Alas, the sun did rise over the lands this fair autumnal morning, first at Signal Hill in Newfoundland, then racing east over the Arctic and the southern provinces, before finally kissing Prince George and then Haida Gwaii with its warmth and brilliance.
For this star and the planets that revolve around it on the outskirts of this rather average galaxy of 100 billion stars in a universe with 100 billion galaxies care not about the legalization of pot in Canada.
To bring it back down to Canadian soil, does anyone remember when the prohibition on liquor ended in this country?
This is a day like any other and, in the broader scope of national history, allowing adults to legally consume marijuana will not be a major change. Instead, this will simply be the new normal. As the years go by, people will sit around with a puzzled look, not because they're perpetually stoned, but because they will have to work hard to remember what life was life before legal pot, like they already do when asked how everyone managed without smartphones, social media and Wi-Fi.
As more and more private and public retail stores spring up selling high-quality cannabis products - not just pre-rolled doobies with filters on them but a broad variety of other ways to consume THC, the stuff that provides the high - the days of getting hooked up by that guy you knew in high school will fade away, as forgotten as the days of buying moonshine from a bootlegger.
As more and more private production facilities begin operation, creating jobs, growing the economy, sponsoring community events and becoming part of mainstream culture, just like the distilleries have, the days of fretting about what people will think of you for partaking in some of the devil's lettuce will shrink further and further in the rearview mirror.
As a result, no future prime minister will try to roll back the clock on this file and make pot illegal again. Once provincial and federal governments become used to the annual revenues from the cannabis industry (and hopefully they... ahem... pass some of those proceeds onto municipalities), prohibition will just be silly talk, regardless of political ideology.
But we also shouldn't be in denial about the negative effects. Doctors are right to worry about long-term health effects. Police officers are right to worry about inebriated drivers. Parents are right to worry about access to children, but if they weren't already worried about it they were hopelessly naive.
Yet this issue was already settled nearly a century ago in regards to alcohol. Despite the steep social costs of deaths, violence and addictions, along with their rippling effects on families and communities, a previous generation of Canadians decided that the individual freedom to choose or not choose to consume alcohol was more important.
That's why it's so easy for some people to say they'll never touch weed in any form but support the right of their fellow Canadians to choose for themselves.
And choose they already have and by the millions, indulging for decades in an illegal product that fuelled an underground economy that mostly benefitted organized crime.
At this point, the government legalizing pot is about as redundant as formally approving Netflix for public use. An unwanted side effect of both - alone and in tandem - is sitting around for too long and eating too much but if that's how some people want to live their lives, that's their choice. There are better ways to spend a weekend than eating THC-infused snacks and watching the entire first six seasons of Game of Thrones, but who's to judge?
Yet even that's a stereotype. As cannabis consumption becomes mainstream and increasingly public, when people can have a THC cookie and wash it down with a beer at concerts and sporting events, when traditions arise involving pot (much like the piper gets paid in whisky for piping in honoured guests at special gatherings) take hold, the reefer madness stereotype will also be replaced. Soon enough, cannabis use will simply be a normal thing for many adults, with little judgment from others.
Even more so, people will stand around and argue what brand is better, just like they do now about beer.
Smoking dope will likely be like smoking cigarettes with the same social stigma increasingly attached to it but pot could also go in a different direction and become like cigars, something connoisseurs do.
Or maybe both.
No matter what, pot has arrived (it's been here for decades) and it's here to stay (it wasn't going anywhere, anyway).
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
