Lab creates buzz with news of cocaine production

Someone at Adastra Labs in Langley, B.C., must have been sampling the wares when they announced last Thursday that they would produce, sell, and distribute cocaine.

image: MedlinePlus

The story created a buzz at the Daily Hive (dailyhive.com) where I saw it first.

I was incredulous. My first reaction was that it must be a joke.

But it was no joke. The news was carried by reliable Canadian sites and even in France and the UK.

B.C. Premier Eby said he was “astonished” when he heard the news. He had not been consulted by Health Canada who approved Adastra.

“I find it more than a little bit frustrating that Health Canada is not apparently in line with us in terms of the direction we’re going,” said Eby. “We need to work together on the toxic drug crisis and our response to it.”

Prime Minister Trudeau he was “as surprised as” Eby, He said that the federal government was “working very quickly” with Adastra Labs “to correct the misunderstanding” caused by the company’s statement on commercialization.

My second reaction was that it was a ballsy plan to snub the law just as shops had done by openly selling pot before it was legalized.

B.C. has decriminalized possession the possession of 2.5 grams of drugs, including cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and morphine. Shops like Adastra were going to dare the cops to arrest them and challenge the stupid decriminalization law, I thought.

The problem with decriminalization is that while possession may be legal, the sale of drugs is not. What sense does it make to possess something you can’t legally buy? Adastra Labs must have been flouting the law to make that absurdity obvious.

Then Adastra Labs revised its original statement. They won’t sell to just anyone.

It turns out that their amended Controlled Drug and Substances Dealer’s Licence does not permit the firm to sell cocaine and other drugs to the general public. Under the Dealer’s Licence, Adastra Labs is only permitted to sell to other licensed dealers who have drugs listed on their licence including pharmacists, practitioners, hospitals for research purposes under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Confusion aside, the amended licences to Adastra Labs represents progress. Victoria’s Sunshine Earth Labs also has an amended licence to produce, sell and distribute MDMA cocaine, opium and morphine to other licensed dealers.

Sunshine Earth issued a revised statement, saying the company is licensed to conduct activities with these controlled substances “under tight limitations imposed by Health Canada.”

This means that doctors now have access to drugs, including MDMA and psilocybin for psychotherapy on behalf of patients who have serious, treatment-resistant, or life-threatening conditions.

A psychedelics company has received federal approval to use MDMA (ecstasy) to treat patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Numinus, a Vancouver-based health company specializing in psychedelic research, will treat 20 people suffering from PTSD using MDMA-assisted therapy.

The panic that hippies were blowing their minds on mind-warping drugs is subsiding.

Now MDMA and psilocybin are joining other mood-enhancing chemicals that have been legal for years; drugs like Effexor (Venlafaxine), available since 2008, used to treat depression, anxiety and panic attacks.

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You’re wrong Premier Smith; B.C. will win the war on addiction

Your chief of staff says B.C. has a “drug legalization agenda,” Premier Danielle Smith.” He adds that B.C. invests in treatment on a “very small scale.”

Those are fighting words, Premier Smith.

You are wrong on both counts. First, drug legalization is precisely the direction that every province should be headed. Drug abuse is a medical problem, not a legal one. Dr. Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes of UBC Faculty of Medicine says:

“If we treat addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal issue, we have a better chance of helping people who use drugs to seek treatment and improve their overall health. These types of decriminalization policies, which have been successfully employed around the world, also help reduce the stigma associated with drug use and promote dialogue among friends and family about an issue that’s often hidden or ignored.”

Dr. Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes image: Twitter

Prohibition has been a complete failure in harm reduction. In fact, the criminalization of drugs has made it worse. If all drugs were legal, the dosage and purity could be controlled and a lot fewer people would be dying from toxic brews distributed by criminals.

I suppose you are proud of Alberta’s Emily Murphy, Premier Smith. Despite being a racist, Murphy’s statue remains undisturbed in Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton. And Murphy is almost solely responsible for the criminalization of cannabis.

Murphy wrote under the name “Janey Canuk’s in a 1922 book, The Black Candle, and in articles in Macleans magazine (I saw the original Macleans article in the Calgary library.)  In it, she claimed that good white women were being led into lives of depravity by Chinese immigrants who drugged them with opium.

She claimed that cannabis users became “raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility.” 

A year later, Canada added cannabis to the Opium and Drugs Act with no debate, not even mentioning it by name. To this day, the exact reason why cannabis was outlawed remains a mystery – at the time, hardly anyone was using cannabis.

Since Tuesday, B.C. has an exemption to federal drug laws that allows for decriminalization of small amounts of drugs. Now the possession of small amounts of drugs – opioids, cocaine, ecstasy, meth – will no longer result in criminal charges in British Columbia.

As for treatment for drug addiction, you are wrong again, Premier Smith.

While your government has built a $24 million recovery centre in Red Deer, with 75 beds and a second will open in Lethbridge this spring, B.C. is doing a better job.

Alberta’s treatment-recovery beds will increase from 1,000 five years ago to 1,900. In B.C., we have 3,272 substance-use beds as of last June, up from 2,900 in 2017.

I welcome a competition between provinces, Premier Smith, but I suspect the comments of you chief of staff are just politics.

You are pandering to prospective voters stuck in the dark ages when people thought that making drugs and booze illegal would solve the problem.

Supplying safe drugs to addicts will save lives. More recovery centres will return the addicted to their loved ones.

The success of Canada’s legalization of Cannabis

The fact that cigarettes were legal but caused cancer and cannabis was illegal but hadn’t been proven to cause cancer struck us as grimly ironic in the 1970’s. We quipped: “They’re waiting to find that cannabis causes cancer before they legalize it.”

graphic: Ben Kuypers

When we organized the lobby group, Alberta Legalization of Cannabis Committee (ALCC) in 1977, we thought legalization would be a romp.

After all, the injustice of criminalization was evident to everyone.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wrote ALCC:

“Thank you for your January 6 letter. In 1974 we initiated in the Senate a cannabis bill, Bill S-19. The Senate passed it in June of 1975, and after that the House of Commons gave it first reading. The Commons, however, was unable to find the time to give the bill further attention; so it died on the order paper when the last session of Parliament ended (January 17, 1978).”

The leader of the opposition, Joe Clark wrote us:

“With respect to this issue, I feel strongly that the present law is not serving as a deterrent to the use of marijuana and is resulting in many young people carrying criminal records for what amounts to a social practice among their generation. (May 17, 1978).”

Regrettably, politicians of the day lacked the courage of their convictions.

It took 41 years before our vision of legal cannabis was realized. In 2015, the leader of a third-place party in 2015, Justin Trudeau, campaigned for the legalization of cannabis and won the election.

On October 17, 2018, Canada became the second country in the world to legalize recreational cannabis nationwide after Uruguay.

After waiting four decades, we didn’t celebrate much. Decriminalization seemed inevitable and the day was anticlimactic.

Kamloops was the first place in B.C. to have a government-run cannabis store. It was more glamorous than I had imagined. I thought of a more utilitarian store, not a place with posters telling of the various strains and stations where you could see and smell the product.

Kamloops’ first cannabis store is located in the Columbia Place Shopping Centre. It opened its doors at 10 a.m. with about 100 people waiting in line. Some people arrived as early as 2 a.m. “I’m just excited that we have a store finally,” the first person in line told Global News (Oct 17, 2018).

The sale of legal cannabis has increased slowly since legalization. According to the National Cannabis Survey in 2019, 47 per cent of respondents said they got their cannabis from a legal source. That figure rose to 68 per cent by 2020.

The number of users has not increased dramatically but the average age of first users increased, perhaps because older Canadians were curious to try it now that cannabis was legal.

Importantly, arrests for possession have decreased dramatically.

And, despite concerns from advocacy groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving who suggested that cannabis legalization would result in more traffic injuries and deaths, that hasn’t happened.

There is more to be done. Pardons for past cannabis arrests are slow and bureaucratic. Prohibition and criminalization of other drugs has been a disaster.

My blog with newspaper clippings and other documents of ALCC can be found at alccblog.wordpress.com.

Prohibition of drugs was a mistake but decriminalization will not stop deaths

How many more people have to die because of a half-baked idea from a century ago?

It all started at the turn of the twentieth century when concoctions of opium were commonly found in medicine chests to treat toothaches, diarrhoea, and coughs. Before antibiotics, doctors used opium to treat diseases such as dysentery, cholera, and tuberculosis.

Many of these concoctions, such as Laudanum, were highly addictive.

laudanum ad in Sears. image: 12 tomatoes

There were two paths that governments could have taken. One would have been to control the potency and purity of opium and sell it through licensed outlets. The other was to make opium illegal.

The choice to make opium illegal was political and racist.

Prime Minister Laurier was looking for his fourth majority in a row in 1908. He heard of the “race riots” in Vancouver and sent his minister of labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to investigate.

King found resentment and anger towards Chinese workers. They had been brought to British Columbia to build the Trans Canada railway. With the railway complete and Chinese workers unemployed, white Canadians claimed that they were taking jobs away.

Also, Chinese Canadians were demonized for leading good, white Canadian women astray in “opium dens.” The Chinese were the perfect scapegoats: too many, too shady. Laurier played the race card, was returned to power, and passed the Opium Act in 1908.

The prohibition of substances, such as alcohol, has been a failure ever since.

Drug addiction is a serious problem but it is not criminal. The Opium Act placed the possession of opium in the same category of criminal acts as murder and rape.

Criminal acts are the most serious offenses against society. But drug abuse is an offence against an individual, not society. While drug pushers have bad intentions, drug users don’t intend to do anything criminal.

The state is to blame for not controlling the purity and potency of drugs made available. If not in a fit of moral outrage and attempt to control behaviour that mainly affects personal choice, governments would have made the rational choice to leave drugs legal.

The government’s impulse to control behaviour by making drug use criminal is misguided. Throwing people in jail for trying to ease their emotional or physical pain is a mistake.

So here we are a century later with these anachronistic drug laws. What are we to do?

Vancouver is asking the federal government to approve a plan to decriminalize simple possession of illicit drugs in the city. Mayor Kennedy Stewart said:

“Personal possession and use of drugs is not a criminal justice issue; it is a health issue,” said Stewart. “It is time to end the stigma around substance use, help connect more of our neighbours to health care, and save lives.”

But decriminalization does not make drugs legal. It does not guarantee the purity and potency of drugs, nor does it make them available from licensed vendors. Decriminalization simply makes the offence of drug possession less serious. The drugs are still as deadly.

It was a mistake to make drugs illegal in the first place. It’s a mistake we are living with today. This year, Kamloops has had the highest number of deaths from drug overdoses on record: double the 25 deaths recorded in 2019. And the year’s grim tally is not yet complete.

It’s too late to decriminalize pot

Decriminalization of marijuana should have happened decades ago. Now it would only add to the confusion.

Marijuana users are caught in a legal limbo. The government intends to legalize marijuana before Canada Day, 2018, but until then it’s illegal. Then, like a light being switched on, what was once a criminal offence will not be.

Alberta Legalization of Cannabis Committee

Government intentions aside, police are going about their business. They arrested activists Mark Emery (the “Prince of Pot”) and his wife Jodie as reported by CFJC Today.

The Liberals have been dithering over decriminalization for decades and this Trudeau is no different. Pierre Trudeau could have decriminalized marijuana in 1979. Then Justice Minister Marc Lalonde was playing politics when he said that he would decriminalize it before the upcoming election if opposition parties would just fast track the legislation. He was doubtful that they would. “I’m not optimistic,” Lalonde said (Calgary Herald, Feb. 22, 1979).

The opposition parties took Lalonde up on his challenge, agreeing to fast tracking.  Both opposition leaders Joe Clark and Ed Broadbent sent me letters of approval for decriminalization. They were responding to letters I sent on behalf of the Alberta Legalization of Cannabis Committee. I helped organize the group in 1977.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wrote me to explain how his government was trying to decriminalize marijuana. His government had initiated a bill in the Senate, Bill S-19, in 1974.”The Commons, however, was unable to find the time to give the bill further attention; so it died on the order paper when the last session of Parliament ended (January 17, 1978),” Trudeau explained.

In my letter to the Calgary Herald, I complained about Lalonde’s tardy pace: “Why does the government seem so reluctant to do what all agree must be done? If Lalonde wants us to believe that this is a demonstration of his government in haste, then it’s time to see what a new government in action; a government that will not fiddle while Canadians get burned (April 14, 1979).”

Lalonde had teased Canadians long enough with his promises of decriminalization. His government was defeated by Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative Party in June 11, 1979.

Executive Assistant to Clark’s Minister of Justice wrote me: “Mr. Clark’s government is currently reviewing this and other issues with a view to formulating policies and setting priorities.” “Be assured, Mr. Charbonneau, that your comments will be given serious consideration by the Government as it continues its study of this important matter (Aug. 3, 1979).” However, Clark’s government didn’t last long enough to decriminalize marijuana.

A Globe and Mail editorial argues that the government should decriminalize marijuana before legalizing it because users are in legal purgatory: “Besides, there is no viable interim regulatory regime that could accommodate a quasi-legal retail market. But there is when it comes to personal possession. It’s called decriminalization.”

It’s too late for decriminalization. More legislation would only add to confusion. There is a simple solution –what the Dutch call “gedogen.” Police simply don’t enforce marijuana laws. Unlike the Netherlands, where the law has been ignored for 30 years, police only have to turn a blind eye for another year.