What Trudeau & the Liberals Get Wrong About Legalized Pot
The introduction of federal legislation that will, by mid-2018, almost certainly make marijuana legal (and regulated) in Canada is, I should stipulate, a significant step forward for progressive policy in Canada, and stands to make many people’s lives better while making life worse for very few.
With that said, the legislation—and any legislation likely to come from the Trudeau government, for that matter—is not perfect. Its imperfections are not legislative or policy missteps, though; they are built in by way of the fundamentally anxious perspective it takes on marijuana. What it doesn’t do is highlight the fact that Canadians will soon be able to purchase and use cannabis in a way that is safe, informative, and positive.
Let’s take it as a fundamental fact that people in Canada are going to smoke pot. A large percentage of people in all age groups, according to Stats Canada have at least tried cannabis, and a sizeable percentage of people smoke it regularly. Yet, the Cannabis Act (yes, the actual title of the bill) skews more towards those who do not smoke cannabis than those who do, however. Rather than viewing cannabis availability as something to offer for Canadians, they view it in the opposite direction: they view it as something to draw lines and boundaries around in order to regulate.
Fair enough. There’s a certain degree of regulatory measures that need to be baked into legalization legislation: you shouldn’t sell to children, and you should sell cannabis that you are confident in the quality of. And yes, to the dismay of some, you should probably limit who is able to sell it and where. (At least at first; I suspect it will not be long in the future before policy questions turn to opening up who and where it can be sold.) Furthermore, you should take the opportunity that legalization affords to discourage black market sale of cannabis.
That is, broadly speaking, what today’s legislation does. But it does so with a perspective that is worth considering for a moment. Much of the language around the bill considers cannabis users as a specific demographic, and while we are enabling that demographic to purchase recreational cannabis, viewing cannabis use as a personal distinction rather than a consumer one leads to some interesting conclusions.
This makes some measure of sense, since much of the more palatable activism for legalization has taken this perspective. Cannabis activists are right when they say the war on drugs is total bullshit, because what it really is is a war on drug users; if you wanted to truly wage a campaign to stop drug use, penalizing people and worsening their economic conditions (not to mention doing so in a way that is wildly disproportional in terms of race) doesn’t have much of an effect. Because the effects of the war on drugs have been directed at individual people, it makes sense that the legalization activists responded on those terms: ‘look at all these people whose lives you are ruining over their desire to consume a plant!’ is a fairly effective message.
It also makes sense that the Trudeau government is approaching the question of legalization in similar ways that it approaches alcohol and tobacco, in that regulation is necessary in certain capacities.
But this is where it gets cannabis all wrong: it passes up an opportunity to provide leadership in the way people view cannabis and cannabis users. When you talk about beer, wine, and liquor, for instance, it is not personalized. (There’s some limited use of “I’m a beer drinker,” or “I’m a gin drinker,” but it is hardly a common construction.) It’s the product that is at the centre of the way we think and talk about it. And legislation tends to reflect this: we are able to regulate it without using the occasion of regulation to cast definitions upon people. And as a result, we generally have healthy conversations as a society about how we regulate beer and wine.
Granted, it was not always quite that simple—beer and alcohol were made illegal in the prohibition era for reasons that were deeply tied to moral convictions; people who drank beer and alcohol were viewed by the state as ‘drinking people’ rather than people who happened to enjoy a specific substance. Once, as a society and state, you view people’s use as something that is tied in some way to their personality, the problems extending from that substance become the fault of the people using them, the fault of the part of them that used that substance.
It seems a bit paradoxical, but from this vantage point it simply becomes easier to restrict that product in order to deal with the problems than it is to take a more nuanced approach.
That didn’t work for alcohol or tobacco, but it stuck for cannabis. Since the interwar period we have lived under a cannabis prohibition regime that has viewed cannabis use as something a person either does or does not do, and done everything in its power to try to ensure that the answer is ‘does not do.’
The current legislation maintains this basic framework for thinking about cannabis, with the only new distinction being that it allows for limited personal freedoms to be a person who does. It would be a major improvement, however, if they thought about cannabis instead as something that you could or could not do.
There’s reasons to be sympathetic to those who would argue that legalization legislation is best brought in from a libertarian right, rather than from a progressive left. From the left, the approach is generally one of ending the harmful effects that the right has wrought on cannabis users over the years. From a libertarian perspective, however, it is likely that you would produce legislation that would be embraced more whole-heartedly by those who use cannabis. The distinction comes down to one word: choice.
The government could have stood up today and said it was introducing legislation designed to give the cannabis-using consumer choice. Instead, obviously, it announced legislation that highlighted the regulations being placed around that choice. In both the short and long run, I think this is a mistake. It isn’t a bill that speaks to the people it is trying to help: it fails to highlight the significance of the change for cannabis users who buy off the street by not simply selling to them the fact that they will be given choice and control as far as their cannabis use is concerned.
The significance of this should not be understated. I buy cannabis from a number of dispensaries in Toronto (fully aware of the risks I am taking by doing so), but what the system offers me is a safer, controlled experience because it allows me to pick strains that work well for me, for different reasons. When I am having extended periods of difficult sleep, for instance, I know that there are types of cannabis available that will both knock me out and leave me feeling fully rested in the morning. What’s more, I know that there are certain types of cannabis that are better for social settings, etc.
This, if you think about it, is not that much different than the way we talk about alcohol: we talk about nightcaps, beers that you can have a lot of, party drinks, cocktails, etc. Choice and variety, while not perfect in Ontario, are something that the government is capable of providing and, if you go into any LCBO, capable of capitalizing on and marketing.
The legislation doesn’t highlight this, though. It doesn’t highlight the fact that Canadians will now get a system that will not only improve their cannabis experience, but will make it more accessible for those who are confused by cannabis or simply opposed to it because they had a bad experience. What it instead highlights is the core concept that you can legally possess and use cannabis—but endeavours to highlight all the restrictions around it.
As a final thought, I think the bill is generally a good one, if cautious. It will ultimately be a first step in the process of creating broad, positive cannabis legislation that both keeps people safe and allows for cannabis to be enjoyable. This legislation does much of the first, but less of the latter. It’s silly to expect it to have been perfect on the first go; there will still be more to do.
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