Dispensaries can’t get product legally
Police worry about organized crime involvement as business booms in legal vacuum
The dozens of pot dispensaries that have sprouted up in Vancouver over the last few years rely exclusively on illegal suppliers to keep their businesses going because they have no legal means of obtaining medical marijuana.
Vancouver police are operating under the assumption that many of the city’s marijuana dispensaries are obtaining their pot from people with Health Canada licences to grow small amounts for personal use, said Sgt. Randy Fincham.
“Somehow, they’re getting rid of their marijuana, and somehow the stores at the street level are obtaining their marijuana. The stores don’t have a licence to buy and the homes don’t have a licence to sell,” Fincham said.
The B.C. Compassion Club Society gets its marijuana only from trusted growers, said spokeswoman Jamie Shaw, but the arrangement is “not at all” legal. “We’ve got exclusivity contracts with our growers so that everything they grow we purchase,” she said.
The medical marijuana industry has changed drastically in the time the compassion club has existed, said Shaw, who is also president of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries. There are about 60 unlicensed dispensaries in Vancouver now, up from just 12 in 2013. Although the dispensary is operating outside the law, Shaw said the club has taken great pains to distance itself from organized crime.
Dana Larsen, the founding director of the Vancouver Medical Cannabis Dispensary, said his two locations source their marijuana from “mom and pop” growers — smallscale, home-based operations that can include people with Health Canada licences to grow for personal use.
“We don’t really ask them necessarily if they’re licensed or not. It’s not legal to sell to us regardless, but it’s not really legal for us to do what we do either,” he said.
Many medical marijuana dispensaries are doing their best, in the absence of government regulations, to regulate themselves and ensure they are getting a safe and reliable product, while others are not, according to Zach Walsh, a psychology professor at the University of B.C. who studies the effects of cannabis use. Without a legal framework, it is impossible to tell the good from the bad, he said.
“The big concern for me is … it’s not good to be providing resources to people who are doing something that’s against the law, but really, how can we ensure that patients are getting the proper quality of cannabis if the chain of supply is not clear? It really highlights that we need to bring dispensaries into the Health Canada program so that we can ask questions about where are you getting your cannabis from,” Walsh said.
Neighbourhood growers were shut out of Canada’s new medical marijuana scheme in favour of new, larger growers who will sell to patients through a secure delivery system. But they were allowed to keep their licences after a judge issued a court injunction in response to a legal challenge filed by home growers.
“Certainly there are people out there who still appear to be growing marijuana without a valid licence,” Fincham said. “A number of these growers are connected to organized crime, on the licensed and unlicensed side, and presumably they’re finding a way to sell their marijuana.”