Rosie DiManno
Spark up a spliff, pass the munchies and watch the government make a mess of this legislation,
The reek assaulted the nostrils from a block away.
Deep inside the Weed Wednesday — formally 420 Toronto — demonstration at Yonge-Dundas Square, averting a contact high was challenging. Not so bad as that time the Star sent me to Amsterdam, on the paper’s expense account, to investigate legal pot use and it took two days to recover from my research before I was fit to file.
Wednesday I eased the queasiness by sticking my head inside a chip wagon and inhaling deeply. Rather the smell of oil and grease than grass fumes.
Many people like the sickly sweet scent of cannabis. I do not. It makes me gag — a built-in, say-no sniff aversion to marijuana and hashish. But in this friendly gathering, that rendered me an alien creature among the smokers and tokers, the bongs and pipes, the bubblers and grinders.
On the stage, lined with lush marijuana plants, someone is hustling cannabis colouring books. Kiosks do a lively business peddling dope paraphernalia. Information booths offer advice on the law. Merchandisers boast a vast array of seed kits. Bands, comedians and a sea of blissful faces, all those consumers sitting cross-legged on the pavement; students from nearby Ryerson University, homeless youth with their stud-collared dogs, yet also plenty of folks well beyond middle age.
This is what I think about pot: It may be a mildly mind-expanding drug but it’s definitely not brain-enhancing. I’ve never met a single chronic user who is anything other than dim-witted and dull. It is the perfect un-stimulant for slackers. If you want to indulge, however, be my guest — just not when you’re a guest at my tobacco-friendly house.
It all felt time-warpy, this passive assembly of marijuana devotees participating in an event that traces its hazy roots to a bunch of California stoners and Grateful Dead truckers in the ’70s. Someone at the microphone is now patting himself on the back as a dope pioneer, recalling the days of The Riverboat, with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee performing. This makes me feel awfully old, because I was a great fan of the folks-blues duo and saw them many times at that long-gone Yorkville establishment.
Weed Day is annually celebrated on April 20, which was also the date many advocates had circled on their calendar — 2016 — when Canada would be pronounced a legal marijuana utopia coast to coast. That day has not arrived yet, despite the faith dopers had put in Justin Trudeau’s campaign promise.
But yesterday did coincide with a declaration by our appropriately named federal health minister, Jane Philpott, at a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York: Canadian laws to legalize marijuana will be ready to roll within a year. “We will introduce legislation in spring 2017 that ensures we keep marijuana out of the hands of children and profits out of the hands of criminals.’’
Yay, went the crowd here. A lowbuzz yay.
What Philpott really meant, I suspect, is we, the government, will snort the profits of cannabis-retailing instead — an estimated windfall of $5 billion annually from tax revenue on legal sales of the drug. That’s extrapolating from the 11 per cent of the population age 15 and older that had used marijuana in the previous year, according to a 2013 survey contained in a November ministerial briefing. The money won’t come out of my pocket, but then I’ve already given the government a small fortune from four decades of cigarette purchases.
Seems a bit counterintuitive, promoting widespread use of cannabis while smokers have been hounded into leper status, the province reversing itself to restrict vaping and Toronto banning shisha lounges. More sensible would be to decriminalize drugs in their varieties so that addiction can be handled strictly as a health issue.
Except I know that cities with extremely lax drug policies, places such as Amsterdam and Oslo, have been transformed into wastelands of the wasted.
“As a doctor who has worked in both Canada and sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve seen too many people suffer the devastating consequences of drugs, drug-related crime and ill-conceived drug policy,” Philpott told the UN.
Doubtless that’s true. Nobody has got it right. Maybe there’s no such thing, and the best we can aspire to is reducing harm.
But neither Philpott nor Trudeau has been specific about whether Canada’s legislation will be aimed at decriminalization or legalization. Either way, after extricating Canada from international narcotics conventions to which this country is now a signatory, we’d be looking at an infernal regulatory bureaucracy.
Would the state have a monopoly on sales? Could provinces enact more stringent rules on retail, legal age for consumption and where pot could be used? If legalized, what would happen to the sounds of individuals now serving jail time for trafficking when the state becomes a trafficker? How would drug impairment be measured under highway and traffic laws?
It hurts my brain just thinking about all the complexities and permutations. And I hate the thought of what a mess government pinheads will make of it.
So stressful. But hey, fire up a spliff and pass the munchies. I’ll just have a shot, beer back, thanks. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.