needs to tread carefully, Mclellan said.

If people begin to see legalization mainly as a cash cow for governments, rather than an attempt to regulate an existing industry, the public could turn against it when bad things tied to cannabis use inevitably occur.

“There are triggering events in public life, in society, that can turn an issue on a dime,” said Mclellan. “My fear is that the first time — and it will happen — that there’s a tragic car accident where the police say that the person was impaired because of drug use ... all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘I told you.’ ”

The government’s challenge in the years ahead will be explaining that legalization is an attempt to reduce harms that already exist, rather than a move to fill government coffers and enrich well-connected business people, said Mclellan.

“This is going to take at least a decade to regularize and ... it’s going to involve ongoing monitoring and refinement,” she told conference members. “We’re not going to get it all right out of the box.”

Derek Riedle, co-chair of the conference and publisher of cannabis culture magazine Civilized, said the branding restrictions go a little too far, but the government appears to be listening.

“What they’re saying is that we’re good to start here, now let’s start the dialogue on how we relax things,” he said.

“This is an evolution we’re about to go through. The regs today are not going to be what the regs are in five or 10 years. But we want people adjusting them, not breaking them.”

Anne Mclellan