National Post (National Edition)
A death rattle of cannabis superstitions
As the first anniversary of cannabis l e g a l i z ation approaches, tales of the apocalypse that didn’t happen continue to trickle into Canadian news. A new one appeared Friday morning when ADP, a human resources “solutions” firm, published the results of a fresh Ipsos survey of Canadian workers. The survey served as a followup to one done last year, when legalization was looming.
At that time, there were widespread expectations that new cannabis law would have a Murphian character: whatever could go wrong would go wrong. “... (N)early half of working Canadians expected productivity (46 per cent) and quality of work (43 per cent) to decline, and health and safety incidents (55 per cent) and absenteeism (40 per cent) to increase.”
Well, odds are you’re reading this in an office, so you tell me whether things have gone all to hell around you in the past 12 months. As an urbanite I honestly don’t even smell pot in passing on the street noticeably more than I did before legalization. More serious effects on economy and infrastructure have proved undetectable. The newer ADP/Ipsos survey reports that “Most Canadians believe recreational cannabis has had no impact at work in terms of health and safety incidents (75 per cent), productivity (74 per cent), absenteeism (71 per cent) or quality of work (70 per cent),” though I suppose it should be admitted that none of these figures starts with a “9”.
Meanwhile, in Edmonton, the local Global News Radio affiliate 630 CHED summarizes a city report on the Year One of legalization with the headline “Edmonton expecting cannabis policing costs to get worse.” We newspeople like to use the word “worse” for its attention-getting qualities when we can, but upon close scrutiny we find the Edmonton police, who screamed for a budget increase in 2018 to handle “additional costs” of legal pot, confessing that no new resources are yet actually needed.
This isn’t surprising. In July a different city report noted that over the first six months of legalization, Edmonton bylaw officers handed out a grand total of 6 (six) tickets for cannabis-related smoking violations; the figure for tobacco complaints was 231. Indeed, the chief immediate effect of cannabis legalization seems to have been that a nervous city government, which had reacted by expanding the no-smoking zone around the entryways of businesses, accidentally caused a major increase in tobacco cigarette litter when ashtrays were removed from those areas.
The fears expressed in the latest report turn out to involve mostly, er, stuff that’s still illegal and will remain so. One of the council representatives on the city’s police commission gives us classic drug-war talk about the frightening “new” drug “shatter,” which is hash oil in a solid, brittle form. Illegal manufacture of “shatter” involves butane, which can explode, and the stuff has a high THC concentration, which can explode your mind, I guess. Shatter sounds pretty wild to me, or at least it has when I’ve talked to well-travelled, high-earning professional friends who have tried it. And who knows? Maybe hash and cannabis oils, and not methamphetamine, are responsible for the screaming and/or nude and/or knife-wielding madmen one often hears of (or overhears) in Edmonton.
Coun. Sarah Hamilton has the concern that when cannabis edibles are eventually legalized, this will create new demand for illegally manufactured products like shatter (rather than for the legal, professionally made edibles in the totally legal retail stores). This is the kind of reasoning that led the police to freak out about legalized smokable cannabis in 2018, except the logic is much less clear. Nowhere, of course, is there any suggestion that removing an item from the schedule of illegal drugs altogether might have had cost savings for police and authority. Nor that replacing booze with pot in our economy and social life might be a positive moral imperative ...
I realize that at this point I might have written about marijuana more often than I’ve used it myself. My point is almost never that marijuana is a good thing or a nice thing, although sometimes I do contrast it with alcohol. The lesson here is a more general one. Pot legalization was unthinkable for most of my lifetime for stated reasons that, if given any intelligent scrutiny or even just presented to anyone who knew what he was talking about, were self-evidently cockamamie.
An absolutely illogical position was the dominant one in law and culture; it enjoyed the moral high ground and control of the levers of law worldwide. We must never forget that such a thing can happen. And yet we are still seeing the dying spasms of the kind of thinking — it can only be called superstition — that kept marijuana illegal.