O Cannabis: Will legalization mean reefer madness or just a mild buzz?

There’s not much of a body of precedent for what’s going to happen on Oct. 17. When exactly was the last time a government in Canada took such a quantum leap towards a more permissive society as will occur when the sale and consumption of marijuana become legal?

Canada will be the only country in the world besides Uruguay to take the step to full legality, although recreational pot consumption is lawful under various conditions in many other jurisdictions around the world, including nine American states, two of which, Maine and Vermont, border Quebec.

There’s no need to rehash, or shall we say review, the arguments for and against legalizing pot. In the end it comes down to politics. If enough citizens thought strongly enough four years ago that legalizing marijuana would put Canada on the road to perdition they would not have voted so enthusiastically for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, who made it plain they would legalize pot if elected.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has said it would be “unrealistic” to reverse the legality of marijuana should his party form government a year hence. And, an NDP government … well, that’s a pipe dream.”

So, this will be the new reality. For the generations who grew up with narcs and busts, dime bags and dealers as a part of the cultural and criminal landscape the shift to not only legal pot, but pot sold by the government is, shall we say, “mind-blowing.”

Pot has been banned in Canada for nearly a century, though its illicit use was pretty much confined up until the 1960s to a minor subculture of artists and ne’er-do-wells. Blame the Vietnam War, if you will, for spawning a vast generation of baby-boomers bent on changing the world and bent out of shape on drugs, the most accessible being weed.

Soon pot became less a means of enlightenment and more of a major profit centre for organized crime, and a gateway drug to the big bad boys like coke, meth, heroin and the modern family of killer opioids.

Legalizing pot won’t end organized crime but at least it will redirect more of the consumer’s recreational drug dollar back into hospitals, schools and the like through tax revenue.

How will Canadians handle this new freedom to partake of wacky tabacky? Again, to what do we compare this new licence to get stoned? What about the freedom to consume alcohol? Canadian provinces did briefly experiment with prohibition in the 1920s, although in Quebec, a ban on spirits alone lasted all of two years, from 1919 until 1921. The province consequently cashed in on booze-seeking tourists and bootlegging.

(As a point of historical trivia, in 1898 the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier held a national plebiscite on prohibition. Read into this what you will, but Quebec voted 80 percent against and the other six provinces and one territory at the time voted 72 percent in favour.)

When prohibition was lifted in the provinces that imposed it - the last to go wet was P.E.I., in 1948 - there are few accounts of armies of drunks rampaging in the streets.

In 2005, when the federal government legalized same-sex marriage there was not a stampede to switch teams and get hitched. In 1968, when the federal government legalized divorce, there was not a massive wave of unhitching.

When Sunday shopping was legalized in Quebec about 20 years ago, hellfire was not unleashed and churches did not crumble - well, not because of Lord’s Day consumerism anyway.

It’s hard to predict how Canadians will react to this new liberty. Polls suggest a small percentage of folks who never would have puffed an illegal joint or nibbled a banned brownie might be tempted once it’s lawful. As it stands, about one in five Canadians say they have smoked or consumed marijuana in some form.

With booze, of course, people can have a glass of wine or beer without getting drunk; pot, though, the whole point is to get high. The legalization of pot in Canada will therefore be a massive social experiment in how responsibly people deal with a new freedom. Will it be reefer madness or just a mild buzz?