Pubdate: Tue, 16 Aug 2016
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2016 The Buffalo News
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: Dan Levin, New York Times

CANADA HEAD SHOP OWNERS ASK: WHY WAIT?

They Choose to Ignore the Current Laws

VANCOUVER, British Columbia  The Cannabis Culture Lounge has 
everything a pothead might need to feel right at home: $3 marijuana 
buds, bongs for rent, bags of Skittles and Doritos for sale, and 
black leather couches where customers can recline in zoned-out 
contemplation in a pungent haze. Never mind that it is all 
technically prohibited by Canadian law.

Still, some enthusiasts have higher hopes for the business, which 
opened more than a decade ago as a kind of speak-easy for marijuana 
smoking  long tolerated by the city's authorities. The lounge began 
selling marijuana after Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister in November.

"This is what recreational marijuana legalization in Canada looks 
like," said Jodie Emery, an activist and coowner of the lounge and 
several medical marijuana dispensaries across Canada.

Trudeau has promised to make recreational marijuana legal in Canada 
as soon as next year, bypassing the nation's strict medical marijuana 
regulations. Under the latest rules for medical use, announced last 
week, patients must be registered, have a prescription and obtain 
their supplies only by mail from a government-licensed producer or by 
growing a limited amount privately.

Impatient to test the shifting political boundaries, entrepreneurs 
have opened hundreds of illicit dispensaries across Canada, selling 
products like organic marijuana buds and potent cannabis concentrates 
while local governments and police have tended to look the other way.

The marijuana boom they hope for has yet to materialize though the 
Canadian government is now doing preliminary work on a measure to 
govern recreational use.

Even so, the authorities in some cities have begun to crack down, 
raiding scores of the illegal dispensaries and arresting dozens of 
owners and workers.

And a lobbying battle is raging between the new entrepreneurs and the 
licensed medical marijuana producers, who were the only ones allowed 
to grow and provide the plant under the old regulations. One side 
complains about being shut out by a politically connected cartel 
while the other complains about unfair and damaging competition from 
those who are breaking the law.

The collision of money, politics and policing has made recreational 
marijuana a major test for Trudeau. How he solves it will be watched 
closely in Canada and the United States, where federal law bans 
marijuana, but state laws are inconsistent.

"Canada is looking to hit a home run, rather than singles and 
doubles," said Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the 
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, based in the 
United States. "What Mr. Trudeau is trying to do is something we can 
only dream about here."

But it will not come quickly. A task force will take a few months to 
gather comments from local officials and the public before Parliament 
starts to draft a measure. "It's a long process, and we're hard at 
it," said Bill Blair, a Liberal Party lawmaker and former Toronto 
police chief whom Trudeau has put in charge of the marijuana effort.

Blair said in an interview that the government's top priorities are 
to keep marijuana away from minors and the profits out of the hands 
of organized crime. That may point to a system similar to the way 
liquor is sold in some Canadian provinces and U.S. states: strictly 
through government-owned or licensed stores.

Some cities in British Columbia are unwilling to wait for Ottawa 
though and are introducing their own marijuana policies in defiance 
of federal law. The province has been a center of marijuana growing 
and culture for decades, and it borders Washington state, where 
recreational marijuana is legal  and extremely profitable.

In Victoria, the provincial capital, where more than 30 dispensaries 
have opened in recent years, city leaders proposed new regulations in 
late July that would allow such businesses to operate if they abide 
by certain restrictions.

Victoria is following Vancouver, which has begun issuing licenses to 
some of the 120 or so marijuana shops in the city, provided they 
comply with rules, like being at least 1,000 feet away from the 
nearest school. Two licenses were granted in the spring, and at least 
11 more are in the pipeline, officials said.

Dispensaries that do not obtain a license will be shut down, 
according to Kerry Jang, a Vancouver city councilor. Jang dismissed 
complaints that the regulations and fees  up to30,000 Canadian 
dollars, or about $23,000, for a license, and 250-a-day fines for 
violations  were too onerous. "They got used to making money hand 
over fist with very little oversight," he said.

Some critics of Trudeau's legalization efforts see a conflict of 
interest in the close ties between political insiders shaping 
marijuana policy and the licensed producers. The head of the task 
force, A. Anne McLellan, is a former Cabinet minister who advises a 
law firm that represents clients in the industry, and Chuck Rifici, a 
founder of one of the licensed producers, was the volunteer treasurer 
of Trudeau's Liberal Party until June.

Rifici said he had no personal or political connection to the 
government's legalization process, but he acknowledged that the 
licensed companies "typically pull in people who know how to navigate 
government."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom