Medical and recreational pot should both be acceptable
The problem is pot stigma, not the “black market.”
Last week’s police raids of marijuana dispensaries in Toronto exposed an important feature of the so-called “war on drugs” in Canada. For years, most Canadians have told pollsters that pot should be legalized or decriminalized. More and more people are recognizing the medical benefits of weed. Our war, then, seems not so much on marijuana as it is on people who have been selling and using it illegally, especially for recreational use.
Pot advocates have warned that the “black market” of presumed gangsters will benefit from the dispensary raids. To me, the “black market” is just another term for the people you bought your weed from before dispensaries.
Our government has exploited the stigma of consuming pot for fun, rather than for health, to criminalize the market and create space for armed, organized gangs to control it. It’s going to take a lot more than legalization to end a stigma around weed that has encouraged crime and led to an untold waste of public resources.
It’s easy to hate the players in the drug trade, especially those who can’t afford a Kensington storefront, but the foolish drug game of prohibition itself is the reason people cannot access marijuana in peace and safety. The problem is not that people with shady motives want to sell weed, but that the government has incentivized such people by making it a crime to grow and sell pot.
Graham Clark, a local criminal lawyer, seized on this in his reaction to the recent dispensary raids.
“Every person who now cannot go to a dispensary will instead have to trek into the black market that government and police, through prohibition, create to the great benefit of actual criminals,” Clark said.
The latter part of Clark’s statement, about government creation of crime through prohibition, is absent from many condemnations of the raids. Rather, the spectre of a dangerous criminal market is being used to explain why police should leave dispensaries alone.
In a news release calling for all charges to be dropped against dispensary operators and employees, the Toronto Cannabis Coalition argued, “when compared with (government-sanctioned) mail order or the black market, dispensaries in Toronto provide a safe, informative environment where patients can source high-quality medical cannabis.”
This statement is true, but the contrast between dispensaries and street drugs reinforces stigma. Just as people who use pot for medicinal purposes have long relied on illegal, recreational suppliers, recreational users have almost certainly been benefitting from dispensaries whose stated purpose is to provide medical marijuana.
Some Toronto dispensaries reportedly have very lax standards for determining a person’s medical need for marijuana. If this is true, dispensaries are successfully blurring the line between selling pot for health reasons, and simply helping people get high.
This line needs to be blurred in order to erase pot stigma. Yes, there is a big differ- ence between needing pot for a diagnosed illness, and wanting it for pleasure. But the difference should never be used to justify the violence, policing costs, criminal records, prison sentences, and court expenses the government currently employs for recreational users and suppliers.
I don’t care if someone without a medical condition can get weed from a dispensary, or her local dealer, or by growing it at home, as long as no one is harmed or threatened in the process.
Removing the stigma associated with marijuana can help us to avoid more foolish time and resource expenditures in the future. For example, in a post-legalization era, the government should make it cheap and easy for people to receive pardons with criminal records related to pot.
There shouldn’t be any sanction for smoking weed in public, selling it on the street, or growing small amounts of it on the balcony — it cannot be added to the preposterous regime of provincial offence tickets for such horrors as drinking in public, begging for change, or sleeping in a public park.
Pot proponents will have to fight for these realities — they will be less successful in doing so if they reinforce the stigma around weed that makes it OK to sell weed in a posh dispensary, but not OK to grow at home, smoke in public, or trade on the street.
If people want marijuana, let them have it without shame or sanction. Instead of reinforcing fear of a black market, let’s just make such a market irrelevant.