Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to legalize and regulate marijuana and advocates are hoping he wasn’t just blowing smoke.
“It's great, it's a sign of the times for cannabis policy,” said Adam Greenblatt, who runs a medical marijuana resource centre. “The current government approach is just not working.”
Greenblatt added that legalizing pot would be a boon to the Canadian economy, especially if exporting were ever made an option.
“It’s multi-billion dollar industry,” he said. “The marijuana industry in British Columbia alone has been valued by some think-tanks at $7 billion. It really depends on how the market evolves. The demand for Canadian marijuana is massive on a global scale.”
“If we don’t invest in real public policy like prevention measures and harm reduction and treatment measures, we might go in the wrong way because psychoactive substances are not without danger,” said Serge Brochu, a professor of criminology at L’Universite de Montreal.
According to a 2013 UNICEF report, a higher percentage of Canadian teens had smoked pot in the previous year than in any other country. Brochu compared weed to alcohol in that it’s illegal for teens to consume, but they still manage to use it.
Still, Greenblatt said that going after pot smokers should not be high on a government’s to-do list.
“We have people defrauding the government out of billions of dollars and we have authorities running after people for smoking pot,” he said. “Let’s get our priorities straight and catch the serious offenders and get money back into the public purse.”
