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OTTAWA – When it becomes legal Wednesday in Canada to buy marijuana for recreational purposes, rather than on the order of a doctor, the opportunity may be anti-climatic for many Canadians. In Ontario, the most populous province, the first legal cannabis buyers will only be online shoppers.
Like many things in Canada, the legal meaning of marijuana varies from province to province. But there is no doubt that the country's fragmented and ill-prepared system will nevertheless result in significant social, economic and legal changes and challenges. Canada is the first major industrialized economy to embark on this path. His success or failure with legal recreational marijuana will likely become a model – or a warning – for the rest of the world.
It is not often that Canada is a global example. That's why, in the last few weeks, Catherine Porter, our office manager in Toronto; Dan Bilefsky, the Montreal correspondent, and I worked on articles related to Wednesday's legalization.
My work in this case actually goes much further. Under court orders, a previous Conservative government reluctantly set up a limited legal marijuana system for medical purposes and greatly expanded five years ago.
This week's change, however, will eclipse all of this, and it's really part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's political agenda. During the 2015 election campaign, he promised to legalize marijuana by July 1, an impossible deadline for politicians in Canada's unelected Senate.
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This promise was, at best, a minor factor in Trudeau's electoral success. And Canadians have always been mixed in their views on legalization. To address these issues, the government stresses that its legalization is not about encouraging marijuana use among Canadians. Mr. Trudeau and his ministers have instead introduced their legislation as a way to end the ruin of people's lives because of the criminal record of marijuana and as a better way to keep marijuana away from children and to profit from his sale of organized crime.
As I said this week, if all goes as planned, motorcycle gangs and other organized crime groups will be replaced by a new, heavily regulated, multi-billion dollar industry. No one really knows how large the market will be and, of course, the new industry forecasts are emerging. However, the government's statistics calculate that Canadians spend about C $ 5.7 billion in marijuana every year, about 90% of which is through the black market.
In many ways, it often seems like I went back to the late 1990s when I reported on technology startups. The market value of each of Big Weed's three biggest players now exceeds $ 10 billion. But all of these companies report losses in the order of tens of millions of dollars from their current marijuana business for medical purposes. The question is whether some of these companies will know the fate of many high-tech companies after the burst of the Internet bubble, and how much will meet the dreams of their investors.
Drunk driving has long been a crime in Canada. Although the penalties for this have been increased, the government has admitted that the police are lagging behind with respect to, for example, the blood testing systems needed to lay charges. Nor does it appear that the police are doing much to shut down the illegal marijuana shops that have appeared in many cities.
Sentenced students and employees are not new, especially among young Canadians, who are among the largest consumers of jars in the world. But many Canadians worry that legalization will generalize their use. And that adds another difficulty to marijuana conversations between parents and their children.
In Canada, the effects on health have somewhat disappeared. Although we still know a lot, no medical group in Canada approves regular marijuana use. In addition to the harmful effects of smoking, there are concerns about how marijuana is affecting the brains of consumers under the age of 25.
This week, an editorial in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association urged Trudeau to rework legalization if it resulted in increased marijuana use. But the marijuana companies I visited can not justify their huge prices by encouraging the use of their products. I will follow closely to see who wins this conflict.
