There are a lot of household plants that, if ingested by pets or children, will result in death.
Cannabis won’t kill you. It’s not toxic. And a child would have to do more than ingest raw cannabis for a psychoactive effect.
And isn’t that the real issue here?
The fact that people like to augment their reality? It doesn’t fit into the puritan utopia where everyone is sober all the time.
People have been using mind-alerting plants and other substances throughout history. It’s human nature to want to “escape” the mind, to “get out of one’s head,” so to speak.
Like most of the obstacles preventing the federal government from removing cannabis from the criminal code, the fear about private individuals cultivating cannabis on private property is a manufactured issue.
The Canadian Medical Association actually sent this submission to the federal Task Farce.
It reads, “There are many health and safety hazards in cultivation, such as high humidity and temperatures, risk of fire, as well as the use of hazardous chemicals, including pesticides used for the control of fungi, bacteria and insects. There is little quality control regarding contamination and potency of the product. As well, home cultivation has an enhanced risk of abuse, if individuals use the production for sale rather than exclusively for personal use.”
This is baseless fear-mongering. These claims have been thoroughly discredited in a court of law.
The CMA’s information on cannabis is about as factual as your local trash collector’s views on physics.
Not to deride people who pick up garbage, but I wouldn’t trust them to build an airplane.
And I wouldn’t trust the CMA to give accurate information about cannabis, particularly cultivation.
What does a medical association know about farming?
Forget the Task Farce and all these busy-body submissions. The Liberals should listen to the dead Trudeau. In 1967, he made massive changes to the criminal code and said: “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation… what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”
When he decriminalized/legalized homosexuality, he didn’t set up a task-force. He didn’t ask Canadians for their input. In a rare moment of clarity, the socialist recognized rights that already existed.
The same can and should be said about cultivating and consuming cannabis.
The state has no role to play.
But what about neighbours? And driving on the roads? And won’t somebody please think of the children?
There are already rules in place to keep society civil and peaceful. More intervention by higher modes of government will only introduce bureaucracy into our daily lives, and that makes no one freer, nor safer.
The smell of your neighbour’s cannabis plants, whether inside or outside, shouldn’t be an issue for the federal government.
Even if they could write all the correct rules and order implementation efficiently, do Canadians want that level of authority in their personal lives?
Must that be the price we pay for “public health and safety” or whatever the current mandate of the government is?
Have we forgotten what living in a free society actually entails? It’s more than just writing letters to the editor.
Banning home cultivation of cannabis serves no one. For, what starts in someone’s backyard may lead to innovation and new solutions.
But when entrepreneurs are prevented from organizing and exchanging, when a plant that’s “legal” and has the ability to replace fossil fuels and toxic medicines is regulated into a corner with alcohol and tobacco — then there’s clearly a problem.