The Trudeau government will reportedly be bringing forward legislation next month that will see recreational marijuana use legalized by Canada Day of next year.
Dr. Mark Ware is a cannabis researcher and was vice-chair of the marijuana task force which delivered over 80 recommendations to the federal government.
While marijuana legalization appears to be right on the horizon, Dr. Ware believes it’s going to take a long time for the generational stigma of marijuana to resolve.
“This is two, three generations old. People have been born and raised, and are having children who are being born and raised that cannabis is illegal. We’re only just entering a phase where we’re starting to think of it as having something other than an illegal stigma associated with it,” says Dr. Ware.
He says we’re in an evolving landscape when it comes to marijuana and with sometimes conflicting information about the effects of marijuana. Dr. Ware says inform yourself and be inquisitive.
Dr. Ware says getting to the truth about cannabis will happen when we can get the stories about marijuana usage and the science to come together.
“We use the stories to generate the research questions – so if a patient comes to me and says ‘you know what I’m using cannabis it’s really helping me sleep’ then I want to take that and say ‘okay, we’ll let’s figure out what type of cannabis see if we can reproduce that in somebody that’s not sleeping that’s not using cannabis,” says Dr. Ware.
Click on the link below to read the federal government’s framework report:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3237304/Framework-for-the-Legaliza…
