The legislation is soon upon us. Regulation is to come. Legalization beckons.
Meantime, the unsanctioned annual 4/20 smoke-in/smoke-out is Game On.
We get it. We aren’t stuck in the 19th century.
We are stuck, though.
The City of Vancouver has demonstrated the most morally malignant governance of the marijuana issue anyone could imagine, and with our sarcastic thanks, let us consider how we are heading for a very nasty chapter.
We can see the mayor has long since checked out. His appointment of a “chief resilience officer” last week to oversee a laundry list of his duties, his deputizing of not one but two councillors to stand in for him, his lamenting how his “failing city” needs a housing reset – all speak volumes of his chronic inattentiveness to the gig.
But while we’re talking chronic, let’s note that on the pot frontier, he will have nothing but his passivity and lassitude to blame for the ugliness ahead.
First, the dispensaries sprouted with no apparent business framework: no licences, no regulations, no regard of the laws. He long left it that way to not politically hurt himself.
Then, police decided – or more likely were told – this was not a priority.
Once the city bylaws were written – and they were crafted relatively well – it was evident they weren’t going to be worth the paper they were on. The debate over the laws was a charade. The law’s principles met with the unprincipled. Dispensaries had no intention of abiding, knowing full well they could sell their products illegally and rag the puck through the languid process of judicial enforcement when there was no police enforcement to worry about.
No matter. Proceed, the city did.
Since then, not one illegally operating outlet has closed.
No injunction has been secured to deal with defiant operators who have disregarded bylaws that came years after they squatted. Few fines have been levied, fewer still paid.
Now we are in an era of billboards touting a smartphone app that finds you a dispensary faster than you can find your credit card.
We are at the zenith moment of lawlessness – peak problem pot, as it were – as the long arm of the law inevitably approaches.
For some reason that escapes me, city hall seems to love the chaos it is creating and the criminals it is financing. True, it may not be organized crime in every instance, but disorganized crime is not particularly better, and for at least another year or so, it is unfettered crime nonetheless.
When I walk past a dispensary in the after-school afternoon, the children I see look like proverbial deer in headlights. I feel for them, because they know little about the science-based harm they are self-imposing in the name of self-soothing. Trouble is, the proprietors do, just as our city does – and as our new law will reflect.
This non-governance is not civic leadership. Set aside any moral matter: what should be an orderly business climate is instead an object lesson on how not to sanction a mitigated risk in a community.
The federal legislation and provincial regulation will at least bring the batch of head shops to a head. Guaranteed, when self-interests of business and government conjoin, when there is real revenue and tax to tabulate, the regimental result will not indulge outliers. Casually positioned and operated dispensaries will, no pun intended, go up in flames. But not before they have further lined their pockets without remit.
Eventually, when the province directs the city on retail licensing, the dirty work of shuttering businesses will be left to the police, I suspect, and here is also where the city has done a disservice to those who serve and protect. Rather than send the signal by cracking down on a handful of flagrant violators a couple of years ago, the police will be dealing with dozens a couple of years from now.
I doubt they will go quietly. Why would they?
For this, I hope that new chief officer appointed by the mayor has done her work in a way he has not and fashioned in the city a true resilience.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
