“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

When I moved to Cranbrook 20 years ago, you could get a free vacation in the slammer for smoking a casual joint. Back in my university days in the 1970s, that “vacation” could have been 20 years.

In fact, in the 1970s, the “minimum” sentence for bringing narcotics across the border into the Great White North was seven years. The minimum! The maximum you don’t even want to think about. But that was in the era of “devil weed” when hysterical movies like Reefer Madness (pictured) tried to scare people into abstinence.

But after the millennium rolled around, attitudes began to change. The sweet smell of pot hung heavily in the air. Cops or “narcs” as we called them back then, began to look the other way. So did the public. It seemed everyone was toking up, including workers, businessmen and even professionals. Finally, it was the politicians’ turn.

It was like an epiphany! If pot was legalized, it could be taxed and the millions in tax revenue could balance the budget, pay off the debt and create thousands of new jobs. What more could they ask? And before you could say “roll me a joint dude,” the very politicians who once screamed from the rooftops to jail all the junkies and addicts were suddenly singing a different tune on pot.

Indeed, the word marijuana took on an entirely different connotation. The formerly distasteful and scary word marijuana became “cannabis,” a softer and sort of scientific word. And then some marketing genius coined the term, “medical marijuana” and presto! – just like that – a new industry was born.

Dollar signs appeared in the eyes of entrepreneurs and with all the genuinely scary drugs around like crack cocaine and deadly fentanyl, “medical marijuana” seemed positively angelic in comparison. Before you knew it concepts like “harm reduction” became part of the public discourse and those pot smoking hippies down the street started to look like upstanding citizens who knew how to have a good time and cure themselves of a whole catalogue of diseases with the world’s newest wonder drug. The world didn’t look the same anymore. And it never will.

Don’t believe me? Then you obviously didn’t hear the announcement Feb. 8 that Dycar Pharmaceuticals Ltd. was soon expecting final Health Canada approval to build an $8 million, 86,000 sq. ft. medical marijuana facility in Cranbrook; expected to grow into an $8 million operation and provide up to 200 jobs for the Key City, or should that be “The Medical Marijuana Capital of the Kootenays?”

Cranbrook Mayor Lee Pratt: “I don’t see a downside. It’s medical marijuana so it shouldn’t have any increase on the recreational side. It’s legal so we have to trust that the rules and regulations around it will put safe practices in place.” The mayor said the city also talked to the RCMP and the Ministerial Association. “They’re not 100 per cent in favour of it, but they’re okay with it.” And the mayor said what many are saying in town. “Do we say no to all those jobs?”

The medicinal benefits of cannabis are now recognized world-wide, but there may come a time when Dycar also considers producing recreational marijuana at its Cranbrook facility.

The Canadian Medical Association, however, thinks differently. In an Aug. 18, 2017 submission to the House Standing Committee on Health it said: “The CMA has long-standing concerns about the health risks associated with consuming cannabis, particularly in its smoked form. Children and youth are especially at risk for cannabis-related harms.”

So there you have it. Two hundred new jobs would do wonders for the Cranbrook economy, but at what cost? Endangering our children and youth and possibly many others? As that famous Nobel Prize Laureate Bob Dylan ironically sang back in the 1960s: “For the times they are a-changin.”

For better or worse? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who hasn’t smoked a joint in at least 40 years.

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