While 4/20 may have been just a few weeks ago, activist Robert Moore said that it’s not time to stop protesting until cannabis is available to all patients that need it.
Moore’s group, World Cannabis, is organizing this weekend’s Global Marijuana March, an international protest against cannabis prohibition.
While the event will take place in cities across the world, Moore said the Vancouver march aims to highlight the closure of 90 per cent of the city’s medical cannabis dispensaries.
“If 4/20 was a protest as well as a farmer’s market and celebration, this is more of just a protest,” said Moore. “The point is to bring awareness, the turnout we had at 4/20 was great, but we haven’t freed the weed yet and maybe we need an event like this every month to bring awareness.”
The march begins at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where Moore said it will move across the Granville Bridge before ending in front of City Hall, where a market will be set up for the remainder of the evening.
“We want to save the dispensaries,” said Moore. “We really want the city to do a revisit and talk about the regulations. A lot has changed since they originally looked at the rules and regulations.”
Moore said he hopes the outpouring of opposition to the city’s regulation program will cause officials to take a second look at their rules, despite Councillor Kerry Jang saying that the framework won’t be reviewed for a few years until the federal Liberal government completes their promise of legalization.
“If we have enough people pissed off and enough people pushing it, maybe we can force their hand,” said Moore. “It looks like their mind is made up, but it doesn’t seem like they were listening to the community.”
Moore said many advocates claim the city wasn’t listening to suggestions from the cannabis community while regulations were being made and city hall went ahead with the rules as a way to save face from the national attention they were receiving about the number of dispensaries opening in Vancouver.
“Can we get them to take a second look and what will that take for them to do that?” Moore said. “We’re writing, we’re calling, we’re protesting – hopefully their mind isn’t just made up.”
For more information on the march, visit the Facebook event page.