Let’s not panic over pot shops

Two very different things, both related to marijuana, happened in Toronto last week. One mattered, and pointed to some of the challenges still ahead with the legalization of marijuana later this year. The other was the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

Allegations that workers were smoking pot on the job, forcing Metrolinx to shut down work on a section of the $5.3billion Crosstown LRT project, was a serious matter.

But the uproar over the Toronto location for one of Ontario’s first government-run pot shops, which continued this week with comments from Premier Kathleen Wynne, is way out of proportion.

It’s half a kilometre from an elementary school. Parents and trustees were not consulted, and Wynne says she isn’t happy about that.

Neither is the hairdresser in the plaza at Gerrard St. E. and Victoria Park Ave. that’s set to be the future home of a store operated by the Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation. She’s worried about the children, and her adult customers.

“One of my customers phoned me,” she said. “She doesn’t want to come to the shop anymore if this is going to exist.”

Why on earth would that be? There will be nothing more dangerous about a legal, governmentrun pot shop than an LCBO outlet, a Beer Store or even the convenience store in that very plaza, which sells cigarettes.

None of those retailers can sell their legal but age-restricted products to any students from the school in the area who might decide to seek them out on their lunch break. Or anyone else, for that matter, who isn’t at least 19 years old and has proper identification to prove it.

The local drug dealers, however, are under no such prohibitions. They can, and no doubt do, sell to anyone with money in hand.

Trying to protect young people, who currently have easier access to a joint than to a bottle of beer, was the first reason Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave for his government’s decision to legalize cannabis.

The second was to transfer billions of dollars from dealers and gangs, and the vast criminal organizations behind them, to government coffers where it can be used to provide services and programs.

According to one rough Statistics Canada estimate, Canadians consume as much as $6.2 billion worth of cannabis each year. That’s a great deal of money that now goes to fund criminal enterprise. And the price Canadian society pays is much higher than that.

The prohibition of marijuana has driven up the cost of policing and contributed to a national crisis of court delays. It has compounded racial and class inequities and unnecessarily criminalized people for doing something that by and large poses little threat to them or others. And it’s done all that without delivering the promised public health and safety benefits.

Legalization, which will mean putting legal shops in communities across the country, is the right thing to do.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges when pot becomes legal. There will be.

Top of the list is ensuring that police have the necessary training and enforcement tools — roadside spit kits, for example — to catch marijuana-impaired drivers.

Under Ontario legislation marijuana can’t be smoked in vehicles, public places or workplaces. That adds up to more challenges for police, landlords and employers.

Just look how many drivers still use their cell phones. And it won’t be easy to stop some people from turning a smoke break into a weed break — as may have happened with the workers on the Crosstown LRT last week.

These are the issues that need attention, not poring over maps trying to find shop locations that somehow manage to be nowhere near one of the 800 schools in Toronto.

There won’t anything more dangerous about a governmentoperated pot store than an LCBO outlet or a Beer Store