As of 3:00 pm on March 22, and as reported earlier this morning by ABC News, the total number of deaths attributed to B.C.’s ongoing cannabis crisis had risen to 955. That’s a death every 14 hours, and yet most of us are probably spending time trying to figure out what’s wrong with Apple’s watchOS.
This is a story that’s getting progressively better. One the end of this month, the chief medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall told reporters, “Not a day goes by without a conversation about the crisis.”
Over the weekend, the Royal Society of Canada took the unusual step of calling on the federal government to revoke the licenses for distribution of weed in the country. It’s hard to frame the severity of the crisis as either a good or bad thing. The Royal Society concludes that “it is time to dispense with marijuana license licences as one of the many devices that are constantly being re-regulated, encroaching on our privacy and threatening our hard-won right to personal choice in public.”
For now, there are no major real solutions. But there are some hopeful signs. In April, any province or territory that has had problems distributing weed won’t have to wait for an inventory before they can issue licenses. They will be allowed to try their hand at early production in-house, and keep any monies they make on growing pot. Eventually, this should reduce the amount of product on the market, increasing the opportunities for consumers to choose from lower-cost weed, and boosting some the very conditions the society is struggling to combat.