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Sensitive patient data supplied to a Vancouver cannabis dispensary has been either mishandled or — according to the shop’s owner — stolen, a situation again highlighting the cloud of confusion over the regulation of retail pot.

Most people in stereotypically weed-friendly Vancouver, it seems, don’t have a problem with dispensaries. A Nanos poll of Vancouverites last year found only 14 per cent supported banning medical dispensaries.

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But the city’s decision to take the lead in Canada by licensing a still-illegal industry has contributed to a regulatory haze where many in Vancouver — including cannabis users and non-consumers alike, and even those involved in the weed business — have expressed confusion about the state of affairs while Canadians await federal legislation expected to legalize non-medicinal marijuana next year.

A tipster recently contacted Postmedia to say he’d found a computer memory card in a Vancouver alley, containing more than 1,000 photos of people taken inside a west-side dispensary, as well as digital copies of private medical documents. Postmedia has reviewed the contents of the memory card to confirm its contents, but is not identifying the dispensary, because it was not immediately possible to confirm how the disk was obtained. The tipster who provided the disk said he was unsure if it ended up in the alley due to negligence or “some criminal act that led to the memory card being stolen or otherwise taken from the dispensary.”