Tax income from soon-to-be-legal marijuana is forecast at $615 million. But it could bring in much more, a Lethbridge business audience heard Wednesday.

And while the federal government will collect the new tax, 75 per cent of it will go to provincial governments to help communities with implementation costs.

That was one of just a handful of new or hiked consumer taxes included in the federal government's budget, highlighted in a breakfast presentation by experts from KPMG.

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Funds from marijuana taxes will also help, says mayor

Federal funds targeting the opioid crisis will be welcome in Lethbridge. And Mayor Chris Spearman says a share of the newly announced taxes on marijuana will also help, when its use becomes legal later this year.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau included $231 million in his new budget - - spread over five years - to support communities battling an opioid crisis.

"Maybe we can get some relief," Spearman said, pointing to the steps the City has taken to respond to the situation. One initiative, a safe-use centre where drug users can find medical help and counselling, opened Wednesday.

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The significant spike in illicit drug overdoses in Lethbridge has not reached Medicine Hat - yet.

There is no way to predict that it will or when, said Insp. Tim McGough, Medicine Hat Police Service.

Lethbridge recently experienced its largest spike in overdoses - 16 cases - ever recorded in a 24-hour period. There were 42 overdose calls to first responders in the week after Feb. 19.

"We've had no specific overdose spike (in Medicine Hat) but we are always concerned with illicit usage." said McGough.

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The president of the union representing more than 3,000 Suncor workers says they have prepared to bring the issue of random drug testing back to arbitration if the Supreme Court of Canada does not hear their case.

The comments came after the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld an injunction against the practice granted by the province's Court of Queen's Bench.

In a Thursday morning interview, Ken Smith, president of Unifor Local 707A, said he was confident Canada's top court will hear their case. The union expects to hear a decision by the end of March.

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A new clinic giving access to a drug similar to prescription heroin is likely heading to Edmonton's inner city.

Alberta Health is planning two clinics as a pilot project, one each in Edmonton and Calgary. Treatment would require opioid addicts to visit the clinic several times each day to inject drugs supplied by the clinic.

It means users no longer need to buy drugs on the black market, and studies at Vancouver's Crosstown Clinic found patients in the program cut back their use of illicit drugs from at least 14 times a month to less than four.

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This week marks a historic first for the City of Lethbridge. The Supervised Consumption Site (SCS) will open its doors and will be the first of its kind in North America to offer all four modes of consumption - ingestion/oral, injection, intra-nasal/snorting and inhalation. Despite this milestone, it's fair to say the facility has been met with mixed reviews, including people who have come to me to "blame" the police service for letting it happen. This not only demonstrates a narrow view of Canada and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but a failure to understand the role of the police in social-political decisions that are driven by municipal , provincial and federal officials and the mandate they support.

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Trying not to be too cynical about all the reporting, discussions, debates and business preparations on Trudeau's "wrath of pot" legalization predications, with the lame duck excuse that the crooks are making too much money on its sales, I'm sorry! The recent news of the inherent benefit of marijuana has been blown right out of the water by a recent group of very prominent world scientists.

They have reported that there is absolutely no shred of evidence whatsoever of its benefit for health and pain relief, because of the availability of hundreds of pharmaceuticals that do not have negative health aftereffects like brain damage, in addition to dangerous driving which puts the very heavy load on our police forces that still do not have equipment to test for drug impairment.

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Emergency services responded to 16 cases on Friday and 42 since Feb. 19

Lethbridge had the single biggest spike of overdoses in a 24-hour period during the ongoing opioid crisis this past weekend, with 16 cases being responded to by local emergency services personnel on Friday alone.

"What we have seen over this past weekend is a dramatic increase in the number of overdoses that our staff at Lethbridge Fire and EMS have responded to," said deputy chief of support services Dana Terry, at a hastily arranged press conference Monday morning. "Specifically with overdoses where Narcan was administered."

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Realtors and condo boards scramble to find solutions

Realtors and condo boards are sparking up conversations about pot as legalization looms.

Anand Sharma, president and condominium manager with the Northern Alberta Chapter of the Canadian Condominium Institute, said condo corporations should start revising their rules if they haven't already to prevent sticky situations when tenants start lighting up legally.

"The bottom line is people are going to have to seek legal counsel to tighten up their bylaws or address some of these issues in their bylaws," Sharma said.

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Re. "Man charged in 2016 fentanyl death pleads guilty in unrelated drug case," Feb. 21

The war on drugs, which is really a war on the people who use drugs, has failed. The people who sell drugs at the street level are very often in the grips of addiction themselves.

This was the case for Jordan Yarmey, and so many others like him. The people who buy drugs are exposed to the possibility of accidental death by fentanyl poisoning, which was the case for Szymon Kalich.

This tragic situation draws attention to the need for drug policy reform. The decriminalization of small amounts of drugs for personal use, and access to drug testing is one way to end the opioid overdose crisis that is devastating families across our country.

Lorna Thomas, Edmonton

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It is hard to pinpoint reasons for a large increase in the number of physicians authorizing the use of medical marijuana, but a local pain specialist has some theories.

"Cannabinoids are showing great promise as medicines, especially in the myriad of non specific conditions like anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, mild to moderate pain, unhappiness, recurrent stress and dysphoria conditions which pharmacotherapy has offered little and doctors are ill equipped to treat," said Dr. Gaylord Wardell, anesthesiologist and pain specialist, Sante Surgi, Medicine Hat. "Patients are dissatisfied with their doctors and their drugs."

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A number of on-the-fly changes were proposed

Calgary city councillors have proposed a number of relaxations on proposed cannabis retailer rules.

On Wednesday, during a council committee, administration presented their land use bylaw rules to ready the city's policies ahead of marijuana legalization. But just like rolling your first joint, the process wasn't easy. The rules will now be smoothed over and sent to an April council meeting before being passed into official law.

If council approves the changes made at the committee level, cannabis stores won't be restricted by distance when it comes to opening up shop near post-secondary institutions.

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Much like a self-learning robot that improves with every step, Edmonton city hall hopes to tweak recreational cannabis bylaws now, and after it is legalized.

"We're still in a little bit of a state of confusion or complexity as to the way it'll all shake down as far as where can the stores be located," Ward 6 Coun. Scott McKeen said Wednesday. "I suspect we'll continue to struggle with these for a couple of years as we tweak the regulations and make sure we get things right."

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Retailers watch on as city drafts regs on where shops can open

The cans and can'ts for Calgary cannabis retailers are taking shape this month, but some prospective shops are pointing out that perception could still be tainting the city's proposed bylaws.

On Wednesday, councillors will see administration's land use amendments to add cannabis retail store rules to the city's bylaws. These tweaks will go before the council in an April public hearing.

Out of three options, the city's going with one that would treat cannabis retailers a little like liquor stores - but not entirely the same as booze businesses.

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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.

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I am quite suspicious about the headspace of the Journal editor who captioned a brief article about a U.S. survey with the headline "Pot holiday linked to fatal car crashes" (Feb. 13). Maybe their attention span allowed them to only get as far as the first paragraph.

The next one explicitly stated that the survey being reported had found absolutely no evidence of a link between pot smoking and car crashes on the one day of the year studied from 1992 to 2016, which was April 20, the day of the year adopted by activists to push for the decriminalization of cannabis.

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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?

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Patients still struggling to get covered by insurance plans

As Alberta moves forward on retail applications for recreational marijuana, those who use the drug for medical reasons still wait for coverage.

Most forms of medical cannabis do not have a Drug Identification Number (DIN) in Canada, which leaves it subject to tax and exempts it from most health coverage plans.

"We're not talking about drug users using this to get high, we're talking about patients that need it to be able to function and be part of a working society," said Scott Bladon, an Edmonton man who has legally used cannabis for three years to treat psoriatic arthritis.

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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.

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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.

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