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This article was published 12/7/2017 (1165 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba government is never going to have enough time to study and prepare for the impending legalization of marijuana.

At least, that’s how Canadian cannabis advocate and president of Winnipeg 420’s organizing committee Steven Stairs sees it.

After all, marijuana is already here, he says, and legalization won’t change the fact that for years now people have been buying and selling it, smoking and ingesting it.

"They’re fostering the black market right now," Stairs says of the government’s slow response to the legalization process. "They’re not hindering it, if anything they’re perpetuating it."

Medical marijuana users and recreational users have had access to the drug for years, ordering an assortment of pot strains and cannabis-infused chocolates, honeys and candies off the internet and having them shipped right to their front door.

"Lots of people have been in this community for 10, 15, 20 years even," says Stairs. Businesses have sprung up from nothing but a guy who grows plants accepting email money transfers in exchange for some carefully packaged marijuana express-shipped in one to three days.

"With legalization coming everybody who wants to be involved in cannabis is doing it," he says. "They’re getting involved whether or not that means advocacy, whether that means trying to put together a business… people are already jumping the gun because they want to be on the ground floor."

If you want to smoke, you can pick a strain off the internet based off fellow smokers’ reviews. Do you want the "Nice looking bag for sure, fluffy stinky buds, reeks of UK cheese" strain or the one with the "extremely sedative" high? If you’re more inclined to eat your way to a high, there are chocolate bars and cereal bars, discrete hard candies and lollipops — there are even gluten-free, vegan options.

But so far, the Manitoba government’s approach to legalization has focused less on the business side of things and more on safety concerns. In the spring, it introduced the Cannabis Harm Reduction Act. The act proposes rules around consumption and storage when people are operating vehicles, and would also allow the cops to suspend a person’s driving privileges for 24 hours if they believe them to be under the influence of marijuana.

So far, the government hasn’t seemed to actually want to listen to the people and companies that have been involved in the industry for a while now, Stairs says.

"It’s almost like parents when you were younger saying, ‘Yeah you heard me, but did you actually listen to what I was saying?’ They don’t listen," he says.

But will the government listen to its citizens? The provincial liquor and gaming authority is currently looking for a company to conduct 15-minute surveys with Manitobans about their marijuana usage and what sort of rules they would like to see governing the use of recreational pot when it becomes legalized in 2018.

"We don’t have a great understanding about cannabis as a substance and how people use it," the authority’s communications and research manager Kristianne Dechant told The Canadian Press this week.

"And this is really unlike with liquor and gambling — which are two products that we currently regulate — where we have a great understanding about the gaps in people’s knowledge."

— with files from The Canadian Press