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Something that was hard to imagine before Washington and Colorado did the unthinkable, and which the witnesses from those states emphasized, is the relative popularity of edible cannabis products. They make up more of the legal pot market than anybody foresaw. This comes with problems of its own. Experts from both states testified that baked goods, chocolate bars, and other edibles have led to accidental cannabis exposures in small children. Some inexperienced adults seem to have had the Maureen Dowd experience of eating an inadvisably large amount of tetrahydrocannabinol-filled candy and freaking out a tad.

But, again, the plus side is that if you’re eating cannabis, you’re not smoking it. The health benefits to medical and chronic recreational users might be enormous. Fifty years after everybody finally legalizes cannabis, we may find it weird that anybody ever smoked it at all.

We were all asked to accept the place of the U.S. government as a moral arbiter for Canada

Radicals and hippies who argued for marijuana legalization in Canada endured decades of being told that, yes, it might be a good idea, but the United States won’t stand for it, and we can’t do it without their approval. This was not even an argument that there would be insuperable technical problems with following our own path on drug law. It was more like, “They’ll make frowny faces at us and it will make them dyspeptic in future trade negotiations.”

We were all asked to accept, as a fait accompli, the place of the U.S. government as a moral arbiter for Canada. Oh, we may not like it, but they’re our largest trading partner, etc., etc. (The conservatives who used to talk this way were the same people who are still the first to yelp about national sovereignty when it comes to defence spending.)

In 2017, we consider marijuana legalization on Parliament Hill, and while our own police try to slow it to a stop, it is American neighbours—respectable-looking white male accountant types!—who materialize with friendly advice and tacit encouragement. I may still not live long enough to actually buy marijuana legally in a Canadian retail store, but it is definitely amusing to have lived long enough to see this.

National Post