Dear Tony: Our strata council is getting a lot of pressure from our owners to adopt a bylaw that prohibits use of marijuana and growing of marijuana plants. Several owners have already complained about the smell of marijuana in the building from several smokers, and we had to eradicate a grow-op back in 2004, costing our strata more than $75,000 in damages that we never recovered. What our council is struggling with is the question of how far we can go with our bylaws. [continues 447 words]
Ontario Senator Tony Dean, sponsor of the Trudeau Liberals' pot bill in the Upper Chamber, is upset that Canadians will not be able to legally light up their spliffs until long after Canada Day. He says time is of the essence, and that the government does not have the luxury of biding it. Why is this? Why, after more than 100 years of marijuana being illegal, does the good senator think pushing back the smoke date by a few weeks is the wrong thing to do? [continues 296 words]
Every morning, Kevin Thompson takes a short stroll from his apartment to the Crosstown Clinic, where he signs in, gets his prescription medicine, then sits in a small room and injects it before heading off to work. He follows this routine up to three times a day and has done so virtually every day for more than a dozen years. The medicine is diacetylmorphine, the medical term for prescription heroin. "It saved my life. No question, it saved my life," Mr. Thompson, 47, says emphatically. [continues 683 words]
B.C. has become a haven of drug-dealing and money-laundering that's killing hundreds of people from overdoses and pricing homes beyond the reach of law-abiding citizens. That's the view of Attorney-General David Eby, who's promising bold action to purge B.C.'s casinos and hyper-inflated real-estate markets from the influence of criminals. "We have an international reputation that's in tatters," Eby told me. "We will clean it up. My goal is to have B.C.'s international reputation back on track." [continues 404 words]
For all the hand-wringing that we were rushing into cannabis legalization, and that there wasn't enough time to get it right, it turns out that it wasn't that hard to figure out, after all. Proponents of legalization have long argued that it makes far more sense to regulate cannabis similar to how we regulate alcohol. All along, then, the model for cannabis retail was staring us right in the face, and the Alberta government deserves credit for not missing the glaringly obvious. [continues 584 words]
With toxic street drugs such as fentanyl killing four British Columbians a day, much of the response has focused on overdose treatments with naloxone, and supervised injection sites. Yet public-health staff have concluded that emergency interventions such as these will not stop the epidemic. If the supply of these drugs cannot be halted - and no war on drugs has ever been won - the only option is to prevent the downward slide that leads to street-drug addiction. Many of the victims are middle-age men and women who have fought a lifelong struggle against such challenges as alcoholism, mental illness, the lasting effects of childhood abuse and more. [continues 513 words]
Would Baltimore be better off if we called off the war on drugs? Yes. There would almost certainly be less violence here. The downside: Barring a sudden and significant change in the city's economic base that could lead to more jobs for men who have been involved in the illegal narcotics trade, we would still have too many neighborhoods with open-air drug markets. But first things first. Let's deal with the violence. The violence remains Baltimore's most immediate and pressing problem; we are internationally known for it. [continues 813 words]
The mayor is wrong on allowing legal pot cafes, and here's why Mayor Jim Watson won't support the idea of legal lounges where people can smoke pot. That's not even remotely surprising: Watson's a cautious, conservative mayor when it comes to social policy. He doesn't want to make it easier for anyone to smoke anything in lounges. If his view wins the day, there won't really be anywhere in Ottawa to smoke pot, because politicians at Queen's Park have banned smoking marijuana in public places. [continues 590 words]
Psychologists point to 'compelling evidence' of cannabis' potential health impairments Apart from the #Metoo maelstrom and the housing crises in Toronto and Vancouver, few things stir up Canadians more than marijuana, which its promoters claim is the cure for everything from glaucoma to brain disease =2E Should private outlets sell recreational marijuana? Is it more enjoyable to smoke or swallow cannabis? Will I get rich on pot stocks? Is it possible to remove the criminal underground from Canada's $6 billion-a-year cannabis industry? [continues 975 words]
Are public health officials facing up to the fact that the overdose epidemic in Canada and the U.S. is mostly devastating boys and men? There are small signs some health officials are slowly, awkwardly, hesitatingly beginning to acknowledge the obvious: The overdose crisis is predominantly an issue of men's health. Public officials have much denial to make up for. It was just a year ago that former B.C. Liberal health minister Terry Lake pulled out the public relations stops to open a 38-bed Vancouver facility for women to overcome substance abuse. Months before an election, Lake also announced an overdose prevention site exclusively for females. [continues 730 words]
Calgarians are demonstrating strong common sense when it comes to offering advice on how marijuana should be regulated. The drug will be legalized by the federal government on July 1, but it's been left to cities to determine where pot smoking will be permitted. A survey prepared for the city by Environics Research finds that approximately 55 per cent of Calgarians believe marijuana consumption should be treated more like alcohol, rather than regarded as a product similar to tobacco. Such a conclusion is prudent and would mean that pot couldn't be smoked in public, just as imbibers can't drink beer and other alcohol in public. It's difficult to imagine people walking down the street with a glass of wine in their hand - it's equally troublesome to picture a group of Calgarians sharing a joint as they meander down the road. [continues 289 words]
The Notley government rolled out more of its marijuana retail regulations on Friday and, we must say, they continue to stay ahead of other provinces. The only way this year's legalization of bud is going to work is if obtaining legit weed is reasonably close in convenience and price to buying the illegal stuff. The Alberta NDP government seems to be making a reasonable stab at doing just that. When you can walk into just about any bar in the province and in a few minutes pick up a couple of joints at a reasonable price, it won't automatically be easy for legal retailers to compete.n Users might have to drive further and pay more for the straight stuff. [continues 393 words]
You save by buying bulk - and this law of shopping logic holds for illegal as well as legal products. Which means someone in Cambridge is either a very sharp negotiator, or a pot-smoking liarÂ… As part of the institutional preparation for the legalization of marijuana, Statistics Canada is currently collecting reams of data on the pot economy. This is necessary to ensure the reliability of national accounts when legal weed becomes a reality, as sales will otherwise show up as a huge, immediate spike in consumer purchases. [continues 826 words]
Earlier this month, front-line health workers in Toronto raised the possibility that part of the city's cocaine supply may be tainted with fentanyl, after a handful of drug overdoses were connected to users unknowingly consuming the deadly opioid while smoking crack. This dismal scenario is common in Canada. Across the country, illicit drugs are being cut with the synthetic painkiller - which is up to 50 times more potent than heroin - because it is cheap and powerful and saves dealers money. During a month-long period in the summer of 2016, 86 per cent of the street drugs tested at Vancouver's supervised injection sitewere laced with fentanyl. [continues 628 words]
Political manoeuvres in upper house likely to push legalization date into September - well past the Liberals' original July 1 target If you were hankering for a summer of legalized marijuana in Canada, you can forget it. And you can thank Canada's newly independent - but unelected - Senate for delays. There is now a firm deadline for passage, but it wasn't the deadline the Trudeau government, and some provinces, wanted. If this was a strictly political gambit, there are those who would finger the culprit, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, as the man who directed his Senate caucus to put the brakes on government legislation, choosing partisan battles over sober second thought. [continues 660 words]
Both the Nova Scotia and federal Liberal governments are blowing the chance to rectify years of anti-black prejudice with their marijuana legislation. For years, the government's "tough on crime" strategy gave police officers carte blanche to harass people of colour. Now that the government has decided to legalize recreational marijuana, they have no plans to issue pardons for marijuana possession convictions. Thousands of people have been charged with pot possession over the past decade. Things got so bad under the Harper government that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police advocated for ticketing to replace criminal charges for simple possession. [continues 700 words]
Decriminalization is the right move , say James Hutt and Emilie Taman. Canada's overdose crisis is getting worse, not better. In 2016, there were 2,861 opioid-related deaths. Last year, there were more than 4,000. All of them were preventable. As the NDP gathers in Ottawa this weekend for its national policy convention, many hope that this issue will be front and centre. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has already indicated that he favours the decriminalization of all drugs - not because it's the popular but because it's the right thing to do. [continues 551 words]
Thank you, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, for giving me cover so I don't wind up being painted as the "worst person in the world," the label Keith Olbermann used on his TV show to hang on people he didn't like. I have been silent as the opioid epidemic raged because I had no clear-cut solution. The debate currently swirls around the idea of city-approved "safe injection sites," more formally known as CUES -- comprehensive user engagement sites. [continues 545 words]
If, five years ago, someone had asked me how I felt about cannabis, I'd assume they were a cop. Even the term "marijuana" - a word believed to be brought to the United States by Mexican migrant workers before the Prohibition era, which was later used to promote racist anti-pot messaging - was a red flag to discreet and casual users such as myself. Weed, cheeba, ganja, sticky-icky, dank nugs - terms the community has appropriated from Rastafarians, West Coast hippies, rappers and Indian yogis: These are the words that would have communicated familiarity and, therefore, acceptance of the habit. But what do you call it now that Canada has developed a sophisticated legal medical program and is close to passing its recreational cannabis legislation? Well, from black-market producers to young workers in illegal dispensaries to the burgeoning, optimistic legal industry: We've all agreed to say cannabis. [continues 1184 words]
