Issue #40 October 2024
On the sixth anniversary of Canada’s legalization of cannabis for recreational use, the discussion remains pertinent for a compelling reason. The products of our long-established recreational drug industries, alcohol and tobacco, account for more harm, including deaths, and drug-related costs to the economy than all illegal drugs combined. Furthermore, numerous academic publications on our legal drug industries, including on the pharmaceutical industry, have documented a legacy of indifference to public health protection, regulatory compliance, and the rule of law. The implications for a new, revenue-driven drug industry are obvious as cannabis makes its historic journey from demonized street drug to glamourized corporate commodity. Any threat to public health lies as much, or more, with a corrupt, revenue-driven cannabis industry as it does with cannabis itself.
Views of cannabis and its legalization remain diverse across a spectrum ranging from stigmatized intolerance to indiscriminate fetishism, and many perspectives in between. Those at the endpoints of this spectrum are not interested in the nuanced truth that it is still too early to know the ultimate outcomes of this drug policy experiment. That is not to say there have been no immediate benefits. Millions of cannabis users can breathe more easily when enjoying their pastime without the ever-present threat of arrest and a life-long criminal record. That is important progress. But, neither does it mean there are no yellow flags already waving for our attention and action.
Public Health Protection: Most cannabis use appears to be benign but not for everyone. As with any appetite of pleasure (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, video games, food, sex, etc.), there are people who experience harm. Since legalization, we have seen increased cannabis-related admissions to hospital, including to emergency departments, for both adults and children. That needs to be monitored closely, as do long term health issues. We need more time to understand the bigger picture of legalization’s public health footprint. What we know now is that we did not get the “public health approach” that the Liberal Party of Canada promised. In the Party’s enthusiasm to find an appealing meme to generate support for legalization, it failed to acknowledge the unavoidable tension between public health protection and a profit-driven corporation’s priority for market expansion and increasing revenue – a guaranteed feature of the private sector model the Liberal Party intended from the beginning. This incompatibility is especially important when the product is a drug. More market exposure tends to increase the level of harm in the population.
While the legalization campaign supported public health measures such as preventing impaired driving, and providing prevention/education programs, it fell short on following advice from health policy experts on issues such as implementing a full ban on advertising, setting a higher minimum age, and not allowing confections as cannabis edibles. The latter measures have significant implications for the cannabis industry’s market expansion and revenue, while the former group does not. Canada’s “public health approach” applied only to interventions that did not encroach upon the industry’s ambitions for market expansion and profit.
Social Justice: The dispensing of new criminal records for simple cannabis possession infractions is much lower following legalization. But that could have happened three decades earlier when the Liberal Party of Canada introduced legislation to decriminalize cannabis use. Despite holding a majority government for ten consecutive years, the Liberals failed to pass that legislation. During the same decade, dozens of other nations and sub-federal jurisdictions in the United States found a way. In 2016, the NDP introduced a motion to the House of Commons to decriminalize cannabis use while the government worked out the complexities of legalization. Liberal and Conservative Party votes defeated the motion. Canadians would continue to be victimized by its government’s war on cannabis. Apparently, the Liberal Party never truly cared about cannabis law reform until it found a way to monetize it. And harmful, unjustified criminalization continues. Statistics Canada has reported that following legalization, there has been a shift from possession charges to importing/exporting charges. Thousands of Canadian travellers have been criminalized for possessing a small personal amount at the border. In sum, this should not be considered a social justice success.
Political Propriety and Transparency: Given the unsavoury legacy of our long-established legal drug industries, one would expect that our government would proceed with prudence, propriety, and transparency when legalizing a new drug industry. It did not. The Liberal Party was never forthcoming with the parochial commercial interests that initiated and drove its legalization campaign. Rather, it’s communication strategy rested upon two duplicitous components: demonize the unlicensed trade in cannabis and deify a licensed trade as a panacea. We heard warnings that our children were buying their cannabis from dangerous organized crime cartels, “street gangs”, and “gun-runners”. The research evidence and the government’s own intel from its Justice Department, The Public Prosecution Service of Canada and The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada told them this was not true.
The deification of a licensed trade was equally fraudulent – with blatant indifference to the legacy of drug harms, economic costs and corporate wrong-doing attributable to long-established licensed drug trades. The Liberal Party also failed to tell us that dozens of its prominent political players, both elected and in the bureaucracy, had already invested in Canada’s licensed trade for therapeutic (medical) cannabis. Many of these players had already assumed various executive positions in the cannabis industry. They were poised to earn substantial returns on their investments with the transition to a much larger recreational market. Two important players, already indirectly connected to the cannabis industry, were appointed to the Chair and Co-chair positions on the government’s Task Force on Regulation and Legalization of Marijuana. Their involvement in the industry intensified after the work of the Task Force.
Legislative and Regulatory Compliance: The overarching promise of legalization was to replace an illegal trade with a law-abiding, strictly-regulated industry that would provide cannabis product of assured integrity. That has not worked out so well. Between April 1 2015 and March 31 2024, Health Canada inspections of licensed cannabis producers identified 3,511 regulatory infractions, 1,314 of which met criteria for “major” or “critical”. Between January 1 2014 and October 7 2024, there have been 100 recalls of cannabis product already on the market. Reasons include product contamination, labelling errors (including for dosages), and illegal or misrepresented product. There have also been waves of product promotion violations in which company identities were not publicly disclosed – information of considerable value to potential shareholders. There have also been instances of corporate crime which remain enshrouded in Health Canada’s enigmatic euphemism “unauthorized activities with cannabis”. In critical ways, Health Canada’s regulatory response has been opaque and forgiving.
Business Viability: With the permissive regulation of this industry, the aspirations of Canadian investors should have been realized. That also did not work out. There has been a pandemic of securities fraud, investor class-action lawsuits, bankruptcies, large-scale layoffs, and stock market delisting. An analysis by law firm Miller Thompson, based upon the performance of 183 licensed, publicly traded, cannabis producers revealed that Canadian investors lost $131 billion. In contrast to these lost savings and dreams is a small group of cannabis executives who, after being terminated from their failing companies, continue to enjoy their multi-million-dollar salaries, bonuses, severances and the opulent lifestyle that comes with corporate largesse.
We hear none of this when the cannabis lobbyists tell us their industry needs less regulation and cannot afford to pay its excise taxes. In other words, the cannabis industry wants to be treated more like an illegal drug trade. Is that why we legalized cannabis in this country? Who could see this as a success?
Mike DeVillaer
Hamilton Ontario Canada
October 28 2024
For more on the story of cannabis legalization in Canada, see my book,
“Buzz Kill: The Corporatization of Cannabis”. You can order it from
Black Rose Books: https://blackrosebooks.com/products/buzz-kill-michael-r-devillaer
Distributors: Canada / USA: University of Toronto Press utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca
UK / International: Central Books contactus@centralbooks.com
Or at your local bookstore. They will appreciate your support.