Does the World Change Tomorrow? (part two)

If I were a diehard advocate of the inherent right to smoke or ingest any part of the cannabis plant, today I suspect, would feel somewhat anticlimactic. Yes, someone over the age of 18 is now allowed, in Canada, to be in possession of or smoke cannabis in public. Except of course if you live in BC. One is legally allowed to smoke in my fair province - but with the exception of one store in one small city - there is no where to buy the stuff unless you do it online. In other words if I had wanted to smoke up today - the only way that I could have done so would be to go to a private, illegal dealer. Other provinces appear to be better organized and access is easier, but it is somewhat ironic that the province that is best known for the quality and quantity of its marijuana has almost none available legally.

As mentioned in the previous blog, the reasoning as to why we needed to legalize marijuana may have not have been based in scientific reasoning or on an over whelming body of medical evidence. However, regardless of the logic why the use of cannabis has been made legal, it is clear that there will be winners and losers. The winners are those corporations who had enough sufficient capital to build large growing, and processing plants and the capacity to work their way through the complex procedures to get government approval. Those large corporations will make millions of dollars, successfully gobbling up small companies that cannot compete. Those corporate entities will fairly quickly dominate the market the way a few food store or drug store chains control their markets.

The losers are all of those small, illegal growers who may have lost most of their best customers. Not only will those growers be affected but all of the hydroponic stores, the sellers of topsoil and of course various hydro facilities will lose a portion of their income. Perhaps even more importantly, we may lose a portion of our vegetable producing greenhouses. Clearly producing four crops a year of cannabis is far more profitable than producing celery.

The next few years will be interesting (and rewarding) for some lawyers as the courts sort out what impairment means for those who ingest cannabis. There will be countless studies, some reporting diametrically opposite findings in terms of the harm or benefits. Maybe if we are lucky, more researchers will , using reliable research methods, examine whether or not the drug is medically beneficial consistently.

But for most Canadians not much else will change. We are not all bound for hell in a hand cart nor are we about to enter a new enlightened age.