The most compassionate view I can muster of the cannabis activists that have behaved defiantly and inconsiderately toward the community in which they live is that they have been for ages clobbered as counter-culturalists and are merely subsumed by self-identified oppression and martyrdom.
But jeez, folks, catch your snap and get the adult on. You have an important role to play, but it’s not this one of caustic juvenility.
A worrying characteristic, among many we have of our city, is that we are in wacky weed limbo, with a black market not losing a blink of sleep about its formidable incumbency and invulnerability due to the liberation of legalization and a legal market dawdling due to lurching, lamentable bureaucracy of stifling and stymieing regulation. Our political leadership has been one toke over the line, sweet Jesus.
The dozens of illegal Vancouver dispensaries continue to chuckle all the way to the bank. No one with any clout wants to walk in with a serious bent to shutter them, so they serve as milch cows for the organized criminals who stock their shelves, ignore their business taxes, laugh out loud at the feeble fines, pay nothing but premises rent and piddling wages, and meet their investment advisors to talk about the latest way to launder or laden the dough. Our city isn’t doing its job, isn’t giving the legal wave a chance to get off its feet, in permitting them to persist.
Who can then blame the silent, smoking majority who need some soothing at day’s end, maybe day’s middle, and are simply the wise consumers we all want to be, looking for the best price – only in their case, with little current recrimination?
We have emotions coming out sideways all over the place. I’m pretty sure we’re going to live to regret the hysterics that inflated the dark sides of political and activist camps concerning the most recent 4/20 protest-cum-festival, for the posturing has forged an impasse that can be responsibilized with a decent discussion or two – maybe over a beer. And unless we focus fast, we live with the possibility of the recreation next April 20 of the midsection of the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray fumbling to court Andie MacDowell, repeating his mistakes – in this case, another dialogue of the deaf that repeats an errant event so easily fixed.
The bad news, bong brigade, is that the annual Sunset Beach escapade has to be sunsetted, albeit one hopes with the good news of a generative agreement to move to an acceptable and sanctioned locale that does not lose your face. If our mayor is serious about Vancouver being a centre of excellence for ambitious cannabis research – and I’m waiting for the first evidence beyond the campaign sound bite – then there is utterly no reason why the city can’t embrace and celebrate the most evident display of cannabis culture. It just needs a venue that isn’t going to maul and deface a no-smoking park, close an aquatic centre for public safety, and fumigate a neighbourhood. Thinking caps over coffee, please.
For many in that 60,000 throng last Saturday, there had been decades of discrimination, criminalization, exclusion and derision. We have to emerge from an era of misplaced vilification and stop the stoner-shaming. I can’t imagine what it is like to be denied travel or an occupation over something so silly as a possession conviction, but there are about 400,000 Canadians with this criminal pockmark.
That being said, while it wouldn’t hurt any of us to understand the hurt of an absurd criminal record, 4/20 isn’t Remembrance Day or Pride or a heritage parade, so it also wouldn’t hurt to dial back the sanctimony and posturing.
The cannabis cohort has experience and expertise that would come in handy now. But to sermonize momentarily, too many in its midst are trapped in their earlier selves rather than as thought leaders for tomorrow, recounting their wounds or resisting rules – rather simply lived within – for the sake of appearing to be renegades. News for you: the leading edge has left you behind, you are part of the establishment now, stop with the feigned protestation and live in the moment.
Inasmuch as the seeming insolence remains with smokers breaking the bylaws of the park, the attention needs to be spent on a mayor in need of the big boy pants. His predecessor was tacitly supportive of the illegal dispensaries with his radio silence on the issue, and his legacy is one we increasingly lament, but there is no excuse for the new Hizzoner not to man up.
It’s easy – send the commercial festival a full-fledged bill attached to a serious lawyer’s letter, and while you’re at it get into court for a stern injunction to shut the shabby players. But in the postal package throw in an invitation to identify a site that would every year send smoke into the heavens, crank out music to amplify the buzz, and let organizers and the audience emerge proudly without a scintilla of indignity or antagonism.
Sounds very Vancouver.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
