cannabisnews.com: Canadians Line Up for Marijuana
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Canadians Line Up for Marijuana
Posted by CN Staff on October 17, 2018 at 15:03:16 PT
By Selena Ross
Source: Washington Post
Montreal -- Just because they arrived at 3:30 in the morning, don’t assume Montreal’s first legal buyers of marijuana are stoners. Call them history enthusiasts, they said.“I might not smoke it. I might keep it as a souvenir,” said Tonino Ruggiero, who was second in line at one of Quebec’s new, government-run pot stores on Wednesday, Canada’s long-awaited day of cannabis legalization. “It’s a moment d’histoire,” said Ruggiero, 64. “This is better than the Olympics. Not as good as the Rolling Stones, but close.”
The store he visited, in a hip neighborhood of Montreal, is one of three in the city. By its 10 a.m. opening time, hundreds of people snaked around the block, with police doing crowd control. Then a cheer went up, and the first customers rushed through the doors.Montreal is one of the few cities in the country where marijuana was available in stores on Wednesday — a result of the fact that each province is responsible for the distribution and retail sales of marijuana.In Ontario, the country’s most populous province, cannabis was available only by mail order Wednesday because the private outlets expected to open there cannot receive licenses before next spring.There are a host of other concerns about legalization — a potential shortage of legal marijuana and the risk involved in crossing the U.S. border after using cannabis, among others — but few were on display in Montreal.Once inside the government-run store, located in a commercial stretch known for wedding gowns, customers were greeted by smiling young women in dark-green aprons standing near wall-mounted touch screens.Through another door was a minimalist, pharmacy-like space, with colorful boxes lining the shelves and more shop clerks.“They were really cool,” said François-Xavier Monbelli, a 44-year-old wearing Burberry glasses. They asked if people had health problems, or “if you want to sleep, if you want to eat, if you want to think, if you want to be creative.”Monbelli, 44, flew to Canada from France for legalization day, but, like Ruggiero, he said he would not be smoking his purchase.In fact, even in the midst of his pot-themed vacation, he was in a rush, he said — he had promised to deliver the drugs to a friend who plans to launch a website of citizen reviews and who needed to get reviewers sampling the different strains as soon as possible.Later this week there will be more time for celebrations, Monbelli said, including a “festival” that involves walking around Montreal and looking at different street art while smoking pot.“We finish off by eating poutine,” he said. “That’s nice, no?”Further down the line, people said they were not doing anything special to commemorate the day. Only one man was openly smoking a joint on the sidewalk — now legal in Montreal — but he said that was his normal procedure when waiting in any kind of line.“People see it as a glass of wine kind of thing,” at least in Montreal, said another man, 30-year-old Ivan Akhtemiychuk.Waiting with his wife, Akhtemiychuk named two types of pot he liked — Sativa and the Cannatonic strain — and said legalization meant he’d finally be guaranteed to get them.On the black market, “people lie about what they sell,” he said. “They say any name, and you can’t verify.”Though Canada has had a legal medical marijuana system since 2001, his wife has found it impossible to get a permit, he said, despite needing to smoke pot for fibromyalgia, epilepsy and lupus.It seemed worth shelling out for, he said. Most in line predicted at least a 50 percent increase over street prices, with some bracing themselves for double, but Quebec priced its product below black-market prices.Those waiting in line were almost entirely men, most of them over 50, and almost all white. David Donaldson was an exception — his mom was a Rastafarian, he said, and he grew up around weed, maintaining the habit after moving to Montreal as an adult in 2007.There would be one major downside to the law, said Donaldson, who works as a licensed practical nurse. With a lot of uncertainty remaining around marijuana-impaired driving — how to detect it, and how to crack down on it — he expected to be pulled over by police more often, saying he feared it would give police “an excuse” to pick on black drivers in particular.Still, he approved overall of the law, he said. “We’ve got to start somewhere.”On the eve of legalization, the federal government had announced it would pardon Canadians with past convictions for possession of marijuana up to 30 grams.On Wednesday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that the day marked the end of “the failed prohibition of marijuana” in Canada and that legalization would take power from organized crime and prevent young people from obtaining the drug.Two women said they had trekked across the city hoping to avoid a long line, unsuccessfully. But they were surprised by the gender imbalance, said Beowulf Bertrand, 25.The best thing about legalization would be the tax revenue for the government, she said.It will also be nice knowing you can relax “if you’re walking by the cops and you’ve got a gram in your purse,” she said. “I’m a goody two shoes.”Source: Washington Post (DC)Author: Selena RossPublished: October 17, 2018Copyright: 2018 Washington Post CompanyContact: letters washpost.com Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ URL: http://drugsense.org/url/vfTNXvhHCannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml
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Comment #14 posted by afterburner on April 06, 2019 at 16:54:54 PT
MMJ Patients Being Slighted by Rec. Rollout
New Ontario Dispensaries Leave Medical Patients With No Access.
Thursday, April 4, 2019
https://www.pot.tv/video/2019/04/04/new-ontario-dispensaries-leave-medical-patients-with-no-access/
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #13 posted by afterburner on April 06, 2019 at 10:42:03 PT
MS Patient Challenges Fake Impaired Police Actions
N.S. woman to challenge law after testing positive for cannabis at checkpoint.
CTV Atlantic.
Published Tuesday, April 2, 2019 11:52AM ADT.
Last Updated Tuesday, April 2, 2019 11:55AM ADT
http://tinyurl.com/y42n2u5fMounties apologize to N.S. woman for incorrectly suspending her licence for a week.
CTV Atlantic.
Published Thursday, April 4, 2019 9:39PM ADT.
Last Updated Thursday, April 4, 2019 10:08PM ADT
http://tinyurl.com/y6fuzv94
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #12 posted by afterburner on April 05, 2019 at 19:38:06 PT
Grapes of Wrath Quotes
Book written by John Steinbeck, Movie directed by John Ford. A family of tenant farmers lose their land and head for California.Son,Tom Joad:
"If there was a law, they was workin' with maybe we could take it, but it ain't the law. They're workin' away our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, takin' away our decency."The laws against cannabis were not logical nor just. They were designed to take "away our decency," to treat us as second class citizens, as prison fodder.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #11 posted by Hope on April 03, 2019 at 08:32:40 PT
Afterburner Comment 10
I love that line!"Everything we planned for is happening’ — while supplies last."Kind of like the story of our lives!
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #10 posted by afterburner on April 02, 2019 at 17:05:23 PT
Torontonians Lineup for Legal Cannabis Store
News. Cannabis.
At first cannabis store in Toronto, ‘everything we planned for is happening’ — while supplies last.
By Jason Miller, Staff Reporter.
Joseph Hall, Feature Writer.
Mon., April 1, 2019
http://tinyurl.com/yypcgz63
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #9 posted by John Tyler on October 26, 2018 at 08:46:57 PT
Mushrooms are a wonder
Re # 1 part two. I remember a story a while back about the Bronze age guy found frozen in the ice in the Alps. He had two types of mushrooms with him. One bunch was for starting fires. When dry, they are highly flammable and very useful in making a fire. The other bunch was for their medical properties. They had antimicrobial properties and could be eaten or applied directly to a wound. Pretty cool. How did they discover that? Mushrooms are a wonder.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #8 posted by John Tyler on October 26, 2018 at 08:34:00 PT
give bees a chance
Re #1 All we are saying is give bees a chance.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #7 posted by Oleg the Tumor on October 24, 2018 at 08:55:14 PT
Now, about this new Treaty, lets see paragraph 19
This is the section called the "MSDS" or Member State Dispute Settlement Arbitration clause (which take the place of the local courts)Consider this possible scenerio:Under the MSDS, Canada sues the US for "its Draconian marijuana laws stifling trade from Canada's burgeoning Cannabis industry." Such a suit would have to go before an arbitrator, which rules in Canada's favor. Then What? Now that is a dilemma! Who to root for?The Firesign Theatre once opined: "How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"Will the USA invade Canada, again? The other two times didn't fare so well, did they?
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #6 posted by Hope on October 20, 2018 at 23:02:57 PT
I enjoyed this.
Tommy Chong says cannabis legalization makes him proud to be a Canadianhttps://www.trailtimes.ca/trending-now/tommy-chong-says-cannabis-legalization-makes-him-proud-to-be-a-canadian/Sometimes I laughed out loud. I'm glad he got to see this and live this.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #5 posted by Hope on October 20, 2018 at 18:58:24 PT
Does anyone know
if the sky has fallen in Canada yet?
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #4 posted by Hope on October 19, 2018 at 18:33:44 PT
Afterburner
I appreciated reading the word, "Descheduling", too. As I recall, one of the "Answers" to deny our efforts at change has been, "The legalizers don't even have a plan for legalization."Well, there ya go. A plan.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #3 posted by afterburner on October 19, 2018 at 10:46:27 PT
Hope #2
Good plan. I see that our discussion of descheduling has potential support in the halls of Congress, present and future. The idea of simply moving cannabis from schedule one to schedule two is more of a stalling tactic than a real solution. It would benefit Big Pharma, but not allow state-legal dispensaries to deduct common business expenses. We can do better than that.Science & Health.
Marijuana Research Is Exploding In The Age Of Legalization, New Study Finds.
Published 3 days ago
on October 15, 2018.
By Kyle Jaeger
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/marijuana-research-is-exploding-in-the-age-of-legalization-new-study-finds/
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #2 posted by Hope on October 18, 2018 at 19:43:15 PT
There is a plan.
A real and rational plan. Well, rational enough for the moment. More rational than now. Read Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s Marijuana Memo To Democrats On 2019 Legalizationhttps://www.marijuanamoment.net/read-rep-earl-blumenauers-marijuana-memo-to-democrats/There is no justice or anything right involved in the harsh and punitive prohibition of this plant. This egregious error in the history of humanity must be corrected.It's finally happening.
[ Post Comment ]
Comment #1 posted by afterburner on October 18, 2018 at 12:07:38 PT
You Can't Fool Mother Nature
World.
The mushroom dream of a 'long-haired hippie' could help save the world's bees.
Evan Bush, The Seattle Times. Saturday Oct. 6, 2018, 10:21 a.m.
https://triblive.com/usworld/world/14150891-74/the-mushroom-dream-of-a-long-haired-hippie-could-help-save-the-worldsBees please!!!
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