Pot leads to confusion

Marijuana’s advocates wonder which
direction Canada will take regarding its use, medicinal and otherwise

LET THE NICE GUYS GROW: Marc-Boris St-Maurice

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The timing is certainly coincidental. This week, the federal Conservatives are reintroducing its get-tough-on-crime bill to the Senate, which died when Parliament was prorogued last December. The bill would, among other things, introduce mandatory six-month minimum sentences on people convicted of growing marijuana—even for ops that are as small as five plants. Talk about a buzz kill.

The timing is odd because the news comes sandwiched between Toronto’s Global Marijuana March on Saturday, May 1 and this Saturday’s march in Montreal—and the dropping of charges against eight of nine people arrested in a March 31 police raid on a Toronto compassion club. This leaves close observers of Canada’s always-fluid pot laws trying to figure out what the contradictory positions mean.

The revived crime bill, says Marc-Boris St-Maurice, is wrong-headed because, “That just discourages people who just want to produce pot for themselves, and favours hardcore criminals. They don’t care if they’re looking at 10 years or 20 years in jail, they’ll still do it. It just pushes out the nice guys to make room for hardened criminals, which is what we don’t need for the marijuana industry.”

As for dropping trafficking charges against the Toronto compassion club volunteers, he says he thinks the courts would rather ignore the problem than face a possible upheaval in the law. He suspects the charges against the club’s owner, Neev Tapiero, will be dismissed as well. If he fights the charges and wins, St-Maurice says, “it could invalidate the prohibition of marijuana. It could screw things up for everybody. I think the courts would rather see the charges dropped in medical marijuana cases rather than set a precedent.”

St-Maurice says the source of the problem is Health Canada. Registered medicinal marijuana users are supposed to get their pot from the ministry’s supply, but complaints have piled up over both the bureaucracy involved in getting a grower’s permit and the quality of the federal pot—it’s too weak to do any good, and wait times have risen, St-Maurice claims, from two months 10 years ago to up to six today. So Canada’s 4,000 licensed users have to get their weed from either private clubs or from street dealers. It’s a situation that St-Maurice says is coming to a head. “It’s time that Health Canada either gets with it or puts it in the hands of people who can deal with it,” he says. “They’ve been jerking around for 10 years. People are considering court actions because the delays are detrimental to people’s health.”

Nevertheless, he is “very optimistic” a solution is not far off, and the sooner the better. The backlogs, the confusion over legal questions and the mushrooming of compassion clubs will, he thinks, force Health Canada’s hand into doing something to ease the supply of medical marijuana.

But all this politics is not going to stop a good party. On Saturday, the city’s potheads will march as they do every year through the Plateau and Latin Quarter before they kick off an outdoor block party at St-Laurent and Rachel, around the Parc des Amériques. “It’s kind of our corner,” says St-Maurice, referring to the long-standing compassion club at 72 Rachel E. The club moved out of those premises last December and into new digs around the corner, at 4135 St-Laurent, between Rachel and Duluth (“We’ve entered the Main-stream, ha ha ha,” quips St-Maurice with a trademark groaner). “We just chose that strip of street given it’s a location that’s close to my heart.”

THE MONTREAL GLOBAL MARIJUANA
MARCH MEETS AT CARRÉ ST-LOUIS AT 1
P.M. ON SATURDAY, MAY 8. THE BLOCK
PARTY, FEATURING MAN MAN, BASS
MA BOOM, MAD’MOIZÈLE GIRAF AND
OTHERS BEGINS AT 3 P.M. FOR MORE
INFO, SEE MONTREALMARIJUANA.COM