The fight to legalize Cannabis in Canada took nearly a century.
We told you in a previous post about how it was made illegal in April 1923 with a simple announcement in the House of Commons that a “new drug” had been added to Bill 72.
Undoing that took 95 years of protests, marches, demonstrations, debates, speeches, smoke-ins, smoke-ups, lawsuits and civil disobedience.
After 34,876 days, Cannabis became legal on Oct. 17. 2018.
So what took so long?
Cannabis wasn’t a well-known drug In Canada in the early 1920s. Farmers would have been familiar with Hemp, but not a lot of people would have known about smoking Cannabis and Hashish.
It would have been known more as a medicine than a recreational drug and cultural references weren’t always entirely accurate.
But just as the first laws against Cannabis in the 1300s didn’t stop people from using it, neither did making it illegal in Canada in 1923.
Use slowly spread and by 1933, newspapers were reporting on people being arrested and sentenced to six months in jail for possession of as little as two Cannabis joints.
It continued to exist largely as an underground drug throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, as records say there was only a “handful” of arrests in Canada during that time, the largest being two tins of tobacco filled with Cannabis that was seized in 1937.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that use really exploded, especially among younger people and the middle class. That also led to a big increase in the number of arrests for simple possession.
In response, the Canadian government launched the Le Dain Commission in 1969, which at the time was one of the most comprehensive inquiries into the use of non-medical drugs.
It concluded Cannabis was generally a benign drug that should be regulated but simple possession and cultivation should be legalized, or at least decriminalized.
The Liberal prime minister at the time, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, accepted the reports but his government didn’t implement the proposed legislative changes.
A fine of $1,000 had been added as a sentencing option in 1969, and by 1971, that’s how most cases were resolved.
It was in the 1970s that hydroponic cultivation began, which created the black market as we know it and made Cannabis much more readily available.
As the Cannabis industry grew in the 1980s, so did efforts to legalize it, along with government efforts to crack down.
Most cases of simple possession continued to be resolved with a fine, but that also meant people were pleading guilty to a criminal offence.
The resulting criminal record could make travel and having a career difficult.
That led to diversion programs as a sentencing option being created in the 1990s, which allowed people to plead guilty and enter treatment or do community service and avoid receiving a criminal record.
But arrests continued, and one in particular would change things dramatically.
Terry Parker had used Cannabis since he was a teenager as a way of controlling seizures. He was arrested in 1987 and charged with possession, but his doctor wrote letters to the court and he was acquitted by reason of medical necessity.
Then on July 18, 1996, Parker, at the age of 43, was arrested once again and charged with possession, distribution and trafficking of Cannabis.
He appealed to the Ontario Supreme Court, arguing his Constitutional rights were being violated because he didn’t have legal access to medical Cannabis.
In 2000 the court sided with Parker and declared the prohibition on possession to be invalid.
In his written ruling, Justice Marc Rosenberg also recognized that would leave a gap in the existing legislation, so he gave the federal government one year to change the law and take medical users into account.
In response, the federal government created the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations in 2001, which was the first medical marijuana system.
That made it legal for patients to possess Cannabis but didn’t provide them with a legal supply, leading to charges being thrown out of court by 2003, so the federal government again looked to change the legislation.
A Bill was also introduced that would have decriminalized possession of less than 15 grams of Cannabis or 1 gram of Hashish — instead making it a $400 fine. But despite wide-spread public support, it was never enacted into law.
Then in 2006, Canada elected a Conservative government led by Stephen Harper, which brought in tougher penalties and sentencing guidelines for drug offences.
Efforts to legalize Cannabis continued however, which ramped up further with the election of the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau — Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son — in the 2015 federal election.
Cannabis had become fairly normalized in pop culture and a 2016 national poll found 70% of Canadians were in favour of legalization.
In April 2017, the Liberals tabled Bill C-45 and on Oct.17, 2018, Cannabis became legal in Canada.