Fear-mongering no replacement for facts
While attending the public meeting on cannabis with the four local members of Parliament earlier this month, I was struck by the scaremongering rhetoric on display from the front.
Cambridge MP Bryan May, KitchenerCentre MP Raj Saini, Kitchener SouthHespeler MP Marwan Tabbara, and K-W MP Bardish Chagger, who sponsored the forum, led a 30-minute presentation on the proposed cannabis laws, including the legislation that will impose blood content driving limits onto cannabis users once the product becomes legal in July next year. Taking comments from the audience afterward, it was clear that there were more questions for them than they had answers.
While municipal concerns should not be underestimated, more important than those questions, in my view, were the concerns of the many cannabis patients in the room that this legislation will negatively affect them.
There were frequent reassurances from the panellists suggesting that the current medical licensing program will remain untouched. And while that is true, the concerns of the audience, or at least the ones who came to the mike, had most to do with the worry that their right to medicate might be at risk.
When the audience asked our MPs if they could tell us what five nanograms of THC per millilitre of blood meant in terms of actual cannabis consumption, the room was met with blank stares. That limit isn’t unimportant — that’s the proposed limit over which someone would be sent to jail for driving impaired, somewhere around 2-3 vaporizer sessions. When pressed further on why there was no research money being spent by government to look into these questions while $274 million has already been allocated for law enforcement, the suggestion from the podium was that people just aren’t ready to accept cannabis as a medicine. This response was frustrating for many in the crowd, and it should go without saying that fear of stigma on behalf of the government is not a good enough reason to allocate exactly zero dollars to scientific research on cannabis.
As a medical cannabis user, I’m worried about the proposed limits. Indeed, the room was shocked to hear that the proposed limits have nothing to do with ensuring that drivers are unimpaired. Staying within the proposed legal limit of 2-5ng/mL of blood will require three to five days of no driving after smoking a single joint, or worse, five to seven days after eating one brownie or edible. Even for recreational users, these limits make it unreasonable for anyone to consume cannabis in the comfort of their own home on a Friday night, for fear of testing over the legal limit when they drive to the office on Monday morning.
The proposed levels found in Bill C-46 are not based in science; even Canada’s own forensic scientists have found no correlation between the lower limit and impairment. Not even the pharmacist on stage, Kitchener Centre’s Raj Saini, could say one way or the other how Canadian law enforcement was going to try and tackle the fact that cannabis in the bloodstream does not equate to impairment the way alcohol does; indeed that fact seemed conspicuously absent from the presentation material.
It must be said that there is never an excuse to drive impaired, and no cannabis user should be allowed to drive impaired. As legalization approaches and the government looks to up their public safety education campaign, it will be important that this message remain central. However, this message should not be interpreted as blanket permission to target medical users who use the product daily to treat a variety of maladies. Taking a tough stand on impaired driving must actually focus on impairment, not per serving limits with no scientific basis.
I look forward to hearing from our MPs at a future cannabis roundtable, perhaps when they are more prepared.