Pot changes could be slow to filter down to Metro Vancouver businesses

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Now that the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled medical marijuana can be legally consumed in a range of ways — not just smoked or vaped — businesses in Vancouver may have to wait a while before they make any real changes to how it’s legally sold.

“The immediate change is for the patient who buys cannabis from licensed producers and then makes their own cookie or brownie out of it,” says Dana Larsen, director of Sensible BC and vice president of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries.

“They are no longer breaking the law and facing actually quite severe penalties.”

But when it comes to buying or accessing pot edibles, Larsen tells NEWS 1130 that nothing has changed in the short term.

“I think that this will mean Health Canada will have to create some regulations for licensed producers who can currently only sell raw buds to be able to sell extracts for food products, but also hash and things like that, as well. Health Canada is going to take forever to write regulations like that, so it’s going to be a very slow process. Your only real choice is to go to a dispensary, and we are in a grey area right now as well, I guess.”

That is because, on top of the uncertainty over when and how the new rules will take effect, new regulations are also being hammered out for dispensaries at the civic level in Vancouver.

“One of the contentious issues is that the City of Vancouver wants to ban edibles. We support many of the regulations they are trying to put in place, but we’d like to see edibles able to be accessed,” says Larsen.

“We are hoping that we can come to some kind of reasonable accommodation but, that being said, the city only wants to ban baked goods — not capsules, drops, tinctures and things like that. There would still be options for patients to consume it, even under new city rules.”

With Vancouver the first city in Canada to try to adopt rules for dispensaries, Larsen says it is understandable they are trying to “err on the side of caution,” especially when it comes to trying to keep pot cookies or candies out of the reach of children.

“But we’d rather see things like child-proof packaging and proper labelling and dosage requirements rather than just banning [baked edibles] altogether. This doesn’t mean less of these products will be available in the city; it just means they won’t be available in a regulated, over-the-counter, open kind of way. They’ll move back to the underground, where’s there’s less oversight.”

Larsen believes it will take a change in federal government before all the rules around medical marijuana are sorted out.

“The Conservatives have been fighting against this every step of the way; they’ve gone to the Supreme Court a number of times on cases they have to know they are going to lose. It’s really just an ideological and political battle. It has nothing to do with science and the best interest of cannabis-using patients.”

One thing Larsen is sure about is dispensaries will be busier than ever.

“We are getting a lot of media attention and as this licensing system comes into place, I think people who might have been feeling trepidations about going into one or weren’t sure what to expect will feel a lot more confident about it.”