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When Ontario announced its pot plans last month, the province suggested the same rules that apply to tobacco and alcohol will apply to pot. So yes, you will be able to toke at home but no, you won’t get to smoke in a public park.

That said, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi has also said the province is considering special recreational pot use areas. This, to me, suggests something like Amsterdam’s coffee shops. Ontario should go that route; anything else would be the wrong approach.

In Quebec, there are special bars where one can smoke cigars. This, of course, is a sensible way to go, and something like that should happen with marijuana.

While meant to reduce the harms of criminal prohibition, the federal and provincial Liberals’ new pot regime will require a whole lot of policing: raids on illicit pot shops, arresting black market dope pedlars and confiscating pot from underage people.

Someone must also make sure the tokes aren’t being had in railway stations or public parks, which in turn means someone else will be ticketed and fined or confronted by officers of the law. (Admittedly, nothing may happen, and people will smoke where they please; people do smoke cigarettes with a certain impunity in Ottawa’s parks.)

If police are still going to bust down apartment doors to find plants more than 100 centimetres tall or checking to make sure you don’t have more than 30 grams on you, the trends that define policing now aren’t going to go away with legalization. We know that cops treat black men and Middle Eastern men differently than they do white men. Even after legalization, in Colorado, black people were twice as likely as white people to be arrested for smoking pot in public.