In my high school days, we certainly didn’t have government-run cannabis stores located within 450 metres of our schools. Back then, our “pot shops” (such as they were) could be found right in the hallways of the school building. Which is to say, you scored a joint from a fellow student, generally one with older siblings who knew a guy who knew a guy. I don’t recall these unlicensed pharmacists asking for ID, but then generally they had a good handle on your name and age and all that from sitting beside you in homeroom.

This wasn’t a particularly secret phenomenon. When I was in Grade 8, our teacher would joke of the local high school that many of us were expected to graduate to that if, in the hallway, you said “Hi” to a fellow student, their typical response would be, “You too?”

Anyhow, you would think that if our aim is generally to keep marijuana out of the hands (and lungs) of children and teenagers, provincially operated and staffed drug stores would be seen as an improvement over the “Psst, wanna buy a joint?” status quo that has reigned for decades. But no. When the location of Toronto’s first Ontario Cannabis Store was announced, parents and school board administrators were vocally angry that it would be located within half a kilometre of an elementary school. As a result of the outrage, Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced that school boards should be consulted about the locations of the stores so they won’t be where kids go “at lunchtime” or “after school.”

Read more:

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The problem, as illustrated on a map that ran on the front page of the Star on Wednesday, is that more or less every populated area of the city is within half a kilometre of a school. The city is lousy with schools, which is a good thing. But it also means that whatever other things you have in the city will pretty much necessarily be near a school.

If you want to locate your pot shops more than 450 metres away from a school, as these reefer madness protesters seem to be suggesting, it looks like most of the options, outside of the airport, are in Exhibition Place and in public parks. I’m not sure setting up a dope cart in the castle playground at High Park is a better option for shielding kids from exposure to weed than a regular old strip mall or storefront is.

But the very concern itself is kind of weird. Because we’re not determining the locations where teenaged drug dealers are going to be peddling to kids. We’re talking about the places where the government will regulate the sale, in part, to control who gets it. Among the main reasons to have provincially operated pot shops at all — and forbid private sales — is that, since they are run by the government, they can be trusted to adhere to government regulations. Among those regulations is that dope won’t be sold to those under 19. It is the system we use at the government-operated liquor retail monopoly, and it seems to work okay. Even the privately run corporate monopoly of the Beer Store seems to police age restrictions well enough to satisfy most people.

Or at least well enough that no one is clamouring to shut down the many, many alcohol dealers that operate within a few-minutes walk of schools. Why aren’t these concerned citizens pointing to the menace faced by students of Cedarbrae Collegiate in Scarborough, to draw a random example, whose schoolyard is a mere 100 metres from a Beer Store, and less than 400 metres from an LCBO?

Those same students, in fact, like students all over the city, are mere steps away from all kinds of bars and restaurants where the demon rum is served by private businesses less closely under the thumb of government watchdogs. But there’s even more: convenience stores on virtually every corner near virtually every school sell tobacco, well known to be far more addictive and deadly than pot. Most of them also operate as little casinos, selling tickets for government-run gambling games and taking bets for the provincial sports book.

All of these things we think shouldn’t be sold to kids. All of them sold right next to where kids are educated.

Proposed regulations on legal marijuana products released by Health Canada on Monday include a health warning, plain child-resistant packaging and mechanisms to show signs of tampering. (The Canadian Press)

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Where is the protest about all these vice peddlers setting up shop in the same neighbourhoods as schools? Where is the outrage? There’s none, really. Or hardly any. Because we have rules, that generally get enforced. And none so strictly as those enforced by government employees in government shops.

Teenagers still sometimes get their hands on cigarettes and alcohol, of course. They steal from their parents’ supplies. They recruit older siblings and friends to go shopping for them. They find strangers willing to pass them a brown paper bag in a parking lot. And they’ll still get pot, too, in many of the same ways. The ways they always have.

But very few of them are likely to get weed by strolling into an Ontario Cannabis Outlet in their school uniform during the lunch hour. The existence of those stores is likely to make it somewhat harder for young people to buy pot, not easier. And the location of the shops, for all the fuss and bother, hardly matters at all.