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The stores that are removing their window covers will be a little more open to the street visually, but they now have to be more careful to keep product displays out of view, in order to serve a legal requirement that has no discernible rational purpose. The law makes it an offence to create the possibility that a 13-year-old passing by the friendly neighbourhood pot shop might see a package containing cannabis. How else, one imagines the crafters of this legislation asking, would anyone ever learn of marijuana’s existence and succumb to its enchanting embrace? You can’t be too careful, people often say. Indeed, they often say it immediately before events prove that, in fact, government rules are made “too careful” every day of the week and twice on Thursdays.

Photo by Riley Cassidy/Postmedia News

With provincial governments losing money up front on cannabis retailing, partly because of continued competition from the black market, you can’t help seeing unintended consequences everywhere you look in the regulations. Given the display rules, no one can see a display of cannabis packages from outside a pot shop; you have to be a customer, and have your identification double-checked, to set eyes on one. Nonetheless, the packages themselves are bound by tight marketing restrictions.

They can’t contain any “depiction of a person, character or animal, whether real or fictional.” They can’t associate the product in any manner with “a way of life such as one that includes glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk or daring.” (Some brand names flirt with defiance of this clause, if the concept of “recreation” includes being super chill or blissful.) Signage, outside and inside stores, is bound by similar provincial rules, which specify that it “must be in good taste.”