THIS WEED REVOLUTION WILL BE VERY ... CANADIAN
As the world watches, our nation ever so cautiously ends its 95-year prohibition
Executives from a multibilliondollar cannabis company based in Smiths Falls flew by private jet into a St. John’s windstorm Tuesday, racing to get to their Newfoundland store in a bid to sell Canada’s first gram of legal weed.
Earlier in the day, at a media briefing across from Parliament Hill, bureaucrats from seven federal departments patiently answered questions about the thousands of rules and regulations that will govern the sale of cannabis.
And at a scrappy end of Merivale Road, an engaging young man in red running shoes sat in the waiting room of an illegal marijuana dispensary, chatting about the stigma that still surrounds the evil weed.
Three snapshots from the day before Canada ends nearly a century of pot prohibition.
They illustrate the tentacles of a policy that will change our economy, our laws and our society.
But this is Canada. The change will be orderly.
Marijuana is legal today, but it’s no free-for-all. And probably not that much fun.
Which is perhaps the point of a federal policy whose stated aim is to “strictly regulate” but not “normalize” marijuana, to make it safe but keep it away from Canadian teenagers, who are among the most avid pot smokers in the world.
And to stop saddling people with a criminal record for possessing a small amount of the popular drug. And to drive criminals out of the trade.
And so Canada marches ahead as the first G7 country to make recreational marijuana legal.
At 12:01 a.m. today, Canadians were allowed to buy dried marijuana or oil produced by HealthCanada-regulated growers. It’s sold in plain packages with childresistant containers. The fanciful strain names dreamed up by marketers — Fantasy Island, Free — are dwarfed by large health warnings and a THC symbol in a red stop sign.
A jumble of federal and provincial laws and regulations govern where and how you can buy pot, what amount is permissible to carry around in public and where you will be allowed to smoke it.
Some rules extend into your home, too. Quebec restricts how much marijuana people can keep at home, for example, and New Brunswick requires you to lock up the pot to keep it away from kids.
A strange new mind-altering world? Hardly. A sizable minority of Canadians already smokes pot. If legalization works, it will lure many of them away from dealers and dispensaries and into legal stores.
And as politicians like to repeat, legalization is a process, not an event. There will be lots of hiccups along the way.
Marijuana shortages, for instance, might make for skimpy shelves or sellouts in the first days, weeks or months.
Every province has an online cannabis shop. But only about 100 bricks-and-mortar outlets were expected to open across the country on Day 1. Expect lineups.
In most provinces, the stores will be run by government agencies. The four western provinces have licensed private stores. Folks in Alberta will be shopping today at The Daily Blaze and Waldo’s 420 store.
Private stores are coming to Ontario, too, and lots of them, but not until next April. The new Progressive Conservative government turfed the former government’s plan for LCBOstyle outlets. It will take a few months to rewrite the rules and issue licences for private shops.
But it’s Day 1, and many Canadians are in the do-you-believe-it stage. In the words of 20-yearold Ottawa pot smoker Nicholas Stewart: “Honestly, I just find it kind of strange.
“I think it will be awhile before parents will see someone ripping on a bong and say to their kids, ‘Oh, that’s a legal activity.’ ”
The logistics of stores, prices and strains will be sorted out. The more difficult and unpredictable part of legalization will be what happens on the street and between neighbours and friends.
Will more people start smoking pot or ramp up their use? Will it become as socially acceptable as having a glass of wine with dinner? Will teenagers find it easier, or harder, to score weed? What battles will erupt as provinces and municipalities navigate the difficult question of whether people should be allowed to smoke their joints on the sidewalk and in public parks?
Stay tuned.
It’s a social experiment with no clear answers, just educated guesses based on the experience of the few American states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Youth use of cannabis has not dramatically increased there.
And some of the problems associated with smoking — the smoke is a nuisance, and the combustion a health risk to the user — might decline as that method of consumption becomes less popular.
The trend is away from traditional dried marijuana flower, rolled and smoked in a joint. Customers down south are mad for vape pens and other “concentrates” and cannabis you can drink, eat, chew or rub on your skin. Candies, drinks, mints and lotions. They will be coming to Canada too, but not for another year.
The stigma that has surrounded marijuana like Saran wrap, however, won’t disappear overnight.
That will only happen when the middle class embraces weed, in the estimation of Kornelious Morgan, a well-spoken young man at work Tuesday at The Hemp Company, an illegal dispensary on Merivale Road. Customers from lower socio-economic classes are less concerned about what people think of their pot use, he says.
“The shame is just not there, typically,” he says. “It’s like the middle-class people are now just going to hop on. They are the ones most concerned about stigma, looking over their shoulders, wondering, ‘Oh, is my neighbour doing it?’ ”
The Canadian entrepreneurs who have turned weed into billion-dollar businesses have lent a cloak of legitimacy, too.
They’ve make marijuana respectable, led by Canopy Growth, pride of Smiths Falls — the company set up its Tweed marijuana plant in an old Hershey chocolate factory and five years later has become the world’s largest cannabis producer. Not that there is serious competition for that title — yet.
Canada leads the world both in its medical-marijuana regime and in developing rules that are ushering this country into legal recreational pot.
Make that cannabis. That’s the new word, although perhaps not on the street.
It’s part of the corporate and marketing transformation that has turned stoners into “experienced users” and smoking pot into “curated sessions.”
And that might be all for the public-health good if people interested in altering their consciousness reach for pot rather than alcohol.