From crime to health to business, Canada’s
decision to legalize marijuana is a grand progressive experiment that promises
to answer a host of questions
When Canopy Growth opened its first
cannabis factory in an old chocolate plant near Ottawa four years ago, it did
so predicting a bright future. Canada
had already legalized medical marijuana, and Canopy predicted full legalization
for recreational use to be next.
What the company hadn’t predicted,
however, was the sudden flood of foreign visitors. Politicians and police
authorities from Jamaica, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece and
Australia have all come knocking, as well as doctors from New Zealand, Brazil
and Chile, along with groups of corporate investors and bankers – so many that
Canopy now splits the groups into smaller units according to their birthdays.
“We knew we’d have to give a lot of
tours, so we just cut a window into the wall,” said the company spokesman,
Jordan Sinclair. “We put windows in all of the doors.”
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Canada will be thrust even more
directly under the international microscope on Thursday, when a vote in the
Senate is expected to ratify Bill C-45, effectively making Canada the first G20 nation to legalize recreational marijuana.
“It’s going to be a bit of a science
fiction experience for a while,” said Benedikt Fischer, an expert on substance
use at Toronto’s biggest psychiatric hospital. “It’s unique in the world, because it’s
happening for the first time in a wealthy country. It’s not like in the US,
where there are these state experiments. Most people kind of ignore Uruguay.
And so the world is really looking at this.”
Governments, researchers and business
leaders around the world all have their own reasons for keeping tabs.
Legalization could affect Canada’s crime patterns, health and countless other
factors – but exactly how, no one yet knows.
Each Canadian province plans to roll
out its newly legalized market in a slightly different way, creating about a
dozen mini-laboratories within one massive test case.
Even places that have already taken
the legalization plunge are hoping Canada will solve some mysteries. After
Colorado legalized marijuana five years ago, for example, organized crime
reacted by ramping up supplies of “black tar heroin, opiates and harder drugs”,
said Dr Larry Wolk, the state’s top public health official.
But Wolk says he is interested to
watch that process unfold on a bigger scale in Canada, where the new law is
expected to deal a much more significant blow to the black market. Any new mix of
illicit drugs in the country could have new effects on public health.
“What’s the impact of marijuana legalization on
the opioid crisis?” he asked as an example. “Does it actually act as a
substitute so that people can get off opiates for chronic pain? Is there a
positive impact? Or is it a negative impact, because as a result there’s more
opiates in the black market? Is [pot] a gateway? We don’t really have an
answer.”
One delicate balance for Canadian
authorities has been guessing at what kind of pricing will be low enough to
eradicate illicit sales – yet not so low as to entice new users. Canada’s
finance minister, Bill Morneau, recently said the goal is “keeping cannabis out
of the hands of kids and out of the black market. That means keeping the taxes
low so we can actually get rid of the criminals in the system”.
One sign of success will be if Canada not only
discourages underground sales, but converts illicit sellers to the new system,
said Tim Boekhout van Solinge, a Dutch criminologist.
“What I am mainly following … is who
will be the new legal growers, and whether authorities manage to get some of
the illegal growers to become legal growers,” he said.
Legal marijuana for sale at a shop
in Salem, Oregon. Photograph: Andrew Selsky/AP
Each country around the world that
has debated whether to relax cannabis laws has had its own priority in mind:
from generating revenue to discouraging drug cartels. In Canada, the emphasis
has been largely on public health. Cannabis will be sold in fairly plain packaging,
and usually through government-run liquor stores.
“It won’t be like buying Budweiser
or branded alcoholic products,” said Steve Rolles of Transform, a UK drug
policy thinktank. “It’s going to be more like buying pharmaceuticals from a
chemist.”
Still, it’s hard to know whether Canada, or any
similar western country, will be able to stick to that public-health focus, he
said.
“We have concerns … that the lessons from alcohol and
tobacco wouldn’t be learned, and we might see overcommercialized markets in
which profit-making entities would seek to encourage more use and could
encourage risky consumption behaviours,” he said.
So far, Canada has allowed a few
major players to dominate the industry, and their influence remains to be seen,
said US marijuana industry expert Mark Kleiman.
“You don’t want to build up big
vested interests that then resist any change,” he said. “If you have commercial
industry in cannabis, they’re going to end up writing the laws.”
For epidemiologists, Canada will
provide the best-ever data sets on cannabis use.
Colorado’s health results have been encouraging, said Wolk.
But overall, researchers lack solid data about cannabis use. Some key questions
include addiction levels, how cannabis affects psychotic disorders, and effects
on young people, said Israeli scientist Raphael Mechoulam, often called the
“grandfather” of cannabis research.
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“About 10% of the users may be addicted – less than alcohol
or tobacco,” he said. “Some users, who are already prone to schizophrenia, may
get the disease earlier.” He said he is also keeping an eye on whether heavy
use by young people may affect their central nervous system.
Another current Canadian health
debate is how many people will be light, casual cannabis users, and how many
will be heavy users.
The government still must decide how
to approach products that are “very potent” in THC, the psychoactive compound
in cannabis, said Mark Ware, a drug researcher and pain specialist who helped
lead Canada’s federal taskforce advising the new legislation. Black-market
sellers have produced increasingly strong concentrates, he said.
“Those have not been the subject of
studies up until recently, so the question of whether to regulate those, allow
them in whatever context, and then be able to study their impacts on health,
that would be very important,” he said. But “once they’re out there, it’s very
hard to put them back in the box again”.
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