I’m the only person I know who flunked a medical marijuana test. Now all my friends are laughing at me.
A while back, I tried
some pot in Colorado, for therapeutic purposes. I liked the result. It
did wonders for my disposition, and also for my sleep. So I decided to
apply for a medical prescription in Canada. I thought it would be pretty
easy. You even get one via Skype.
My family doctor was happy to help me.
(She doesn’t think I’m the dope fiend type.) She sent me to one of those
referral clinics that are springing up like weeds. They screen you,
give you a prescription and hook you up with a licensed grow-op, which
sends you your medicine in the mail.
Soon
I was in a waiting room filling out a bunch of forms. There were lots
of boxes you could tick off – stress, anxiety, sleeping problems, aches
and pains, frequent feelings of utter and complete inadequacy. That was
me! I noticed I was 35 years older than everybody else in the room. The
other patients looked like stoners.
Sadly,
the middle-aged female psychiatrist who interviewed me was not
convinced. “I’m probably feeling lousier than you are right now,” she
groused. It didn’t help that I’d signed my real name on the forms.
“Globe and Mail columnist plans pot clinic exposé,” was probably the
headline running through her head. She told me to take up meditation.
When
my friend Bernie heard this humiliating story, he burst into laughter.
“Here, try some of this,” he said. He offered me some pot he’d bought at
a “dispensary” that opened a block or two away from the referral
clinic. You walk in there and show them your prescription for high blood
pressure (or whatever), and they’ll sell you anything you want.
Canada
is going to show the world how to legalize marijuana in an orderly,
rational and responsible way.
That’s what Justin said! Meanwhile, the
pot entrepreneurs aren’t waiting. They are rushing to establish facts on
the ground. Illegal storefront operations that are ironically often
municipally licensed are sprouting everywhere, selling anything they
want to whoever wants to buy it. For all we know, they buy their stuff
from illegal grow-ops, black-market gangs, and some unauthorized home
growers who were approved under the previous federal pot regime. The
cops leave them alone because no level of government has any policies
about any of this and soon it will be legal anyway, so what the hell.
Don Briere, who runs
a string of retail stores in the West, will give you a franchise to
sell illegal products in Toronto for only $50,000. He wants to be the
Tim Hortons of cannabis, and who wouldn’t? Pot is cheap to grow, and the
margins are beyond belief.
Good luck to Bill Blair, Justin Trudeau’s new Pot Czar. The barn door is wide open and the horses are galloping off in all directions.
The
medical pot people hate the retail storefront people, who are
undermining their credibility. The storefront people push some
incredibly potent products designed to get you more blasted than you
have ever been in your entire life. The medical people want an industry
that is highly regulated, quality controlled and doctor-directed. “The
federal government needs to step in and tell everybody what are the
freaking rules,” said a spokesman for the association of legal growers.
“Patients,
who are often very ill, need to buy something that’s safe and is the
same every time,” Danial Schecter told me. Dr. Schecter is co-founder of
the Cannabinoid Medical Clinic, which now has four branches and 4,150
patients. He says unregulated pot could be full of pesticides, bacteria,
fungi and other nasty stuff. “You never know what the ‘dispensaries’
are selling,” he warned.
They’re also
stealing potential business from the medical clinics. Millions of
Canadians suffer chronic pain from conditions that cannabis could ease.
Why bother going to a doctor when they can get the over-the-counter
stuff just down the street?
Mr. Blair
promises that all of this is going to get sorted out – just as soon as a
federal-provincial task force is assembled to examine all the facts,
new legislation is passed, a regulatory and inspection framework is put
in place, and someone figures out who gets to own and operate the
industry, how the prices will be set, what the taxes will be, where and
how the stuff is sold, and whether there is any way to minimize the
number of young people who will become dysfunctional and brain-damaged
from consuming too much THC.
But hey.
It’s the vision that matters! And while the government sorts out the
details, the industry has a vision of its own. Its vision is to develop
yummy, delicious and health-giving pot products for each and every one
of us. It’s already working on legal edibles – cookies, candies,
brownies, gummi candy, you name it. In case you can’t wait, you can
already get all that stuff online. You can even get your illegal pot by
mail – no need to lurk around some shady dispensary. It comes
vacuum-sealed, bubble-wrapped, triple-bagged and delivered to your
doorstep by Canada Post.
“Don’t tell me
you haven’t heard of Bud Buddy,” one of my friends said pityingly. “You
really are a bunny.” Now I know. Who needs medical marijuana when
there’s that?
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