Canadians are stepping into the great unknown
It was supposed to kill the black market and keep pot out of kids’ hands. But so far, Canada’s bold and unprecedented legalization of cannabis is a mess.
Nowhere is it more obvious than the city known as Van-sterdam in the province whose name is part of a sought-after brand of bud.
Here, there is no place to buy cannabis legally and the city-licensed, but illegal cannabis stores are still open. In anticipation of being legalized as recreational pot shops by the province, some have removed dispensary or anything medical sounding in their names.
Some had fire sales, clearing the shelves for products that they hope to buy from the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch. Meantime, legal suppliers are concerned that they don’t have enough to meet demand.
On Tuesday morning, WorkSafeBC sent out a news release reminding employers that they must not allow anyone who is impaired to do work that could endanger a co-worker or anyone else.
Great advice. But how does an employer do that when there is no good test for impairment?
Earlier, Transport Canada warned that cannabis is “a potential threat” to aviation. With no good impairment tests available, Air Canada and Westjet have banned cannabis use for all “safety-secure” employees. That means no cannabis either at work or any other time for anyone directly involved in flight operations including maintenance workers, dispatchers, flight attendants and pilots.
While flying has always been safer than driving, Transport Canada sent out no similar warning about the threat on the ground.
This year, TransLink will have more than 400 million passengers. In September, it said that it would be drafting a cannabis-related policy for the people who drive and maintain Metro Vancouver’s buses, trains and ships.
But on the eve of legalization, spokesperson Lida Paslar said its policy that employees are not permitted to show up to work impaired does not change.
As president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, Vancouver’s Adam Palmer boldly stated this week that police were ready. But police here don’t have the same tools as their American counterparts to determine impairment. Under Colorado law, drivers must give blood samples if police have reason to believe they are impaired.
In Canada, the federal government has approved a roadside saliva-screening device. Many police forces (including Vancouver and Delta) have decided against purchasing it and B.C. lawyers were quick to say they would challenge the device’s usage because it’s been found to not be particularly reliable, especially when used in cold weather.
That means that many forces will rely only on standard field sobriety testing by specially trained police.
In Colorado, fatal vehicle crashes increased 40 per cent in four years following legalization. Officials haven’t definitively linked that to legalization because state law doesn’t require coroners to test all dead drivers specifically for marijuana.
Even without that data for those four years, the number of drivers in fatal crashes who did test positive for marijuana rose 88 per cent between 2013 and 2017.
In Washington, which legalized marijuana around the same time as Colorado, drug-impaired driving now eclipses alcohol, according to the state’s Traffic Safety Commission.
Over the last five years, cannabis-related visits to Canadian emergency rooms have doubled and even tripled, according to the Canadian Institutes for Health Information.
Marijuana-laced edibles are the main culprit. They will remain illegal until Health Canada figures out how to regulate the amount of THC — marijuana’s active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol — in each product.
Of course, that doesn’t mean home cooks can’t experiment. One newspaper has already published some recipes. Buried in the story was advice: Go slowly because this isn’t your 1970s pot and make sure to keep the cannabis-laced food away from kids and pets.
Still, the big unknown is the long-term health effect of regular cannabis use and, by extension, the possible future costs to the already beleaguered health-care system.
Health Canada’s cannabis fact sheet is long and concerning. But physicians warn that we may not even know the half of it.
There’s so little research. It’s like smoking in the 1960s before researchers figured out that it causes lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines cannabis use disorder as a condition requiring treatment. Where’s the money for research and treatment of that?
Confusingly, there is a crazy quilt of regulations across the 13 provinces and territories.
The minimum age for purchase and possession in British Columbia is 19, but it’s 18 in Alberta and Quebec (although Quebec’s new government may increase it to 21).
It’s OK to smoke a joint walking down a B.C. street, but it’s against the law in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon.
It’s legal to grow up to four plants except in Quebec and Manitoba, where there’s a $2,542 fine.
Usually, cautious Canadians don’t get themselves into messes like this, preferring to wait to see how the big guys do before making substantive changes. But not this time. We’re pioneering with Uruguay as the sole national role model.
And, truth be told, it has the unmistakable feel of having leaped off a precipice without having glimpsed the bottom.