VIANARCHRIS
Well-Known Member
Barely illegal: Canada’s vice laws have undergone radical change in the last few years — but it hasn’t necessarily affected how Canadians, and the police, behave. In a two-part package, National Post looks at enforcement (or the lack thereof) around marijuana and prostitution and what it means for the future.
VANCOUVER — If several thousand people gathered in Downtown Vancouver for a mass light-up of cigarettes, it would be assailed by condemnations from the city’s chief medical health officer. If they came to chug moonshine, the gathering would be stopped in its tracks by riot police.
But when a midsize town’s worth of people convene to smoke marijuana in the heart of Vancouver, it is essentially a civic institution.
New prostitution laws may drive sex work underground — but can it stop it?
Four months after the federal government brought into force new laws aimed at ending prostitution in this country, the vast grey market for sexual services in Canada remains, unsurprisingly, intact. From Halifax to Victoria and everywhere in between, sex is still being bought and sold in Canada, according to sex workers, police departments, researchers, and common sense.
But that doesn’t mean the industry itself hasn’t shifted in response to the laws. More importantly, it doesn’t mean the problems that prompted the legal change in the first place have gone away.
On April 20 — the world’s unofficial marijuana holiday — as many as 30,000 people gathered around the Vancouver Art Gallery for the city’s annual “smoke-out.” By mid-afternoon, a crushing throng of people splayed for a block in every direction, all cloaked by a skunky thin haze.
When this event started in the 1990s, a defiant few roamed the event with baskets of joints for sale. Now, it’s among the largest open-air markets in the City of Vancouver: More than 300 vendors, from slickly branded booths selling pot-infused olive oil all the way to dreadlocked men clutching hand-lettered signs reading “Dubes $5.”
There are no permits, since this is technically a protest. There are no sales taxes, since these are all illegal transactions. And there are no age limits, as evidenced by a crowd comprised largely of glassy-eyed high schoolers.
There are plenty of Vancouver Police, of course, but they’re only there to direct traffic and call in paramedics whenever an attendee drops from over-consumption. Most of the time, they can be seen leaning on barricades looking bored.
Just after 5 p.m., an emcee summed up the scene from the 4/20 main stage, “nobody’s this free anywhere on Earth!”
Arlen Redekop photo / PNG staffThousands attend 420 at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC, April 20, 2015.
Cannabis and all its “preparations, derivatives and similar synthetic preparations” are effectively banned in Canada, according to the Chretien-era Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. With a doctor’s note, medical pot users can attain the stuff from an Ottawa-sanctioned catalogue of commercial growers. But for everyone else, get caught with a sandwich baggie of the stuff, and it can technically mean five years in a federal prison.
But in 2015, there are thousands of people who have lived their entire lives without the slightest hint that marijuana is illegal. A joint might still get you arrested in Iqaluit or rural Saskatchewan, but in large corners of this country, it is easier to get high now than it could ever be under legalization.
So easy, in fact, that only hours after 4/20 celebrations had petered, Vancouver City Hall announced that they were finally going to start licensing the city’s vastly expanding collection of marijuana dispensaries – over 80 and counting, more than the number of McDonald’s franchises here.
“The City has no jurisdiction to regulate the sale of marijuana but it does have clear jurisdiction to regulate how and where businesses operate in our city,” it stated in a release.
Arlen Redekop photo / PNG staff420 attendees in Vancouver, April 20, 2015.
Providing pot to legitimately sick people was how Vancouver’s dispensary trade got its start, but that pretense is now thoroughly out the window.
Many Vancouver dispensaries have onsite naturopaths to give out prescriptions to any and all comers, even if they forget to fake a serious illness. Dispensaries have employees stand on the street to hand out promotional cards to draw in new customers, several now have marijuana vending machines and at one, customers can obtain their cannabis by using a claw crane arcade machine.
Despite whatever license Vancouver attaches to dispensaries, this all remains wildly illegal. Yet it persists solely because the Vancouver Police have openly declared they have no intention of doing anything about it.
“If it’s being used in a manner that’s unlikely to impact your neighbours or surrounding community, then it’s unlikely police would become involved,” said Sgt. Randy Fincham, spokesman for the Vancouver Police.
If you get charged with possession in Vancouver, you obviously did something that was over the line
“The tallest nail gets hit first,” he added, and in a city with no shortage of drug problems, there are plenty of nails taller than almost anything marijuana-related.
As a result, any Vancouverite under the age of 30 has basically never known a world in which they could be written up for anything less than a shipping container full of pot.
“If you get charged with possession in Vancouver, you obviously did something that was over the line,” says Nick, a canvasser with Sensible B.C., a pro-legalization lobby group.
A recent example would be Weeds Glass and Gifts, a dispensary that in recent years has rapidly expanded to include 15 locations throughout Coastal B.C. A Weeds location got raided in April, but only after police got word of a 15-year-old allegedly winding up in the hospital after buying some Weeds edibles.
Similarly laissez-faire attitudes have taken hold in virtually every other major Canadian city. The website WeBeHigh.org tracks tolerance for marijuana around the world, and Toronto, Sudbury and Montreal are all in the “virtually legal” category, with the likes of Whitehorse, Regina and St. John’s not far behind.
One anonymous Whitehorse resident on WeBeHigh reported being pulled over by an RCMP cruiser while concurrently speeding, rolling through a stop sign and smoking a joint. Despite the tripartite of crimes, they were simply “told to keep the window down for the drive home.”
Just across the 49th parallel from Vancouver, of course, marijuana is legal. Last year, Washington State became one of the few places on earth to tax and regulate recreational cannabis.
Despite this, it has not spurred the wave of Canadian pot tourists that one might expect. Washington pot is more expensive, less diverse and, ironically, harder to obtain.
Last summer, when virtually every week yielded a new dispensary in Seattle, the city’s first recreational pot store, Cannabis City, had to turn away customers after it ran out of stock in only three days.
Eighty years ago, the roles were reversed.
During the 1930s, it was Seattle where a popular drug — alcohol — was illegal. Vancouver, meanwhile, was thoroughly “wet” after its own experiment with temperance fizzled out in 1921.
Despite this, Seattle was a far, far easier place to get drunk. In fact, say prohibition historians, the city has never again been as easy a place to get a drink than it was during the lawless 1930s.
“Seattle was virtually an open city,” said Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, writing in an email to the National Post. Vancouver, by contrast, “actually had laws that regulated liquor sale and consumption.”
Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, says that during Prohibition “you could come to Seattle, step off your train, and a few steps down the road you could probably enjoy a drink.”
There is a dark side to Vancouver’s open-armed acceptance of pot, of course. Vancouver’s 4/20 rally, for one, sent 64 people to hospital with symptoms ranging from nausea to vomiting.
Seven per cent of drivers injured in B.C. car crashes had consumed pot only hours earlier, according to a recent report by the British Columbia Medical Journal. Two years ago, pot was cited in the derailment of a B.C. train.
VANCOUVER — If several thousand people gathered in Downtown Vancouver for a mass light-up of cigarettes, it would be assailed by condemnations from the city’s chief medical health officer. If they came to chug moonshine, the gathering would be stopped in its tracks by riot police.
But when a midsize town’s worth of people convene to smoke marijuana in the heart of Vancouver, it is essentially a civic institution.
New prostitution laws may drive sex work underground — but can it stop it?
Four months after the federal government brought into force new laws aimed at ending prostitution in this country, the vast grey market for sexual services in Canada remains, unsurprisingly, intact. From Halifax to Victoria and everywhere in between, sex is still being bought and sold in Canada, according to sex workers, police departments, researchers, and common sense.
But that doesn’t mean the industry itself hasn’t shifted in response to the laws. More importantly, it doesn’t mean the problems that prompted the legal change in the first place have gone away.
On April 20 — the world’s unofficial marijuana holiday — as many as 30,000 people gathered around the Vancouver Art Gallery for the city’s annual “smoke-out.” By mid-afternoon, a crushing throng of people splayed for a block in every direction, all cloaked by a skunky thin haze.
When this event started in the 1990s, a defiant few roamed the event with baskets of joints for sale. Now, it’s among the largest open-air markets in the City of Vancouver: More than 300 vendors, from slickly branded booths selling pot-infused olive oil all the way to dreadlocked men clutching hand-lettered signs reading “Dubes $5.”
There are no permits, since this is technically a protest. There are no sales taxes, since these are all illegal transactions. And there are no age limits, as evidenced by a crowd comprised largely of glassy-eyed high schoolers.
There are plenty of Vancouver Police, of course, but they’re only there to direct traffic and call in paramedics whenever an attendee drops from over-consumption. Most of the time, they can be seen leaning on barricades looking bored.
Just after 5 p.m., an emcee summed up the scene from the 4/20 main stage, “nobody’s this free anywhere on Earth!”
Arlen Redekop photo / PNG staffThousands attend 420 at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC, April 20, 2015.
Cannabis and all its “preparations, derivatives and similar synthetic preparations” are effectively banned in Canada, according to the Chretien-era Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. With a doctor’s note, medical pot users can attain the stuff from an Ottawa-sanctioned catalogue of commercial growers. But for everyone else, get caught with a sandwich baggie of the stuff, and it can technically mean five years in a federal prison.
But in 2015, there are thousands of people who have lived their entire lives without the slightest hint that marijuana is illegal. A joint might still get you arrested in Iqaluit or rural Saskatchewan, but in large corners of this country, it is easier to get high now than it could ever be under legalization.
So easy, in fact, that only hours after 4/20 celebrations had petered, Vancouver City Hall announced that they were finally going to start licensing the city’s vastly expanding collection of marijuana dispensaries – over 80 and counting, more than the number of McDonald’s franchises here.
“The City has no jurisdiction to regulate the sale of marijuana but it does have clear jurisdiction to regulate how and where businesses operate in our city,” it stated in a release.
Arlen Redekop photo / PNG staff420 attendees in Vancouver, April 20, 2015.
Providing pot to legitimately sick people was how Vancouver’s dispensary trade got its start, but that pretense is now thoroughly out the window.
Many Vancouver dispensaries have onsite naturopaths to give out prescriptions to any and all comers, even if they forget to fake a serious illness. Dispensaries have employees stand on the street to hand out promotional cards to draw in new customers, several now have marijuana vending machines and at one, customers can obtain their cannabis by using a claw crane arcade machine.
Despite whatever license Vancouver attaches to dispensaries, this all remains wildly illegal. Yet it persists solely because the Vancouver Police have openly declared they have no intention of doing anything about it.
“If it’s being used in a manner that’s unlikely to impact your neighbours or surrounding community, then it’s unlikely police would become involved,” said Sgt. Randy Fincham, spokesman for the Vancouver Police.
If you get charged with possession in Vancouver, you obviously did something that was over the line
“The tallest nail gets hit first,” he added, and in a city with no shortage of drug problems, there are plenty of nails taller than almost anything marijuana-related.
As a result, any Vancouverite under the age of 30 has basically never known a world in which they could be written up for anything less than a shipping container full of pot.
“If you get charged with possession in Vancouver, you obviously did something that was over the line,” says Nick, a canvasser with Sensible B.C., a pro-legalization lobby group.
A recent example would be Weeds Glass and Gifts, a dispensary that in recent years has rapidly expanded to include 15 locations throughout Coastal B.C. A Weeds location got raided in April, but only after police got word of a 15-year-old allegedly winding up in the hospital after buying some Weeds edibles.
Similarly laissez-faire attitudes have taken hold in virtually every other major Canadian city. The website WeBeHigh.org tracks tolerance for marijuana around the world, and Toronto, Sudbury and Montreal are all in the “virtually legal” category, with the likes of Whitehorse, Regina and St. John’s not far behind.
One anonymous Whitehorse resident on WeBeHigh reported being pulled over by an RCMP cruiser while concurrently speeding, rolling through a stop sign and smoking a joint. Despite the tripartite of crimes, they were simply “told to keep the window down for the drive home.”
Just across the 49th parallel from Vancouver, of course, marijuana is legal. Last year, Washington State became one of the few places on earth to tax and regulate recreational cannabis.
Despite this, it has not spurred the wave of Canadian pot tourists that one might expect. Washington pot is more expensive, less diverse and, ironically, harder to obtain.
Last summer, when virtually every week yielded a new dispensary in Seattle, the city’s first recreational pot store, Cannabis City, had to turn away customers after it ran out of stock in only three days.
Eighty years ago, the roles were reversed.
During the 1930s, it was Seattle where a popular drug — alcohol — was illegal. Vancouver, meanwhile, was thoroughly “wet” after its own experiment with temperance fizzled out in 1921.
Despite this, Seattle was a far, far easier place to get drunk. In fact, say prohibition historians, the city has never again been as easy a place to get a drink than it was during the lawless 1930s.
“Seattle was virtually an open city,” said Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, writing in an email to the National Post. Vancouver, by contrast, “actually had laws that regulated liquor sale and consumption.”
Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, says that during Prohibition “you could come to Seattle, step off your train, and a few steps down the road you could probably enjoy a drink.”
There is a dark side to Vancouver’s open-armed acceptance of pot, of course. Vancouver’s 4/20 rally, for one, sent 64 people to hospital with symptoms ranging from nausea to vomiting.
Seven per cent of drivers injured in B.C. car crashes had consumed pot only hours earlier, according to a recent report by the British Columbia Medical Journal. Two years ago, pot was cited in the derailment of a B.C. train.
Marijuana is just not the same benign substance that we knew about in the 60s
Of all the recreational drugs, marijuana is the least likely to kill its users from an overdose, but studies are emerging showing that it leaves teenagers with permanently damaged memory — a phenomenon that many young British Columbians have seen firsthand. And just like cigarettes, of course, bong hits and doobies still fill the lungs with tar.
“Marijuana is just not the same benign substance that we knew about in the 60s,” a spokesperson for Vancouver Coastal Health told Global News last year.
But at a time when tax-free, storefront pot is now available virtually within walking distance of any corner of the city, it’s clear that Vancouver — with other cities quickly following suit — are in the midst of a marijuana golden age.
Of all the recreational drugs, marijuana is the least likely to kill its users from an overdose, but studies are emerging showing that it leaves teenagers with permanently damaged memory — a phenomenon that many young British Columbians have seen firsthand. And just like cigarettes, of course, bong hits and doobies still fill the lungs with tar.
“Marijuana is just not the same benign substance that we knew about in the 60s,” a spokesperson for Vancouver Coastal Health told Global News last year.
But at a time when tax-free, storefront pot is now available virtually within walking distance of any corner of the city, it’s clear that Vancouver — with other cities quickly following suit — are in the midst of a marijuana golden age.
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