Sunday, 29 Sep 2024

Legal Marijuana’s Unresolved Issues a Year On

Just over a year has passed since Canada became the first large industrialized nation to legalize recreational marijuana. Here’s the mini version of the article I wrote for The Times about what it has brought the country: tears for investors, frustration for many shoppers and indifference from most of the public, but few of the widely feared problems. Please let me encourage you to read the full version.

[Read: From Canada’s Legal High, a Business Letdown]

As is often the case with longer stories, my reporting took me down many paths that ultimately couldn’t be included in the article. But as we mark the first week of legal sales of edibles (if, again, on a limited basis), let’s look at some of the unresolved issues surrounding the legal marijuana market:

— I spoke with Erin Brophy, a researcher at the Conference Board of Canada, who studies how employers are dealing with cannabis use by their workers.

She compared the fears in the run-up to marijuana legalization with the Y2K fretting of two decades ago.

“There was all this hubbub sort of leading up to it, and then it wasn’t really the disaster that people expected it to be,” Ms. Brophy said. “I always have to add the qualifier that it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still legitimate concerns and that there won’t be new ones in the future. So it’s still something worth having a conversation about.”

At the top of the list of her concerns are the effects of edibles on workplaces. Smoking remains the most common way for Canadians to get their marijuana buzzes. For employers that’s a good thing, as it leaves a lingering and unmistakable odor on users. (By the way, the smell in commercial marijuana grow rooms like the one pictured in this newsletter is almost unbearable after a couple of minutes.)

But, Ms. Brophy said, “from a workplace safety standpoint, edibles are just easier to hide and harder for an employer to detect.”

On top of all that, she said, the science is still out on how to define marijuana impairment, something that has become even more difficult with edibles because they metabolize differently within the body than smoked weed.

“The science is not there to say ‘one toke for women, two tokes for men,’ as is the case with alcohol and blood levels,” she said. “The science is essentially behind the legislation.”

— At McMaster University in Hamilton, Michael Amlung, a professor of psychiatry who studies addictions, told me that defining impairment isn’t the only outstanding cannabis issue on researchers’ agendas.

“One of the things that’s concerning from my standpoint in terms of research is when we’re talking about cannabis use among youth. We don’t know much about the effects of cannabis on the developing brain — and the brain does continue to develop into the teen years and into the early 20s,” he said. “There is some preliminary evidence that heavy cannabis use during those time periods can impact typical neural development, but we don’t understand yet what the potential long-term consequences may be.”

He is also dismayed about many claims around marijuana, particularly the idea that different strains offer specific properties — like, say, aiding sleep.

“There is a lot of snake oil at this point,” he said. “This idea that cannabis is a miracle plant that will cure all of your ailments is, at least currently, not supported by the science.”

Genetic analysis by botanists, Professor Amlung said, shows that there has been so much cross breeding between strains “that those labels are largely meaningless from a scientific standpoint.”

But while he had concerns, Professor Amlung was also confident in predicting that there was little possibility that Canada would become a land of stoners, even if legalization led to more people using cannabis.

“In terms of it being a scourge on society and leading to the so-called reefer madness, I just don’t see that as being a likely outcome,” he said.

— Finally, it’s not clear when the industry will start making money. All of the investment experts I interviewed agreed that we would see many mergers between the various marijuana producers, leading ultimately to a smaller number of large growers.

But none of them were willing to predict when the industry might produce the riches it once promised investors.

“It has been a remarkable swing from euphoria to where we are now,” Eric Kirzner, a professor emeritus of finance at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, told me. “But it really was a crapshoot then, and it’s a crapshoot now.”

Trans Canada

The venerable Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York now hosts two dramatic paintings by Kent Monkman, the Toronto-based artist of Cree and Irish ancestry. Holland Cotter, the co-chief art critic of The New York Times, wrote that with the works, Mr. Monkman had “flipped a conventional, disempowering idea of Native victimhood on its head.”

SNC-Lavalin’s attempts to avoid a criminal conviction in a corruption case led to the political storm that nearly upended the re-election hopes of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This week, the company brought the case to a close with a plea bargain.

The Cold War was back in the Supreme Court of Canada this week when it ruled that the younger son of two Russian sleeper spies who once lived in Canada was entitled to Canadian citizenship, my colleague Dan Bilefsky reported.

The latest installment of the story of Joshua Boyle and Caitlin Coleman, who were held hostage for five years by a Taliban faction, came this week when a judge in Ottawa dismissed 19 charges against Mr. Boyle, many of them involving allegations of assault and sexual assault against his estranged wife.

As participation in hockey continues to decline, the sport’s seeming inability to deal effectively with racism and abuse is increasingly seen as a factor.

When Gerald W. Cotten died last year, the secrets of his cryptocurrency exchange went with him, locking investors out of about $250 million in their assets. Now, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is being asked to exhume Mr. Cotten’s grave to confirm that the remains in it are indeed his.

In a move not welcomed by Canada, the Trump administration is taking the first steps to allow imports of Canadian drugs in an effort to cut American drug costs. There are fears that it will have the opposite price effect in Canada while also creating shortages.

Around the Times

Todd Heisler, a staff photographer at The New York Times, has created a haunting photographic portrait of an auto repair shantytown using a 19th-century photographic technology. For photo enthusiasts, Time Insider has also laid out how it was done.

Netflix insists that it will remain commerical-free. But Tiffany Hsu reports that it’s not above cutting deals with brands.

Told that she couldn’t compete at the Olympics because her testosterone levels were too high, Ugandan runner Annet Negesa underwent irreversible surgery. Her life has been a struggle since then.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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