A Brief Note On Dope Regs: Make 'em Now Or Make 'em Never

 As you may know, I spent the last week and change  out on the Left Coast.  Probably the most interesting part was hanging with friends last Saturday at a beach BBQ, discussing the state of medical marijuana.  Half the table owned "green cards" or "compassion club" membership cards, and more than half of those were retired.  Trying to sound knowledgeable, I told them I knew a gal back in Ontario with chronic pain, who got a couple of vials of oil per month from the program.  And she'd told me the price of street weed, which she'd used previously to alleviate pain, had plunged during the last year. They cackled at my simplicity and one little old lady said: "We know that, sonny."

So there you have it.  The elderlies have gone rogue.  So if the Trudeau government plans to get ahead of the issue, they should act soon.  Otherwise Canada will turn into B.C.  Questionably legal pot shops on every corner.  Downtown T.O. smelling sickly sweet with the herb, just like Vancouver.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, other than its pretty clear organized crime has a toe in the business. There's an incentive: open a dispensary and you have a legal reason to be driving around with 30 kilos of weed in your trunk.  And some dispensary owners have responded to $250-a-day municipal fines for being open illegally...by paying $250 a day.  This is suspicious behavior, in my opinion, and not something you would expect from a young hippy couple with shop-keeping ambitions.

And not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that either.  I'm sure there are many west coast bikers who, as they get older, would like to transition into selling a legal product.  Even tough guys dream of an easier life.  But if the federal government wants to shape the market rather than take what is there now,  they should move with more haste than they're currently displaying.   Some leeway seems to have already disappeared.  A too restrictive regime at this point will not supplant the status quo; it will be undermined by it.  Unless Justin Trudeau wants to start busting Vietnam vets, and maybe even his own mother.

Constitutional Right To Smoke The Herb?

On may 14th, 2008, the Montreal compassion center contacted the Quebec human rights commission asking 'if citizens using medical marijuana, with or without Health Canada permits, are entitled to protection under chapter 1.1, sec. 10 of the Quebec charter of rights and freedoms'.

On January 30th, the commission responded in a thorough 28 page written decision that they did indeed benefit from such protection. The implications of this decision on medical marijuana users, in Quebec as well as across Canada, are such that access to medical marijuana is on it's way to becoming a constitutional right.

Love to see how the fellows at Western Standard, who are pro-herb but anti-HRC, will deal with this one.

There's supposed to more information re. this letter at the norml website but, like, umm, there isn't. Maybe someone was supposed to post something but put on some Grateful Dead instead and got totally engrossed by all the lines on their hand.

Margaret Wente Vs. The Truth

Ms. Wente foams up over a recent Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario decision:

But rights slice both ways. Mr. Lane applied for a job for which he clearly wasn't suited, and misstated facts to get it. Now he stands to collect nearly $80,000, and he was only on the job for eight days.

From Donna M. Seale's "Human Rights in the Workplace" Blog:

The tribunal concluded that Mr. Lane had been fired as a result of his disability and the perceptions as to the impact of his disability on the workplace. The adjudicator rejected ADGA's argument that it terminated Mr. Lane simply for failing to live up to the essential requirements of his job during his 90 day probationary period. A further argument by ADGA that it had the right to fire Mr. Lane once it found out he had failed to reveal his disability during the hiring process was also rejected. On this point, the adjudicator pointed to expert evidence adduced at the hearing which detailed that persons with bipolar disorder are very reluctant to reveal their conditions to prospective employers due to the stigmatization of mental illness in the workplace and society in general.

And further:

None of the managers who made the actual decision to terminate Mr. Lane took any steps to assess whether ADGA could accommodate Mr. Lane's disability. In fact, the adjudicator pointed out that the key managers who decided to terminate Mr. Lane were completely ignorant of their legal obligations when dealing with a disabled employee. Given that Mr. Lane had specifically revealed his disability to Ms. Corbett and suggested ways he could be accommodated, the adjudicator was astonished that management had seemingly not contacted its human resource department or legal counsel to determine what it should do to carefully manage the situation. Instead, the ADGA manager principally responsible for the termination believed that the information Ms. Corbett had relayed to him about Mr. Lane's bipolar disorder was irrelevant. He based his determination to dismiss Mr. Lane solely on his personal assessment of whether Mr. Lane was capable of performing the job for which he was hired.

Ezra riffs on Ms. Wente in his post "The "human right" to have manic episodes while testing artillery". Its software, Ezra, artillery software. The guy wasn't tapping live shells with a little red hammer.

As an aside, Ezra severely bungs up the facts of this case as well:

Light up a cigarette in an Ontario restaurant, and you're breaking the law. Light up a marijuana joint, and the restaurateur is breaking the law if he tries to stop you.

But, as The Sun story Ezra links to clearly states in the 2nd line, the customer in question stepped outside to spark up his J of medical mary-jane.

There are none so blind as those who cannot read, I guess.

Incidentally, I have to disagree with the Prince of Pot here:

"I don't see people with insulin bringing their syringes out in the middle of restaurants and giving themselves injections," [Marc] Emery, who is facing a 10-year jail sentence at the U.S.'s behest for selling marijuana seeds, said from his home in B.C., noting that since Gibson was drinking alcohol at the time of the Burlington incident in 2005, he could have ingested the cannabis via an alcoholic tincture that would have been just as effective and more discreet.

More discreet, but not nearly as fast acting. That is why these people are provided with the weed itself rather than some orally administered THC compound. (That and, in the case of cancer patients, the issue of trying to relieve nausea with a medicine that must be swallowed).