This is interesting: a BBC piece about the spread of home-grown marijuana in Canada, and a bit on the legislation and current politics surrounding its use. This might explain how much weed I smell in Montreal. Also a fascinating bit of speculation on the future of US-Canada relations if Canada does, in fact, legalize marijuana altogether (which it probably won’t, but who’s to say, really?).
People keep asking me whether weed is legal up here. To my understanding, Canada’s marijuana laws are under dispute. It hasn’t been wiped off the criminal code or the controlled substances statutes, but most police officers don’t seem to prosecute for it. This I gathered from a mixture of online sources and my daily discussions with the Haitian cab drivers who loiter around my gym, all of them high as kites at any given hour. Apparently, over half of the Canadian population maintains that marijuana should be legalized altogether, rather than simply decriminalized as it may well be. The percentage of people who echo that sentiment has actually risen since the new administration took over, trying to enforce anti-drug laws and imposing higher fines on public smokers and private cultivators. These criminal charges are still relatively tame, as they put marijuana dealers behind bars for up to a year if they sell as part of organized crime or if they’re involved in violence; and up to two years if they sell to youth or frequent schools. That seems fair. Basically, it seems the only reason all of these marijuana laws don’t hold up in Canada is because the Canadian government will never take away the right to use marijuana medicinally, as did the U.S. under Attorney General John Ashcroft around 2000. So in an effort to protect the right to use medicinal marijuana, the government has to have some licensed dealers or allow people to grow their own weed. The federal government certainly won’t provide it, but it needs to be readily accessible, so they can’t stringently regulate it, either.
On a side note, the medicinal uses of marijuana span from treatment of epilepsy to Crohn’s disease to multiple sclerosis.
And by the way, there’s actually a political party called The Marijuana Party of Canada. Wild guesses as to what its platform consists of?
