TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF
Cultural and commercial acceptance of marijuana replace fear and racism of old ‘Reefer Madness’ image
“Marijuana is the unknown quantity,” Harry J. Anslinger, the U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, warned in the pages of the continent’s newspapers, including the Toronto Star, in February 1938, setting in motion a moral panic that lasted the better part of a century.
“No one knows, when he smokes it, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveller, a mad insensate, or a murderer.”
Today, a full 80 years later, as the clock ticks over from Reefer Madness to outright legalization across Canada, we actually do know the answer.
You can remove “mad insensate” and “murderer” from Anslinger’s list of possibilities and insert a few more august outcomes, up to and including provincial premier and prime minister. And let us not be so churlish as to quibble, on this day of national transformation, over which among us bought and sold.
It’s been an astonishing cultural journey through the generations, as the Devil’s Cabbage made its way from the Mexican farmhands of the 1930s to the jazz musicians of the ’40s to the Beatniks of the ’50s to flower-power hippies of the ’60s and onward, through Ronald Reagan’s failed War On Drugs to what it is today — a mildly harmful intoxicant, now utterly bereft of the counterculture baggage that once defined it.
Culturally today, in Canada at least, cannabis is neither conservative nor liberal — a fact nowhere more apparent than in Ontario, where the door-ajar legalization of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now has been thrown wide open by Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. Under Ford came the green light both to private bricks-andmortar pot shops and rules that will allow cannabis consumption in publicly designated smoking areas, rather than the behind-closed-doors-only scenario envisioned by former premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.
All these last-minute tweaks have been more than a headache for the cops. A month ago, the Toronto Police Service, in response to queries from the Star, issued a firm statement about the rules for cannabis use in public — the answer was no. The statement was redrafted into a qualified yes two weeks later after Ford’s decision to allow pot, even where alcohol is not allowed to be.
It’s all too much for many. And that is to be expected. As was the case in 1927, when Ontario ended prohibition against alcohol, you cannot legislate against stigma. Even the most full-throated cannabis advocates acknowledge that while a global change is underway, Canada is at the very forefront. The world will be watching, many skeptically, in the days months and years to follow.
Paradoxically, Ontario is both the biggest commercial prize in Canada’s legal cannabis marketplace and also the only laggard — as lineups form outside cannabis stores in nine of 10 provinces, Ontarians will have nowhere to go but a government-run website, as the clock strikes midnight. Not until next April 1 — April Fool’s Day, no less — when the first of the Ford-mandated bricks-and-mortar shops reveal what’s inside.
With every province filling in the fine print on legalization, Canada’s cannabis culture shift varies coast to coast. Manitobans, for example, will not be allowed to grow their own, but Ontarians will.
Indoor gardening supply houses in Toronto say the change is palpable. “We used to see a husband come in and buy a hydroponics kit and he’d be back the next day returning it, with an angry wife at his side,” a spokeswoman for Bustan Urban Gardening Essentials in North York told the Star. “Now, the wives are coming in and doing the buying. Legalization is changing our business. The shift is all in the direction of small, condo-size systems.”
Sifting through a century of cannabis coverage in Canada, it’s evident much of that cultural shift was complete as the 21st century began. Eighteen years ago, under the Page One headline “Reefer blandless: Pot goes mainstream,” it was apparent, even from a policing perspective, that Canada was on a trajectory toward decriminalization, if not outright legalization.
Toronto documentary filmmaker Ron Mann, who had then just released Grass ,a scathing and often hilarious indictment of U.S. efforts to stamp out pot over the previous four generations, spoke of a decoupling of pot from the pantheon of hard drugs taking hold, culturally.
“The movement has been incredibly successful in separating the perceptions of marijuana from the pantheon of hard drugs,” said Mann. “Add to that the medical marijuana movement taking flight with enormous amounts of research detailing its effectiveness as a relaxant, a pain reliever, anti-nauseant and appetiteen hancer. All of it spread over the internet for all to see, has demystified a lot of the anti-pot propaganda around the world, to the point where only the United States, in increasing isolation, continues to take the hardline stance.”
Toronto Police Det. Rick Chase, then a leading authority on the force’s drug brigade, sized up what he was up against in the year 2000 as one enormous headache.
“The time we spent, the expense of investigation, the court costs — and in the end, even large-scale growers get a slap on the wrist because the Crowns don’t take it seriously,” said Chase.
“We know, statistically, that people from all walks of society smoke marijuana. And the medical marijuana court challenges mean the sands are shifting under our feet. I can’t tell you I’m an advocate of decriminalization. But I can say it’s incredibly frustrating to invest these kinds of resources, often with no punitive results at the end of the day.”
The earliest cannabis coverage, dating from the 1920s, reeks of outright racism. Though arrests were rare — you could count on one hand the number of busts by Toronto cops in the ’20s and ’30s — the Star published a dizzying range of allegedly deadly deviance south of the border. One New York dateline from 1926 described how marijuana “occasionally leads an inoffensive little Mexican soldier to chop another into small bits.” Another, a 1930s bust in Montreal, goes out of its way to profile “two black musicians” arrested for pot. In a story datelined Detroit from the same era, a Michigan judge laments that females are particularly susceptible to marijuana’s power. “It’s so cheap and its exaltation at first is extraordinarily sensual,” the judge said. “But it’s a vicious habit. The normal inhibitions, especially in women, are removed.”
As documentarian Mann and others have detailed, race was always at the root of the Reefer Madness-era panic. And if that fact evolved over the decades, the punishment did not, as the Toronto Star’s Jim Rankin and Sandro Contenta proved in 2017 in an exposé showing that black people with no history of criminal convictions have been three times more likely to be arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana by Toronto police than white people with similar backgrounds.
For many, that fact alone clinches the case for legalization. If prohibition did more harm than the substance it was meant to control, saddling as many as a half-million Canadians with life-limiting criminal convictions — the gaping racial disparity within those numbers cannot end a moment too soon.
So where does it leave us now as legalization takes hold? Life is unlikely to change much for the millions of Canadians already accustomed to cannabis. Though the black market will not vanish overnight, those who access the legal product can do so knowing it is safe from both prosecution and contamination.
If history repeats itself, law enforcement has its work cut out. In the year following the legalization of alcohol in 1927, police in Ontario charged more than 1,700 people with bootlegging offences, a dynamic that waned over time, with the LCBO ultimately establishing its monopoly on liquor.
For everyone else, you can simply ignore it. Or, if you intend to try it, educate yourself first. Deeply. And then go slow. Very slow. Among the many caveats to cannabis is the difficulty of measuring dosage — for recreational users, there’s no accurate analog comparable to “one drink,” and by extension, for medicinal users, there’s no precise equivalent to two aspirin.
But that too is changing. Among the explosion of businesses accompanying the shift to legalization are companies like Toronto-based Vapium, led by robotics expert Lisa Harun, whose team is designing and engineering next-generation vaporizers to provide the medical and recreational communities with a means of precision dose measurement.
“As a company, part of our mandate is social change — we want to beat down the remaining stigma by using science and data to support cannabis as a medicine,” Harun told the Star.
The next step in crushing that stigma, Harun believes, is CBD — cannabidiol — the non-psychotropic compound within the marijuana plant that comes with medical benefits but no inebriating effect.
“Our focus is on designing, engineering and manufacturing a vaporizer so precise that it delivers an exact dose that will enable doctors to prescribe CBD. When we overcome that hurdle it is going to go a long way toward breaking down the last of the stigma because CBD is not psychotropic, it’s analgesic, it’s anti-inflammatory and it’s curative. We’re still learning more, but at this point the evidence is beyond anecdotal that CBD works for children with epilepsy in a way that nothing else does.
“So dosing is going to be crucial to that. Our goal is to standardize the unit of measure. We’re not aggressive in any way in how we explain this because aggression never wins you any arguments. We just want to use science and data to show there’s a better way.”
Harun and her team lived and worked in Asia building robots before returning to Canada ahead of the final drive for legalization. The timing, she says, is dizzying.
“No matter what your politics are, this is groundbreaking — Canada is taking a leadership role as the first G7 country to legalize cannabis. And we, as a country, have a chance to dominate this market. It’s awesome.”
“The movement has been incredibly successful in separating the perceptions of marijuana from the pantheon of hard drugs.” RON MANN, Toronto filmmaker