Legalization
I really hope this isn’t the one thing for which Canada is known.
When travelling, and the answer “Calgary” to the question “so where do you call home?” draws the fairly common blank stare, there are two things which can usually be relied upon to locate my home town on Planet Earth. My first recourse is usually “ever heard of the Calgary Stampede?” If that doesn’t work, which it usually does, then the next thing to try is “remember the 1988 Winter Olympics?” Still nothing? “From Montana, drive north. It’s just colder and has lower speed limits but otherwise it’s more-or-less the same.” Depending on how far south I am in the continental US, that’s usually a good bet for finally getting the location pin to drop on the map in my travelling acquaintance’s head.
I’m expecting, however, that pretty soon all that is going to change.
“Calgary? Isn’t that in Canada? Didn’t you guys just legalize weed up there?” Yes, that Calgary and that Canada, I’ll think, while I silently lament it’s not the “Canada with the RCMP Musical Ride?” Or Banff. Or k.d. lang. Or The Queen or maple syrup or hockey or any of the other endless things that Canada does better than, now I think about it, just about anyone else. No, it will be “Canada, the place where they legalized weed.” I have distinctly mixed feelings. That wasn’t always the case for me but it certainly is now.
First, before I go any further, let me state for the record (and so I don’t get a jillion comments about it) I have absolutely no objection to the consumption of cannabis. I don’t consume it myself — never have — and don’t intend to start now. That said, I have never been in favour of legislating someone’s notion of morality and certainty not any politician’s notion of morality. In fact, I am at the absolute opposite of that particular political pole. What an adult chooses to do in their own home, or what consenting adults choose to do together in their own home I have always thought as being fundamentally none of my business. I suppose some would call that libertarian, with a small ‘l’. Guilty as charged.
However, before legalization I did have some beefs with marijuana use. Not legal ones, but personal ones. In particular I remember one spectacular summer Sunday afternoon a few years ago. It was hot and still and had that amazing carefree summer light which comes at the intersection of July and August. As I dodged the late afternoon strollers on my bike along the banks of the Bow River, I was greeted not by that intoxicating smoky meat smell of dinner time barbecue, but rather the skunky stench of high grade BC Bud. It was omnipresent from Edworthy Park through to St. Pat’s bridge. It was, in a word, disgusting.
There was a time back in the early seventies when I visited certain parts of my boyhood hometown of Vancouver, such as ‘hippy central’ Gastown, when there were hints of a sweet, Patchouli oil smell I would whiff from time-to-time. I was too naïve to know what it was back then, but I do recall it wasn’t an unpleasant smell. It, too, was the aroma of summer and youth and possibility. If I ever smell it now, which is rarely, it brings back basically happy memories of being a kid on the West Coast in a beautiful city where you can ski and sail on the same day.
But this new, amped-up, super-potent, presumably genetically modified stuff stinks — literally. Really, really stinks.
Funnily enough what bugged me the most, as I huffed and puffed my way along the endless, winding Calgary bike paths, was not that stink making an otherwise magnificent summer afternoon ride really unpleasant. No, for me that smell was the acrid reek of me paying my taxes in every way and seemingly on everything while a big, robust, popular business wasn’t paying a penny on anything. Shades of the Volstead Act. So when our wunderkind Prime Minister made legalization a key plank in his platform — and won an election based on it—I thought legalization was, momentarily setting aside all other considerations, a good means of getting our hands on that lucrative commerce, tax the hell out of it, and use those revenues for schools and roads and more of that excellent, free-for-the-patient health care we have up here in Canada. Overnight, marijuana would go from being a crime to a cash crop.
Jackpot.
The rest of the story is a classic case of wishing carefully, lest those wishes actually come true. In short, now that we have legalized marijuana, I’m having second thoughts.
Top of mind is that while I supported legalization, I somehow didn’t realize that it would be legalized around me. Talk about not thinking things through. Where would people buy it? Cannabis stores, of course, which are seemingly everywhere. 17 in Alberta alone on the day it went on sale with many more to come. I don’t know what else I expected but it’s still a little jarring when a shopper, in one stop, can pick up a quart of milk, a Snickers bar and a couple of pre-rolls in the same strip mall. It’s not wrong. It’s just weird. Really weird.
One of my early, post-legalization fears — that some would interpret legalization to mean ‘smoke everywhere and anywhere’ — is likely unfounded. Municipalities have largely jumped on that misapprehension and placed pretty severe restrictions on where consumers may consume. Now we’re having the discussion about those who live in rental units where the landlords, for perfectly valid and rightful reasons, have decided they do not want their tenants consuming on the premises. However, for reasons I am not quite able to understand, we as a society now seem to own the problem of where these disenfranchised tenants will go when they do want to consume. Enter the Cannabis Consumption Areas here in Calgary which are designated public spaces for, as one might expect, consuming cannabis. Never mind, for the moment, why taxpayers should fund these but it just seems—well—seamy. I visited Dam Square in Amsterdam in the late seventies. I’m sure it’s very different now but back then it was an open air drug free-for-all and not a nice place at all. Downright scary, actually. I fear our Cannabis Consumption Areas will auger down into the same pit if we’re not really vigilant.
However, here is what is absolutely at the top of my list of unintended consequences, oddly enough: that the legalization of marijuana will be the one thing for which this country — which I love — is known. I desperately want Canada to be known for something else. Something more life affirming and awe inspiring. Marijuana, besides whatever medicinal benefits it may possess, is just about getting high. That’s it.
As far back as the 1950s, Canada was developing a state-of-the-art jet fighter — the Avro Arrow — which, at its peak, employed 14,000 workers. It was just beginning to prove out its astonishing performance when the entire project was capriciously cancelled to save money in a relatively brief period of tough economic times. But that wasn’t enough. That same government conspiratorially and unnecessarily insisted the five prototypes be destroyed along with the production-ready manufacturing facility as well as all the plans and paperwork. The 14,000 skilled workers employed on this project deserted Canada in droves figuring the future lay elsewhere, which clearly it did. It was a one way street. Having dispersed and found the future elsewhere, they were never to be re-assembled again.
That remarkable aircraft, somehow magically never cancelled, and into which those 14,000 amazing Canadians poured their heart and soul for years — that’s what I would prefer come to mind when people think about Canada.
Not too long ago, I had the great honour of interviewing a gifted Canadian scientist who is the Wayne Gretzky† of his field. A philanthropist provided him $150 million over ten years and two empty floors of a research facility to fill as he saw fit to pursue his lifesaving medical research — he was that good. That sounds like a great story, except for one thing. It is all being done in Texas. Early on in his academic career the scientist had Caltech and Stanford fighting over him as to which school he would attend next. Inexplicably, Canadian universities were indifferent to his prodigious talent and let him slip between their fingers.
That kind of talent, somehow magically in Truro rather than Texas, and the remarkable accomplishments which flow from it along with a nine or even ten digit economic benefit—that’s the Canada I hope instantly pops to mind as the penny drops for my airline seat neighbour.
Presently, this is a country where we can’t seem to build a pipeline for our own oil while we continue to buy exactly the same stuff from tinpot dictator thugs. Neither can we figure out a way of not needing oil at all — wouldn’t that be great, someday? We also don’t seem to be able to keep a car plant open, even if it does build cars designed and engineered somewhere else. Or build a four lane freeway through the mountains or high speed rail across that obstacle-free prairie between Calgary and Edmonton. We also haven’t yet been able to figure out how to not pump raw sewage into the pristine Pacific just off Victoria Harbour at one end of the country or similarly into the equally pristine St. Lawrence at the other. We have to figure out how to look more to the West, East and North instead of obsessively and obsequiously to the South. Perhaps most importantly we have yet to square ourselves, once-and-for-all, with our past so we can finally move forward to our future.
In other words, with regard to our big, audacious national aspirations — our moonshots — to say that Canada has a track record of shooting itself in the foot would be kind. It’s more like a case of taking a blunt, rusty axe and hacking the foot off at the ankle in a series of slow blows. Quite simply, it makes me furious. It should make all Canadians furious.
That said, when it came to the legalization of cannabis, that proceeded posthaste. Obstacles which cropped up were impressively dynamited out of the way without delay. Those with street level responsibility for getting the legalization program off the ground often asked for more time. None was forthcoming. The legalization of cannabis was promised and it was going to be delivered, damn it, sort of on time and sort of on budget like our lives and future depended on it. If the newly created regulatory agencies hadn’t woefully underestimated the shockingly high demand for the leafy green stuff—potentially bankrupting new, independent storeowners in the process—you would have to say it was one of the more successfully executed government programs. Keep in mind, though, that this is an industry which out of legal necessity had run successfully with zero government control or oversight since long before the days of Reefer Madness. Seeds plus water plus electricity equalled money and lots of it if you could tolerate one of your colleagues permanently disappearing every once in a while.
I’m sorry to have to say, folks, but these are some seriously screwed up national priorities.
In the end, once again, let’s not forget cannabis is just about getting high. It’s neither rocket science nor heart surgery. It’s simply the ability to momentarily hit life’s pause button and defer reality for a while. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. However, at best, weed is just another form of agriculture and we have plenty of that already along with lots of wood to hew and water to draw.
So, while I still believe Canadians were right to legalize cannabis, I just don’t want it to be the first thing my travelling acquaintances think about when I tell them I’m from Canada.
©2018 Terence C. Gannon
†Up here, we can’t have a story about Canada without mentioning Wayne Gretzky. It’s the law. At least it should be.
Thank you so much for reading. This essay is also available as an episode on the Not There Yet podcast, read by the author.
