Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2022

Too many cannabis retailers? “… a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Steve Lafleur points out that the temporary surplus of cannabis stores will inevitably self-correct, as most retail situations tend to do on their own without needing the “helpful” hand of government to intervene:

Lately there has been a moral panic brewing in Toronto about the number of marijuana stores in Toronto. Take this New York Times article, for example, which captures the mood with the quotes from various Torontonians. Or this BlogTO piece. And here is a link to a story about two city councilors (including my own) pushing for a moratorium on new pot shops.

At least on its face, the panic hasn’t been about the availability of cannabis products or any kind of (unsupported) claims about pot shops attracting crime. Rather, the concern is that there is simply an unsustainable number of shops that may be cannibalizing other retail opportunities. So a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market.

What could possibly go wrong?

The boom in pot shops is real. Legal marijuana retailing is a new phenomenon, and there has been a gold rush in the sector. This was first evident in financial markets during the 2018-19 weed stock boom (which went bust) as investors sought to capitalize on the rollout of legal marijuana sales in Canada. There are now nearly 2,000 pot shops in Ontario, and it’s not hard to find two on the same block. People aren’t wrong to point out that there has been a rapid buildout of marijuana retailers. Hence the push by City Council and now the Ontario Liberal Party, to restrict clustering of pot shops.

To be sure, new trends can push out old trends. And this can be frustrating. For instance, one insidious trend recently replaced two of my two favourite hole-in-the-wall restaurants: poke bowls. The trendy Hawaiian rice bowls have taken cities by storm. Businesses, understandably, want to capitalize on the trend. If people want it, businesses will sell it.

Trends can create dislocations. No one knows in advance how many poke restaurants — or pot shops — the market will bear, where they should locate, or what their operating hours should be. But through a process of trial and error, retailers and consumers will figure this out. And if it is just a flash in the pan trend, many will fail.

But that’s okay. That’s just the creative destruction of the market at work. It’s not always pretty, but it’s how we get new products and services. It’s a process. Sometimes the market rewards annoying things. But trying any effort to plan these things in a way that avoids over-saturation of short-lived trendy businesses would be rife with unintended consequences.

December 30, 2019

QotD: Microbrew beer

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Hops, of course, add the bitterness we have come to expect in beer (except drinkers of Molson Golden, who have come to expect almost no taste at all), and they also act as a preservative.

Risk-taking microbreweries these days are known to replace or supplement hops with such oddities as heather, bog myrtle, ginseng, and hemp. As hops are related (by marriage) to cannabis — that other great medicinal herb — we shouldn’t be surprised to encounter hemp beer, and indeed you can usually find it on tap in Toronto at C’est What down on Front Street. It’s not bad either, once you get it lit, which is the hard part.

Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.

July 24, 2019

Wait, you mean there might be a downside to cannabis legalization?

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a libertarian of long standing, I’m on the record as being in favour of legalizing cannabis since long before it was cool (geeky and perpetually uncool libertarians probably helped keep it from being cool for at least a few years longer). I’m not enthused to hear that we may have been undersold on the risks of cannabis use … not that the government didn’t try telling is it was deadly, deadly poison (they did, repeatedly, and at great length), but they institutionalized the role of the boy who cried wolf, and every illegal narcotic got basically the same description. I’m actually not kidding here: the first health class I got in middle school included a lecture and a pamphlet on the dangers of pot; the second class covered the dangers of cocaine; the third warned against LSD; and so on … but they used a copy/paste to discuss the physical and mental risks of the different drugs, and they all read the same way. All those evil drugs are evil, bad, and rot your brain. Knowing that the pothead (“Hi, Gary!”) at the back of the class hadn’t suddenly had a psychotic break and tried to fly off the top of the school was the first hint that we were being oversold on the real world risks of (some) illegal drug use. The declared fact that some illegal narcotics actually are deadly, deadly poison ran up against the observed fact that a significant majority of people over the age of fifteen had tried cannabis and found it somewhat less scary than advertised.

Along with the beginnings of doubt that the government was being honest with us, and the clear understanding that even if using drugs wasn’t as dangerous as we were told, we shared a growing awareness that being caught with drugs by the police was significantly more dangerous and possibly deadly. Officer Friendly would shoot you down like a mad dog if he thought you were one’o’them drug-crazed hippies. It certainly changed the social dynamics of any interaction with Officer Friendly’s fellow heavily armed co-workers…

In the National Post, Barbara Kay suggests that not all the dangers of cannabis use were mere government propaganda:

Some years ago, in conversation with his wife, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in mentally ill criminals, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson observed that the perpetrator of a recent violent crime had been high at the time, and had smoked pot regularly all his life. Her response — “Yeah, they all do” — jolted him. The result was his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.

Much of the referenced material in Berenson’s book had not yet been published a decade ago. But more recent studies only confirm what a few intrepid researchers were already warning about then.

Indeed, as I noted in a 2008 column, the head of the Medical research Council in the U.K., Professor Colin Blakemore, who in 1997 had been the moral authority behind a pot-legalization campaign, unequivocally reversed his pot-friendly stance in 2007, stating: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

If you haven’t energy for a whole book, but would invest in 16 pages on the subject, you will be well rewarded by Steven Malanga’s in-depth article, “The Marijuana Delusion,” in City Journal‘s June issue. Here you will find debunked the blithe claim, still received as gospel by progressives and libertarians, that pot is virtually harmless and even therapeutic.

Unlike marijuana, real medications are deeply researched before coming on the market, and may attest to proven benefits, but are obligated to admit potential harms. Is pot a medicinal drug or a placebo? Nobody really knows. One may argue “who cares, as long as it works” (anecdotally I hear that pot works, and also that it doesn’t work), but that isn’t the point, since the legalization movement made medical claims for pot in order to bring the public onside politically. There was no will on the movement’s side to discover even radically fortified pot’s downsides.

The knowledge was out there for those interested. In 1987 a study of nearly 50,000 Swedish military conscripts followed for drug use over 15 years found that frequent pot use in teenhood was linked to a six-fold risk of schizophrenia as compared with non-usage. A 2004 meta-analysis of studies on pot use came to a similar conclusion. These studies, and others, are suggestive that heavy marijuana consumption, particularly in youth, may cause serious mental health problems. Yes, it is possible that the link isn’t entirely causal; people with mental health issues may be more likely to use marijuana heavily. But at the very least, this ought to be an issue of ongoing concern, particularly now that marijuana is legal in Canada and in an increasing number of U.S. states.

May 1, 2019

To the surprise of nobody, Ontario’s cannabis stores are still struggling

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Ontario government created a tightly restricted retail market regime for newly legal cannabis sellers, with a tiny number of licenses issued and highly bureaucratic “safeguards” for the retailers’ guidance and control. The city of Toronto, for example, with a population in the 2.7 million range, was allocated a whopping five stores. Only one of those stores was allowed to open on the first day of legal retail sales, and today there are three in operation, despite penalties and potential loss of licenses at stake for those who haven’t opened yet. The chorus of complaints from would-be customers has not diminished much, if at all since day one:

With legalization day long come and gone (and the euphoria of being able to spark a joint in public gone with it), the turtle-paced roll-out of Toronto’s weed retail scene goes to show the government and the OCS have some work to do before purchasing legal weed can be completely glitch-free (and lineup free, too).

Here are a few of the lows of getting high, courtesy of Toronto weed stores since buying pot became legal.

Weed prices are up
According to Statistics Canada, prices for weed have steadily been on the up and up since legalization last year.

While Nova Cannabis is trying to tackle its biggest competitor (illicit weed stores) with Black Market Buster deals, people who are buying their cannabis from the OCS are now paying an average of about $9.99 per gram—that’s roughly $3 more than those buying their bud from illegal stores.

Black market weed is still thriving
There’s still around 20 illegal dispensaries operating in the city, and at least 100 illegal marijuana delivery services. Why? See above: unlicensed weed stores are significantly cheaper than the legal ones, and loopholes in the city’s laws allow them to operate pretty much undisturbed, save for the occasional raids.

[…]

OCS packaging
Aside from the fact every product coming out of the OCS comes triple-wrapped in excessive, sometimes non-recyclable polypropylene packaging, the containers are just plain confusing.

Lack of packaging standards means your order comes in all shapes and sizes, regardless of whether you’re getting bud or pre-rolled joints, which is as confusing for buyers as it is for those behind the counter.

And that doesn’t even include the even louder chorus of complaints about the quality of the legal product…

April 29, 2019

Cannabis stores struggling against cheaper black market weed outlets

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:

How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?

How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?

Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.

It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.

So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.

Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.

You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.

It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.

The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.

“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.

March 5, 2019

It’s almost as if we elected the actor, but really wanted the character he’d played on TV instead

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells calls Justin Trudeau an imposter:

… the problem for Trudeau — who came to power promising a new era of transparency — is that this phoniness is a trait he shows all too often.

In 2016, when the Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had attended a Vancouver fundraiser attended by Chinese billionaires — one of whom promptly donated money to the private Montreal foundation named for Trudeau’s father — the Liberal Party of Canada said no government business is discussed at such events. Trudeau later admitted they asked about policy and he talked about jobs.

Legalizing cannabis is one of the signature achievements of this government. But Trudeau has never been able to say he did it so affluent consumers could more readily get high. Instead, he had everyone in his government swear the goal was to drain the black market and keep the stuff out of the hands of teenagers. Neither goal has come anywhere close to being reached. Judged by the standards of a bake-off for the children of privilege, legalization has been a great success. Judged by the standards the Prime Minister claims, it’s a mess. The operating assumption seems to be that we’re simply supposed to read between the lines — that we’ll understand that when Trudeau speaks he is not to be taken seriously.

[…]

I could keep picking examples of Trudeau acting one way and talking another (climate change, Indigenous reconciliation) until the cows come home. But at some point you’d say, with reason, that this is not exactly innovative behaviour for an elected politician. But what’s so damaging about the SNC-Lavalin affair is that, in private, there’s no evidence Trudeau governs as the future-looking sophisticate he plays on TV.

[…]

There’s a stack of assumptions behind that strategy as long as your arm: that SNC does work so good it could never be replaced, that a trial would wreck it, that a mere judge couldn’t possibly weigh the company’s social contribution in determining its legal liability. And the biggest assumption of them all is that all of this is so obvious, none of it needed explaining in two years of feverish PMO activity. Not to the attorney general — she got earfuls of explanation, delivered in shifts working overtime, for months after she made what Trudeau felt was the wrong decision. And not to you and me. Trudeau never thought you and I deserved to know why he was trying to keep SNC out of a trial court. This makes a mockery of a simple idea: the consent of the governed.

It turns out that behind the curtain, the wizard from the woke future of politics was indulging the oldest of old-fashioned industrial policy. Navdeep Bains, the so-called innovation minister, might as well legally change his name to C.D. Howe for all the innovation going on here.

As for Wilson-Raybould’s diversity of background and perspective, it turned out to be inconvenient. She didn’t buy into a cozy meeting of minds along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor. And the meeting of minds was what really mattered. Because it’s 2019.

The day got worse for Trudeau, as another cabinet minister resigned rather than stick around for the deck chairs to start floating away:

October 25, 2018

Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!

I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.

I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!

It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.

The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.

“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)

Of course, not everyone is impressed:

October 19, 2018

Ontario’s lack of retail cannabis stores – “What have they been smoking at Queen’s Park?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Financial Post, William Watson points out the weirdness of Ontario’s decision to delay the opening of legal cannabis stores until next Spring:

For several years now, dozens of dispensaries have been operating quite openly. (They call themselves dispensaries to further the narrative that, like your grandmother’s rye, marijuana is for medicinal purposes.) Only now, with pot use becoming legal, are these dispensaries being shut down — although Toronto’s chief of police says not right away, as he doesn’t have [the] person power to do it all at once.

If they don’t shut down, they may forfeit their chance at a licence to sell pot legally once licensed retail operations do finally start in the province on (when else?) April 1st of next year — 166 days after legalization. Why would they not be granted a licence? Not because they trafficked in marijuana when its use was strictly illegal, if seldom prosecuted. But because they continued to traffic in marijuana after it became legal but before the government gave them a licence, an offence that will be prosecuted slowly, if at all.

Silly me. I thought marijuana legalization would simply say that after a certain date the police wouldn’t arrest you for having such-and-such an amount of marijuana in your possession. End of story.

[…]

Countrywide, as the Financial Post’s Vanmala Subramaniam recently reported, a big roadblock to timely legal supply has been the need to seal products with federal excise revenue stamps. But there’s only one supplier and the stamps come without adhesive. Stamps! In 2018!

In American movies of the 1930s and 1940s, moonshiners and bootleggers waged war against “revenuers,” federal agents charged with levying excise taxes on booze. It seems the revenuers have now taken charge of Canada’s marijuana industry. You might plausibly argue that the former illegal market operated in the interests of consumers. There seems little doubt the new legal market will operate in the interest of governments, their unions and their revenue departments.

When cops did enforce the country’s no-toking laws, they could plausibly tell themselves they were doing it to protect young people and other innocents. Now when they enforce the laws they’re doing it to protect legally privileged producers against producers who find themselves offside with often arbitrary licensing laws. Protecting kids was one thing. Protecting cartels is quite another.

October 18, 2018

Canada legalizes cannabis … then takes the rest of the week off

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

What do you know? Justin Trudeau actually followed through on his promise to legalize marijuana across the country! Of all his election promises, that’s probably the one that most voters expected him to ditch as soon as the votes were counted, yet here we are in the second country in the world to legalize the stuff. So, everyone not here in Canuckistan, we’ll probably be back sometime next week as we’ve got a lot of mellowing to get done…

Oh, you want a blog post? Duuuude, just take another hit.

Oh, okay, here ya go:

An Abacus Data poll released this week suggests Canadians are ready for marijuana legalization even if their governments might not be: Strong majorities of respondents in every age group and in every region said they could support or at least “accept” the framework that goes into effect Oct. 17. Even 54 per cent of Conservative voters said they could support or accept legal weed.

[…]

The resistance continues, certainly. In a special meeting on Tuesday, just days before Ontario’s municipal elections, City Council in Markham, Ont., passed a bylaw restricting marijuana smoking to private residences. It had earlier voted 12-1 in favour of “opting out” of storefront retail, as allowed for under provincial regulations.

“When you’re taking your grandmother down the street for a walk, (we don’t want you) having to be exposed to a number of individuals potentially at a street corner participating in it,” says Mayor Frank Scarpitti.

Richmond, B.C., is another refusenik jurisdiction. Mayor Malcolm Brodie notes the city took a much harsher approach than neighbouring Vancouver to the proliferation of illegal dispensaries, throwing the book at the only one that attempted to open. And he credits the provincial government with listening to municipalities’ concerns and allowing them to go their own ways

Indeed, considering the Reefer Madness-level debate, it seems somewhat remarkable how peacefully this sea change is washing over the country — and it seems the patchwork of provincial and municipal rules, much derided by Conservatives, is partly to credit for that.

A quick run-down of the new rules.

Thanks to time zones, the first legal sale of marijuana happened in Newfoundland:

One of the first customers to buy legal recreational cannabis in Canada says he has no intention of smoking, vaping or otherwise consuming the gram of weed he bought at a store in St. John’s.

Ian Power, who was first in line at one of several stores in the country’s easternmost province that opened just after midnight local time, says he plans to frame his purchase.

Hundreds of customers were lined up around the block at the private store on Water Street, the main commercial drag in the Newfoundland and Labrador capital, by the time the clock struck midnight.

A festive atmosphere broke out, with some customers lighting up on the sidewalk and motorists honking their horns in support as they drove by the crowd.

Cannabis NL expected 22 stores to open on Oct. 17, but not all opted to open in the middle of the night to commemorate the event.

Licensed marijuana producer Canopy Growth Corp. opened the Tweed-branded store in St. John’s at the late hour, while retailer Loblaw Companies Ltd. planned to start selling cannabis at its 10 locations at 9 a.m.

October 13, 2018

On the cusp of legalization

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh finally gets to take a victory lap:

On Thursday the marijuana company Sundial Growers held a ribbon-cutting for its new grow-op in the Alberta town of Olds. I am not sure whether “grow-op” is an acceptable word in the new setting of giant legal cannabis cultivation facilities, but let’s stick with it, if only to call attention to the extraordinariness of what we are witnessing this month in Canada. The launch was held in a small office, and Sundial only received its cultivation licence from Health Canada on Sept. 14, but the first fruits of its pot business are already budding in a room nearby.

The company intends to have a 500,000-square-foot growing facility built in 2019, but its press release points out that it can add more space quickly. I might have been stopped short by the spectacle of the mayor and the (United Conservative) MLA rejoicing as a CEO explained the details of his craft weed business and remarked on plans for a “Sweet Jesus” varietal. But what really struck me is something the mayor said: When the company is up and fully running, he observed, it is going to hire 500 people in Olds, becoming the town’s largest single employer. Olds is, of course, home to Olds College, a century-old agriculture and food research institute: this was a major reason for the new marijuana industry to locate there.

How long ago would this scene — being played, as it is, in a naturally conservative part of the Alberta hinterland — have seemed like science fiction or parody? The Sundial facility is dwarfed by the 800,000-square-foot Aurora Sky factory, strategically located near Edmonton’s awkwardly remote international airport in the suburb of Nisku. Everyone who has ever tried to flee Edmonton or come to it through that airport has complained about its preposterous distance from the capital’s downtown, but this turns out to have an unimagined advantage. You can build a spacious agri-pharmaceutical facility at low cost practically next to the runway, establish an ultra-secure, ultra-short supply chain, and presto hemp-o: overnight response to a worldwide medical market for cannabis products becomes a snap.

I am someone who is entitled to a victory lap for having insisted years ago that we were not, as a country, properly imagining the dimensions of a legally unleashed cannabis industry. We had no idea how much economic activity was being annihilated by a perverse, illogical feature of criminal law. Maybe it is time, as Finally Doing The Obvious Thing Day nears, for me to take that victory lap.

September 29, 2018

The Ontario government’s amazingly sensible approach to legal cannabis

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley expresses what a lot of surprised people must be feeling after Premier Doug Ford’s government introduced startlingly mature and sensible rules for the distribution and sale of cannabis products in the province after the federal government’s legalization is enacted:

The Ontario government tabled its cannabis retail framework in the legislature on Thursday, and it only further repudiates the Frightened Communist model envisioned by the Liberals. The government will sell pot online, as before, and will maintain a monopoly on wholesaling. But the rest will be up to the private sector, under the control of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. As it stands, there won’t even be a cap on the number of licences; a government official said Thursday they expect 500 to 1,000 applications right off the bat.

In response, OPSEU president Smokey Thomas beamed out a furious press release on behalf of his spurned members — er, sorry, on behalf of Ontario’s “municipalities and communities.”

“Unlimited stores and unlimited places to smoke will cause unlimited problems,” Thomas averred. “It’s outrageous. We’re going to become the wild west of cannabis and Sheriff Doug Ford is going to skip town, leaving communities and municipalities holding the dime bag.”

Thomas predicted Premier Ford would hand out retail pot licences to “Conservative insiders” and “corporate donors.” (Corporate donations are illegal.) He accused Ford of funnelling what by rights should be public profits into “private pockets.”

“If Ontario’s finances are truly as bad as Ford wants us to believe, why is he giving away the millions, maybe even billions, in revenue we’d get if cannabis sales were public?” he asked.

Does the government make money on cigarettes? On alcohol sold in bars and restaurants, at privately run LCBO agency stores and, of late, in supermarkets? Of course it does. Scads of it.

So it’s all quite ridiculous, as OPSEU press releases tend to be. But Thomas is not wrong when he argues the new approach is remarkably permissive. Perhaps most notably, whereas the Liberals’ proposed rules banned using marijuana in public, the PCs’ would allow you to smoke or vape it anywhere you can tobacco (though not in cars or boats). But it’s far less permissive than one might expect in other ways as well.

September 28, 2018

Ontario government lays out the path to a fully legal cannabis market

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There is going to be a gap between the federal legalization date next month and the beginning of legal sales from brick-and-mortar stores in Ontario in April:

With the legalization of recreational marijuana around the corner, the Ontario government has finally answered some of the most burning questions about where residents can officially buy and smoke pot.

A day before new pot legislation is set to be tabled, The PC government announced earlier today that starting Oct. 17, weed will be up for sale at private retail pot shops by April next year.

Doing away with the cap on the number of licensed cannabis stores in the province, the government is officially taking a free-market approach to what would previously have been an LCBO monopoly under the Liberal provincial government.

[…]

Until April, cannabis will be sold exclusively online, distributed through federal wholesalers and the government’s Ontario Cannabis Store.

The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario will be in charge of regulating the marketplace, including granting and revoking pot shop licenses.

Store owners will need to apply for a retail-operator license as well as a retail store authorization for every location they open, which will be limited to a set number, to prevent possible over-expansion, Walmart-style.

There will also be restrictions for federal cannabis growers, who will only be able to hold “a single retail license at a single production site located in Ontario,” said Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney.

All currently existing pot stores who continuing to operate illegally after Oct. 17 will lose their right to ever apply for a license in the future, as will stores who have a history of dealing with organized crime and providing pot to minors.

Ontario’s new government agency, the Ontario Cannabis Retail Corp., will be in charge of handling online cannabis sales as well as wholesaling to private stores, who will potentially run the gamut from local pot shops to huge cannabis corporations.

There will be a minimum distance requirement between pot shops and schools set up in the future.

Any Ontario municipalities who don’t want pot shops on their turf — like Norfolk County in Southwestern Ontario, the first to vote no on cannabis storefronts — will have to opt out officially by Jan. 22, 2019, which they were previously barred from doing.

August 14, 2018

Ontario embraces online sales for marijuana, with retail stores to follow in 2019

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the Ontario government’s surprisingly sensible approach to phasing in retail sales of cannabis over the next eight months:

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government called a brief truce in its multi-front war with the federal Liberals on Monday to give one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature policies a major boost: as had been widely rumoured, the Tories will scrap the previous Liberal government’s tentative public marijuana retail scheme and instead hand out licenses to the private sector.

How many licenses and what kinds of stores are just two of many unresolved details. The government says it will consult widely to determine how best to proceed, with a target opening date for licensed brick-and-mortar stores of April 1, 2019 (with publicly run online sales to commence in October). But it seems safe to hope the cap, if any, will be significantly higher than the previous government’s laughably timid 150.

Thanks to Toronto’s reluctantly laissez-faire approach to illegal storefront (nudge-wink) “medical” marijuana “dispensaries,” we know 150 might not even satisfy a free market in the country’s largest city. Trudeau has always said the goal of legalization was to smash the illegal market and plunk down a legal one in its place. The Ontario Liberals’ plan seemed almost tailor-made to fail in that endeavour.

There remains ample room for the new government to screw this up. But if it gets pricing and regulation and enforcement halfway right, the country’s most populous province should now be well placed to give legalization a good shot at achieving what proponents have always said it should — which is, basically, to make it like booze. Of course kids still get their hands on booze, but at least it’s a bit of a chore. And at least when kids get drunk, they’re not drinking moonshine.

The need to claim the retail market from the existing extra-legal networks will hinge on quality, availability and (especially) the prices that the province sets. Price it too high (pun unintentional), and the legal market will not take over distribution and sales from the black market. Provide poor quality and get the same results. Restrict sales too stringently, and watch the profits go back to the current dealers … who are not noted for their sensibilities about selling drugs to the under-aged.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to ponder why they’re going in this direction. Fedeli and Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney were at great pains Monday to stress their primary concern was the children.

“First and foremost, we want to protect our kids,” said Mulroney. “There will be no compromise, no expense spared, to ensure that our kids will be protected following the legalization of the drug.”

“Under no circumstances — none — will we tolerate anybody sharing, selling or otherwise providing cannabis to anybody under the age of 19,” said Mulroney. Fedeli vowed that even a single sale to a minor would void a retailer’s license.

Yet, let’s be honest, kids well under the age of 19 can already get cannabis and other illicit drugs — more so in urban and suburban areas, but it’s hard to imagine that legalizing cannabis for 19-plus customers somehow magically renders the under-19s uninterested in getting access, too.

May 6, 2018

Justin Trudeau may (or may not) delay the legalization date for marijuana

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s just another day in Liberal Ottawa, as the Prime Minister briefly appears to wobble on the one election promise he’s close to fulfilling before the next election cycle begins. Colby Cosh manfully avoids a few drug-related jokes while recounting the latest “goffe” (as Gary Johnson actually said):

The legislative scenes preceding the three-quarters-legalization of marijuana in Canada continue to have an unreal, hallucinatory quality for which I am determined not to use the obvious metaphor. On Tuesday the Senate Aboriginal Peoples Committee presented the government with a demand that its vague summer legalization deadline be delayed by “up to one year” because Indigenous groups were not consulted closely enough on the effects of making it lawful to have a plant.

The prime minister, after some hemming and hawing, reiterated that legalization will happen on time, whatever the particular date happens to end up being. This will certainly come as a relief to the people who have poured zillions of dollars into a new horticultural and retail industry on the premise that it would, y’know, exist. Seeing how many of them are former Conservative politicians, perhaps they can be persuaded to buy a novena or two for a Liberal government that has — despite the unique moral pressure that Indigenous Canadians are capable of exercising, and in arguable defiance of its own history — decided to stick to an electoral promise.

Even as it is, the promise is taking most of the life of a Parliament to fulfill. Perhaps the conscience of Justin Trudeau, the little cartoon angel that perches on his shoulder and whispers progressive maxims in his ear, would have preferred to relent and toe the legalization deadline forward a year. Unfortunately, on the list of Trudeau’s political problems, “not being able to get stuff done in Canada” ranks alarmingly high at the moment.

In an ideal world, going along with the Senate committee and inflicting a wrestler’s piledriver on the economy for the sake of a principle might have been tempting. May 2018 is, alas, not really the time to be asking for that. It is precisely because so many interest groups and subnational governments have had to be negotiated with and appeased that pot legalization has taken so long — long enough that another election is in sight, with other elements of the Liberal program already in smithereens by the wayside.

January 13, 2018

Everyone You Love Did Drugs

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 12 Jan 2018

It turns out that a lot of accomplished, well-respected historical figures did drugs. From Winston Churchill taking amphetamines to Thomas Edison lacing his wine with cocaine, not everyone who uses narcotics is a hopeless basket case living in a dumpster. While some drug users spiral into addiction and crime, others go on to become president. It’s time to debunk the age old stereotypes of the back alley dangerous dealer or the lazy stoner when, according to the National Survey on Drug Use, roughly half of all Americans have tried an illegal drug.

In the latest “Mostly Weekly” host Andrew Heaton breaks down the cartoonish Drug Warrior portrayal of drugs by showing some of the beloved historical figures who used them.

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