A recent poll suggests 51 per cent of British Columbians are buying all product legally

B.C. has had a difficult road to getting cannabis users interested in purchasing from legal retailers over their neighbourhood dealer, but a recent poll suggests that the province may finally be winning the battle over bud.

A Research Co. poll released earlier this month found that 51 per cent of B.C. respondents who have consumed cannabis in the past six months have bought all of their products from licensed retailers. That's an 18-point increase from a similar survey conducted in October 2019.

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It is indeed sweet victory to see the B.C. Liquor Corp. selling cannabis.

In the B.C. election of 2001, I, as a B.C. Marijuana Party candidate, was arrested at the behest of the Victoria Hillside liquor store for campaigning for legal cannabis.

Some advice about marketing would be in order.

As a Realtor of 30 years, I can offer some pointers. Analyze the prevailing market and emulate it. At present, in the "friends" market, you can smell before you buy. If you don't like it, you can bring it back.

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Dear Editor:

Contrary to Joe Fries' editorial "Abstinence works best" (Courier, Aug. 16), Rhode Island treats addicted prison inmates with methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone. Like methadone, buprenorphine is an opioid agonist, or replacement opioid. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist that blocks opioid receptors.

The benefits of opioid substitution therapy are well-established, in and out of prison. It reduces crime, prevents overdoses and the spread of infectious diseases, denies profits to criminal gangs, allows addicted individuals to function normally within their families, jobs, and communities, and gets them off the hamster wheel of raising money by hook or by crook to pay criminal gangs for illicit opioids of unknown potency and purity.

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More than half of all Canadians believe drug treatment should focus on abstinence, rather than opioid replacement therapies, according to poll results released this week.

Research Co. found 57% of those surveyed were in favour of programs that aim to get people off drugs entirely, rather than programs that supply people with free dope to help keep them healthy and out of trouble.

It's unclear from the results if people's attitudes towards drug treatment are shifting, but it's clear that a majority of the population supports an approach that doesn't enable addicts.

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Re: "Legalizing pot is proving to be a public-health disaster," column, Aug. 11.

Lawrie McFarlane's verdict is premature. Legal regulation in Canada isn't analogous to legalization in Colorado, for among other reasons, Colorado allows advertising and initially allowed edibles and extracts with inadequate labelling, packaging and dose limitations.

Yes, emergency-room visits from adverse reactions spiked in Colorado following legalization, but this was due in part to inexperienced tourists from prohibitionist states, and consumers feeling more inclined to seek help once they no longer feared arrest. Panicked patients are typically discharged (the wiser) on the same day, with no lasting ill effects. Such visits remain far less common and severe than visits related to alcohol, pharmaceuticals and tobacco.

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Re: "Legalizing pot is proving to be a public-health disaster," column, Aug. 11.

In his opinion piece on cannabis legalization, Lawrie McFarlane cites a short-term increase in the numbers of adolescents visiting emergency rooms for cannabis in Colorado - a jurisdiction with a commercialized approach to cannabis legalization - as evidence that Canada's much more restrictive public health-oriented approach to legalization has failed.

However, as scientists who have carefully considered how to best measure the public-health impacts of cannabis legalization, we would suggest a thorough and ongoing analysis of Canadian data is needed to understand the effects of the new regulatory landscape. Although cannabis-related hospital visits should be a priority, we also need to ask important questions about underlying causes: if we see an increase, how much is due to increasing use among youth, and how much could be related to shifting trends in products/modes of administration (e.g., a shift towards high-THC concentrates, increased edible consumption)?

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It's becoming increasingly obvious that legalizing marijuana consumption was a colossal public-health blunder.

A good part of the evidence comes from south of the border, where several states legalized pot much earlier than Canada. This has allowed time for robust scientific follow-up - follow-up that is beginning to reveal a frightening picture.

Colorado legalized medical marijuana in 2012, and recreational use in 2014. One result is that emergency hospital visits by adolescents with marijuana-related symptoms have jumped from 84 a year in the pre-legal era, to 500 in 2018.

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VICTORIA - B.C.'s largest First Nation is accusing the provincial government of stalling its application for a retail cannabis licence while it races to open its own public store in the community's prime retail location.

The Cowichan Tribes on Vancouver Island are in the sixth month of trying to get approval for two retail store licences from the provincial government. As the Cowichan wrestle with a wall of red tape, and are repeatedly rejected for nation-to-nation talks with the province, the B.C. government is competing against the First Nation for the municipal rights to open a store in the community's largest shopping centre.

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