Gormley: Cannabis legal framework has serious side effects

Wednesday’s legalization is superficially attractive because cannabis is now “legal,” but it’s not. And some danger lurks, writes John Gormley.

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This week’s highly anticipated and, in some circles, much-vaunted national legalization of cannabis introduces an entirely new market for recreational drug use. Culturally, the impact will be far reaching. But it usually takes years to measure the arc of culture.

This cannabis legalization, like so much from Justin Trudeau, is more about virtue signalling and symbolism than sound public policy. Beyond being able to check off an election promise, cannabis reform could have been done more deliberately and incrementally. Instead, there is an incrementalism to this plan but it could affect a lot of lives along the way.

If cannabis regulation can be judged on a scale of one to 10 — 10 being fully criminalized laws akin to heroin — and one being the sale of parsley in the grocery store, it’s likely been at a seven or eight for many years. A gradual scaling down of regulation could have been planned where pieces of the marijuana regime are removed and a public consensus reached on how far the government should go.

Ironically, an important part of this debate was had 50 years ago when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau established and then ignored the LeDain Commission’s study of the future of marijuana laws and the non-medical use of drugs.

After an extensive three-year investigation involving more than 12,000 Canadians (and even an appearance by Beatle John Lennon), the commission recommended that marijuana and even so-called hard drugs be decriminalized, removed from the criminal laws and that education and “wise, informed freedom of choice” be encouraged while possession of drugs could be discouraged by a $100 fine.

Justin Trudeau could have, upon being elected in 2015, moved to quickly remove simple cannabis possession and cultivation from criminal law and institute a nominal fine with no criminal conviction or record. He could have then established an extensive public consultation to hear broadly from Canadians on issues of education, risks to young people, addictions best practices, medical and legal frameworks and whether going further than decriminalization would make sense.

Wednesday’s legalization is superficially attractive because cannabis is now “legal,” but it’s not. And some danger lurks. It normalizes marijuana use for kids (that happens when you sell something in stores); law enforcement and science are playing catch up; and, while provinces regulate the use and sale of cannabis, cautious provincial laws and overlapping federal regulations treat cannabis far more stringently than alcohol and sometimes with confusing outcomes.

Particularly if federal law is invoked there can be life altering consequences for people offside with the law. An adult possessing more than 30 grams of dried cannabis in public or distributing more than 30 grams can be fined $200 under provincial law. If federal charges are laid, a conviction, depending on the amount of over-possession, could result in up to five years in prison; “distributing” is called trafficking and can net up to 14 years in a penitentiary.

Similarly, giving or selling cannabis to an underage person is treated seriously provincially — a $750 fine — but more so federally, with up to 14 years in jail.

While individual purchases and possession in public are limited, pot at home can be stockpiled and supplemented with home harvested plants. God help the earnest couple, heading up to the lake for the summer, arrested after tossing a kilogram of their home supply into the car to use while they’re away.

Ditto for the other misadventures of people who unwittingly break the law and find themselves in jeopardy if an enthusiastic police officer or prosecutor opts for federal charges as traffickers or distributors.

Now that the genie is out of the bottle, the federal government will be forced to move down the scale haphazardly and reactively, rather than with a coherent plan. In time, the federal legal reach will likely be ended with cannabis devolved entirely to provincial jurisdiction to be regulated like alcohol. Or parsley.



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