Canada is taking no chances with marijuana legalization. This means that in the first country in North America to sanction retail sales of recreational cannabis, marijuana zoning laws will make sure to do what adults apparently cannot \u2014 keep weed away from schools.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s promise to allow citizens to march into a store and purchase cannabis will at last be fulfilled later this year<\/a>. In Ontario, the country\u2019s most populous province, all sales will be overseen by government authorities \u2014 literally, as all cannabis storefronts will be government-run.<\/p>\n These state-run cannabis retailers should be able to placate non-users and marijuana skeptics, given that the government will be able to directly assure that only people 19 and older will be able to buy legal marijuana.<\/p>\n However, this month, officials in Ontario released the planned locations for the province\u2019s first four marijuana storefronts. In Toronto, one store is to be located in a strip mall \u201calongside a kid\u2019s tutoring service,\u201d some 450 meters away from an elementary school, as The Toronto Star reported.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSo, what\u2019s the problem?\u201d you may reasonably ask.<\/p>\n As per the paper: \u201cThe Toronto strip mall is a popular hangout for high school students from Malvern Collegiate, as well as Neil McNeil and Notre Dame Catholic high schools.\u201d<\/p>\n Never does the newspaper provide the \u201cthen\u201d part of the implied conditional sentence here, but the takeaway is obvious: Marijuana zoning laws that allow legal cannabis shops to exist near schools present some kind of threat to the children.<\/p>\n You can credit the Star and the Toronto school board authorities for their restraint in staying silent on this matter \u2014 if for no other reason than it is promoting unneeded worry. As studies in the U.S. have shown<\/a>, legalization does not lead to youth using marijuana.<\/p>\n However, this hasn\u2019t stopped officials and the public from promoting marijuana zoning laws to keep dispensaries far away from children. Last year in Los Angeles, a medical marijuana dispensary located within walking distance of a school was forced to close after parents and teachers organized a series of protests.<\/p>\n \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t be here, period,\u201d said Yvonne Chan, the principal of the school, in comments\u00a0to the Los Angeles Daily News<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019re going to attract our kids into drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n Chan did not offer a theory as to how<\/em> that would happen. Nor did she provide examples of kids getting stoned by osmosis as a result of proximity. This is telling, because she didn\u2019t have to. Across America, the thesis that pot stores and schools don\u2019t mix has resulted in strict zoning laws requiring marijuana storefronts to be between 600 to 1000 feet away from schools \u2014 restrictions that are often not applied to liquor stores, bars or even strip clubs.<\/p>\n This thesis has no data to support it, and yet is repeated time and again, unchallenged. It\u2019s similar to classic Reefer Madness hysteria, and threatens to either relegate cannabis dispensaries to forbidding parts of town, or choke them out of existence entirely via strict marijuana zoning.<\/p>\n Toronto offers an object lesson. Here\u2019s a map of the city, with a radius of 450 meters from every school.<\/p>\n Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) got flack for placing its 1st Toronto store 450m from a school. If 450m is our \u2018inappropriate distance\u2019 metric- well, then we\u2019re going to have a tough time placing any stores. Here are all schools in the city (with a 450m buffer) pic.twitter.com\/pot1xHhbiv<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Brendan risotto (@Dovercourter) April 17, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n To the Canadians\u2019 credit, there seem to be a few brave voices of reason.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure they\u2019d have protocols to prevent children from purchasing the product, that are equal to or greater than the Madison (pub) selling a pint of beer to an 8-year-old,\u201d Brian Burchell, head of a merchants\u2019 association that may soon welcome a dispensary, told the Star. \u201cEverywhere in our area is near a school, along with half of our members being bars.\u201d<\/p>\n Think about it rationally. What incentive is there for a dispensary to become kid-friendly? It would be closed in a heartbeat. The point of a retail outlet is to engage in retail, which is hard to do if you\u2019re closed. It\u2019s past time for the lazy and inaccurate formula around cannabis and schools to be challenged \u2014 because when it is, it falls apart at the slightest touch.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> do you think marijuana zoning laws should keep cannabis and schools separate?<\/p>\n The post Legal Marijuana Dispensaries Don\u2019t Threaten Schools \u2013 Why Do We Act Like It?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Canada is taking no chances with marijuana legalization. This means that in the first country in North America to sanction retail sales of recreational cannabis, marijuana zoning laws will make sure to do what adults apparently cannot \u2014 keep weed away from schools. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s promise to allowContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,50,119,139,4050,673],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25662,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25661\/revisions\/25662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Legal Marijuana Dispensaries Don\u2019t Threaten Schools \u2013 Why Do We Act Like It?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"