TORONTO - Adam Ash, 37, wasn't the least bit shy in explaining why he was at the Hunny Pot Cannabis Co., a four-story boutique on Queen Street West in the middle of the city's downtown district.

"Marijuana," the Toronto resident said midday on a recent Monday, a little bewildered as to why someone would even bother asking.

Glass containers of marijuana flower were laid out on tables throughout the shop, amid glass cases of rolling papers, pipes, bongs, grinders and vaporizers. Employees known as "bud tenders" worked the floors, ready to provide advice and recommendations for picking just the right strain.

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TORONTO - An aging construction worker arrived quietly in the building's basement, took his seat alongside three other men and struck his lighter below a cooker of synthetic heroin.

A woman, trained to intervene in case of an overdose, placed a mask over her face as his drug cooked and diluted beneath a jumping flame. He injected himself, grew still and then told of the loss of his wife who died alone in her room upstairs - an overdose that came just a few months before this social service nonprofit opened its doors for supervised injections.

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It'€™s all about harm reduction and improving community health outcomes

No doubt some Hamiltonians are chuckling to hear city council is considering banning sugary drinks from city buildings to protect people's health.

With good reason.

The proposed ban by the public health department lands at the same time the city is moving ahead with opening its first safe injection site for drug addicts.

It's more than a little ironic that the city may be cracking down on sugar while enabling the use of illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine.

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"You can't help dead people - that's the point of injection sites"

There you go again, being a "bleeding heart." A recent letter writer is correct. Injection sites are encouraging and abetting druggies in their bad habits. There is no point to safe-injection sites.

And if they die, as they surely will if they don't kick their habit, why should I give a hoot?

They chose to live on the edge as they do. Suffer the consequences! They know better, and yet refuse to accept the inevitable. Stop or die!

And you should stop trying to be the social conscience of your readers.

(Look, we're not fond of illegal drug use. But caring about what happens to our fellow citizens - especially the weakest - is important in a civilized society.)

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Doug Ford says he is "dead against" supervised injection sites and believes the focus should be on drug rehabilitation instead.

And if elected premier of Ontario in June, the Progressive Conservative Leader says he will do everything he can to fight the opioid crisis and get people who are struggling with addiction the help they need.

"If your son, daughter, loved one ever had an addiction, would you want them to go in a little area and do more drugs? I am dead against that," Mr. Ford said Friday. "We have to help these people. We can't just keep feeding them and feeding them."

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Heather D'Alessio remembers drug education in high school that consisted mainly of dire warnings about the consequences of using any of them.

She was smoking pot by Grade 9, so she disregarded the advice.

"Most of the time, they would give us these fact sheets on cannabis. Then we'd all take it out to the corner and get high and laugh at it because we thought it was stupid."

Who uses cannabis?

Governments and public health advocates are now launching new education campaigns to warn young people about the health risks of marijuana, which will soon be legal across Canada.

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Toronto's municipal licensing and standards department is reviewing city bylaws to see if changes are needed to deal with the "potential impacts" that people growing legal marijuana may have on neighbouring tenants or properties.

Mark Sraga, director of investigation services for the licensing department, said he doesn't anticipate cannabis home-grow operations to have a significant impact on municipal bylaws when the law permits people to grow the drug this summer.

"Under Health Canada rules, people are allowed to grow medicinal marijuana in their houses," he said. "I don't see how growing four plants necessarily having any impact considering the fact I've seen some personal designation grow licences for hundreds of plants."

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Premier Kathleen Wynne has ordered that school boards be given a say in where provincial marijuana stores are located, noting that boards are likely to know "where their kids go at lunchtime (and) where they go after school."

Her demand came after the announcement that Toronto's first outlet of the Ontario Cannabis Store would be located in Scarborough, 450 metres from Blantyre Public School. The Toronto District School Board said it had asked to be consulted about the location, but never was. Concerned Blantyre parents discussed the news at a school council meeting last week.

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Two very different things, both related to marijuana, happened in Toronto last week. One mattered, and pointed to some of the challenges still ahead with the legalization of marijuana later this year. The other was the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

Allegations that workers were smoking pot on the job, forcing Metrolinx to shut down work on a section of the $5.3-billion Crosstown LRT project, was a serious matter.

But the uproar over the Toronto location for one of Ontario's first government-run pot shops, which continued this week with comments from Premier Kathleen Wynne, is way out of proportion.

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More than half the charges laid against London marijuana dispensary staffers and operators swept up in a series of raids on the illegal businesses in the past two years have been withdrawn, court records examined by The Free Press show.

London police have launched seven raids in three separate crackdowns on city pot shops since August 2016, resulting in 49 charges against 15 people.

But court records show 25 of those charges - mostly for possession for the purposes of trafficking - were later withdrawn and resolved through peace bonds, a non-plea order requiring the person to be on good behaviour for a set period of time.

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Sex-ed, pot and Brown

There's no dust on Doug Ford.

Just a day after being elected head of Ontario's PC party, Ford has announced he'll repeal the Liberal's sexed curriculum, hand marijuana sales back to the people and make a decision on permitting Patrick Brown to run as the PC candidate in the riding of Simcoe North.

While political pundits are licking their pencils in anticipation of analyzing Ford's every move, the newly elected leader is already out there working the crowd and winning over voters.

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Guns, gangs unit member has pleaded not guilty

A suspended Hamilton police officer fed drug traffickers sensitive information and favours in return for cash payments, a Crown attorney said Monday during his opening address to a Toronto jury.

Craig Ruthowsky, a former member of the Hamilton Police Service's guns and gangs unit, has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice, bribery, breach of trust, trafficking and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.

He became ensnared in a Toronto Police Service wiretap investigation called Project Pharaoh aimed at gathering evidence of drug and firearm trafficking in Toronto's west end, Crown attorney John Pollard said in Superior Court.

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A provincial government commitment to provide $ 40 million to help municipalities cover the costs of pot legalization is a starting point, says Mayor Chris Friel.

But Friel remains critical of the Ontario government's approach to the legalization of marijuana saying the increased law enforcement and safety costs are just one part of the overall picture.

"I'd say that it's a starting point because right now no one really knows what the extra costs will be," Friel said. "But again I ask: where is the public consultation?

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Suspended Hamilton cop Craig Ruthowsky revealed that he aided a drug dealer to cultivate his trust so he could snare a larger trafficker, his former best friend testified Tuesday.

Sgt. James Paterson, who once considered himself Ruthowsky's "best friend," confronted Ruthowsky after he was suspended in 2012 while both were working for Hamilton's guns and gangs unit.

"Craig Ruthowsky advised me that the dealer was dangling a bigger fish in front of him that he wanted to get, this major importer Officer Ruthowsky had said 'I was trying to make myself look like a dirty cop so that will trust me more, and he'd give up the bigger fish,'" said Paterson.

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The local public health agency says smoking marijuana should be banned in multi-unit buildings, including balconies

The local health unit is throwing its support behind the City of Ottawa's public health agency after they called for a ban on smoking marijuana inside multi-unit residential buildings - including on balconies.

Last week, Ottawa's acting medical officer of health recommended the Ontario government extend its proposed ban on pot smoking in common areas of condos, apartment buildings and university residences, hotels and their balconies.

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In 2018 we find ourselves battling an opioid crisis that has been years in the making. Opioids are drugs that act on the nervous system to relieve pain and were originally derived from opium but now also include synthetic preparations.

In the mid-1990s, their use by physicians was heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, leading to greater prescribing for both acute and chronic pain. Patients using opioids can develop a dependency or addiction.

There are two sources of opioids: those that are produced by the pharmaceutical industry and those that are illicitly produced. Recently, the illicit supply has become so contaminated with fentanyl (a very powerful opioid) or fentanyl-like substances that many people are at risk of an unintended acute and potentially fatal poisoning.

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Curtis McGowan wrestled with his opioid addiction for years, but his suspected overdose while in prison raises serious questions

On one of his many trips home from jail, Curtis McGowan beamed with pride and clutched a Dr. Seuss book.

"Mom," said the six-foot, 300-pound foundry worker, handing Michele McPherson a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, "this is the first book I ever read."

To mother and son, it was a moment filled with significance. He'd struggled with illiteracy his whole life, just like he'd struggled with drug use and mental-health problems. If he could learn to read, perhaps sobriety and serenity were not far off.

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It is a misnomer for the media to always mention "guns and gangs" when it comes to the violent exchange between gangs. Guns are not the problem; the problem is the control of drugs and contraband, which the gangs are fighting over.

Gangs, no matter where, will use whatever means available to get their share of the lucrative and fast-growing drug market. In my opinion, a review of the escalation of drug availability and use would be more beneficial than creating ad hoc committees to study guns and gangs.

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There's no buzzkill like bureaucracy. A new proposal by Ottawa Public Health to ban marijuana - once it's legal - from condos and apartments, seems like overreach to us.

As the Sun's Andrew Duffy reports today, Ottawa's acting medical officer of health has recommended that the province extend its proposed ban on pot smoking in common areas of condos, apartment buildings and university residences. Dr. Vera Etches said the province should prohibit smoking cannabis, e-liquids and herbal shisha products in condos, apartment buildings, university residences, hotels and their balconies.

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Same tribe, different mindsets.

On Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the shores of Lake Ontario, dead centre between Toronto and Montreal, there are more than 20 pot dispensaries and at least 30 smoke shacks selling cheap cigarettes.

The population of Tyendinaga is 2,124.

Do the math.

At the Six Nations Mohawk Territory, however, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada with a population of 12,000-plus living on the reserve, there is a huge sign on the main highway indicating zero tolerance to illicit drugs.

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