Difficult to legalize pot and discourage its use

Canada’s finance ministers met in Ottawa Monday to confront the reality that if we want legal marijuana to displace the illegal kind, they won’t be able to tax it heavily, at the same time as Ottawa’s public-health authorities conferred on how to discourage people from getting high at all.

“Our government’s goals are clear: we want to keep criminal elements out, and we want to keep cannabis out of the hands of children,” Finance Minister Bill Morneau said, in a statement setting up the ministers’ meeting. “This will mean keeping taxes low, and working together on an ongoing basis to ensure a co-ordinated approach.”

Meanwhile, the health officials’ goal is to nudge us away from using marijuana even once it’s legal. Ottawa’s health board got local health units’ concerns about the remaining details of legalization Monday night, which include the rules about “edibles” like pot cookies and lollipops (they should be restricted tightly) and packages (they should be as plain as possible, with health warnings and dosages displayed prominently).

The case for restricting edibles is fairly clear: the health unit notes that in Colorado, which legalized cannabis in 2014, some children got sick after consuming poorly labelled or carelessly stored food laced with marijuana products.

The case for restricting packaging isn’t as obvious.

“Graphic product labelling has been required for tobacco products since 2000 and is recognized as a best practice,” the health unit says. But why should marijuana be like tobacco and not alcohol? In fairness, the health unit would prefer to treat alcohol more like tobacco, but we don’t, and there should be some reason to our approach.

The situation’s messy. The federal government is moving marijuana toward easier access after decades of moving tobacco, alcohol and even junk food toward prohibition. We just don’t have very much practice loosening rules rather than tightening them.

Warnings on cigarette packs that become ever starker and more gruesome. There are bans on advertising, public-health messages about the many dangers of smoking, rules requiring retailers hide their stock and widening bans on where you can smoke.

Crummy food is moving in the same direction, with public-health warnings, calorie counts on menus, junk-food restrictions in schools and sugar taxes in a few jurisdictions.

With alcohol, our governments have conflicts of interest, especially in Ontario, where alcohol taxes and the LCBO’s profits make up a meaningful percentage of the government’s revenues. So although the government will warn you that drinking is bad for you, it’ll also advertise alcohol to you and make buying it as convenient as possible.

Taxing stuff is the most effective tool for discouraging people from buying legal things. Even so, we’ve learned that there is such a thing as too much tax on tobacco, which was being smuggled into Canada by the boatload about 15 years ago until governments slashed cigarette taxes. Cigarettes have well-established legal distribution systems and yet a dangerously large number of smokers were willing to go outside the law to save a few dollars a pack.

With pot, we have established illegal distribution systems that police officers have spent their careers failing to dismantle. We’re hoping legal ones will replace them. But restrict pot too tightly with taxes and limits on sales and as Morneau implies, the dealers will still be more competitive than legit channels.

We won’t put dealers out of business with lower quality, more expensive, less convenient products any more than we did it with law enforcement.