Vancouver recently shut down dozens of dispensaries in the city, as they continue to march forward with their plans for legalization of the plant. Roughly 22 dispensaries are now out of business and the city says that they still plan on cracking down on even more in the coming weeks. Several of the dispensaries are also engaged in an ongoing legal battle with the city over the new changes. A number of dispensaries now popping-up in Toronto have helped that city to surpass Vancouver as the cannabis capital of the country.
In the Toronto market there are now at least 100 cannabis shops in the area. One second-year student from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School recently mapped the dispensaries in the area and there looked to be about 114 of them with more coming in the near future. Even the Mayor from Toronto, John Tory, has come out and expressed frustration with the booming cannabis market in the area. He said that he is waiting on Ottawa to tell him how to proceed and deal with the situation. He, like many, are struggling to contend with permitting voluntary exchanges of this plant to occur. “The one thing you can’t afford to have happen is a broad-scale mockery of the laws,” said Tory. As if criminalizing a plant that offers people healing in the first place wasn’t a mockery of the law itself.
Legalization sure isn’t looking like many thought that it would when they decided to clamor around Trudeau over his promises of allowing a cannabis market. Amid the increasing frustration for how the state is handling the affair, Canadian Criminology experts have come out and urged the Canadian government to pardon offenders and to stop using limited resources over detaining people for victimless cannabis-related crimes.
In Vancouver alone the police have said that it takes the equivalent of three months’ work by just one investigator in order to execute one warrant on a cannabis shop. After the police recently raided a number of dispensaries in the city, they simply re-opened the next day in an act of civil disobedience.