News

Medicinal marijuana dispensary in Stellarton offers variety of products This isn't your grandma's home remedy.

Staff suggest HRM consider how to handle legalization Halifax is starting to think about how legal marijuana will roll out in the municipality.

Territory will likely have 'phased-in approach' to new weed laws The territorial government wants to know what the public is looking for in upcoming marijuana legislation.

Abe Snidanko, the relentless narcotics officer who was feared by the scourge of Vancouver's hippies and lampooned by the stoner comedy duo of Cheech and Chong, has died. He was 79.

Opinions

In the wake of a recent spike in drug deaths in Toronto, municipal politicians have suddenly gone into overdrive suggesting ways to combat this scourge.

The scourge of fentanyl has hit the nation's capital with devastating consequences, and kudos to Ottawa police for going into overdrive to bring to justice the criminals who traffic in this deadly drug. But there is no excuse for what they did to Royston Christie after a drug raid at his Caldwell Avenue home.

Part one of two RCMP are still making pot arrests, in Prince George, in 2017, less than a year before marijuana becomes legal in Canada.

Legal pot was inevitable the moment society became inexorably bound to runaway technology. Friday, with a digital lifeline severed, pasty-faced, disoriented humans stumbled out of the disrupted dichotomy - separate connection - to join other disoriented, confused survivors wandering, lost and untethered, in the foreign world of a decade back.

Letters

Letter writer Simon Guillet rails against marijuana and conflates it with opioids and heroin. He obviously is not aware that marijuana has not caused an overdose death in recorded history.

Add this to the reasons why marijuana should be legalized: more than 100 years ago, the cigarette companies had Congress legalize their products. The only reasons were the farmers who were growing their own tobacco; the government wanted the taxes and still does.

Re: "Consumption sites save lives," editorial, Aug. 9. The answer to ending the fentanyl crisis was given in the editorial, but even as it quoted the words from Jack Phillips of the Society of Illicit Drug Users, it seemed to be oblivious to the message. The editorial quoted his words: "As long as people are using crap drugs, they will overdose and continue to die."

Re Rethink before decriminalizing drugs, DiManno, Aug. 7 Rosie DiManno's column is well-reasoned but wrong. This century's problems aren't due to irrationality, not that there isn't a lot of that to go around, but rather to ignoring the facts and evidence.

Re Rethink before decriminalizing drugs, DiManno, Aug. 7 If drugs were legal and pure, and users could read the instructions on the packet and ask their doctor or pharmacist how much will give them a good high and how much will kill them, surely there would be fewer accidental overdose deaths.

Re Rethink before decriminalizing drugs, DiManno, Aug. 7 Rosie DiManno should think twice about decriminalizing drugs. Canada gave the concept serious consideration in 1972 with the Le Dain Commission and thought about it some more with the House of Commons Special Committee on Non-medical Use of Drugs in 2002.

Re Rethink before decriminalizing drugs, DiManno, Aug. 7 When it comes to dealing with addictive drugs as a society, Rosie DiManno misses the point entirely, partly because she based her argument on a bad interpretation of the facts.