Ready or Not, Recreational Marijuana Use Is Coming to Canada
Le Canada s’apprête à légaliser le cannabis.
Promesse de campagne de Justin Trudeau, la légalisation du cannabis à des fins récréatives est prévue le 1er juillet 2018 au Canada. Mais certains s’inquiètent : sécurité routière, publicité, encadrement de la production, âge légal de consommation… A sept mois de la date butoir, le pays est-il prêt ?
TIVERTON, Ontario — Behind a forbidding high-security fence topped with razor wire, Supreme Pharmaceuticals is busy preparing for the legal marijuana trade, with workers expanding a greenhouse complex where the lucrative crop grows.
2. But while Supreme looks like it will be ready for the day when prohibition ends, Canada’s governments still have a lot of work to do.
3. Proposing legislation to legalize the recreational use of marijuana was the easy part for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With about
1. forbidding rebutant / fence clôture / to top surmonter / razor wire barbelés / trade commerce; ici, vente / to expand ici, agrandir / greenhouse serre / crop culture. 2. while ici, bien que / to look like ici, donner l'impression que. 3. about environ / seven months to go before Canada becomes the second nation after Uruguay to take this step, the federal government and the provinces are staring at a formidable to-do list.
QUESTIONS REMAIN
4. Ottawa still has to set the limit at which drivers will be declared impaired under criminal law, and must determine the rules for advertising and the standards for growers.
5. Working out most of the details affecting consumers is largely up to the 10 provinces. But only three — Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick — have offered any idea of how they will operate and regulate their marijuana markets, and then only in the most general terms. The other seven are still in the midst of public consultations.
6. Two of the most important questions for consumers — how much the legal product will cost and how much it will be taxed — are still being debated by the two levels of government. 7. In most of the country, it is still unclear whether marijuana will be sold only in governmentrun stores. And most provinces have yet to decide the amount of marijuana individuals will be able to possess or grow.
8. Nor have most provincial governments decided on the minimum age for buyers, or where smoking marijuana will be legal. The federal government must also explain how it will deal with international drug treaties that prohibit marijuana sales.
9. Even the precise starting date for legal pot is a mystery.
10. On top of that, and perhaps counterintuitively, police forces are warning that successful inauguration of a legal system for selling mari-
juana will require an accompanying crackdown on the black market.
LEGALIZATION BY JULY?
11. Despite all these challenges, suppliers are optimistic that legal recreational sales will be a reality by summer.
12. Even with the uncertainty, many investors are betting there is money to be made on legal marijuana. In October, Constellation Brands, a major wine and beer distributor in the United States, invested $245 million in Canopy Growth, the owner of several licensed medical marijuana growers in Canada.
13. While the commercial side is upbeat, many provincial leaders say Trudeau’s timetable of legalization by July — one of his main campaign promises — is unrealistic. Some have demanded a delay. 14. Speaking with reporters, Brian Pallister, the premier of Manitoba, said his province is reluctantly working to meet the federal government’s schedule.
15. “That doesn’t mean I like it,” he said. “I’m going to continue to express my concerns about the rapidity of this change.”
16. But Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto and a Liberal member of Parliament tasked by Trudeau with overseeing the marijuana issue, said the government will stick with its plan. He dismissed suggestions that the process was rushed, noting that the federal government had been discussing the issue with provinces for two years.
17. “I don’t minimize the complexity of the work ahead,” Blair said Friday. “But by establishing a date for implementation, it’s focused the process.” Further delay, he added, “just facilitates vast windfalls of profit to criminal enterprises.”
18. Many police forces are among the groups calling for a delay. While a new law will allow the police to use saliva tests to identify marijuana-impaired drivers, what will qualify as impairment has yet to be defined. Little equipment to conduct the tests is in the field, and few officers have been trained in its use.
19. “Are we going to be ready?” asked Mario Harel, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and head of the force in Gatineau, Quebec. “We don’t think so. We’re dealing with a lot of situations so we’re going to be doing our best to be as ready as possible.”
SALIVA TESTS
20. While some Canadians are questioning the accuracy of saliva tests, Robert Mann, a scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health who studies cannabis use, said the tests have proved valid in other countries, although he acknowledged that marijuana’s active ingredient was not as easily measured as alcohol.
21. His larger concern, he said, is changing public opinion about whether it is safe to drive under the influence of marijuana.
22. “There’s quite a common perception that you can drive safely under the influence of cannabis,” Mann said, adding that this view is based in part on now-refuted research from about 20 years ago. “It took quite a while for people’s attitudes about drinking and driving to change.”