By Nikolai Karpinski [1]
BELLEVILLE – Expected changes to federal marijuana laws have city planners and business owners talking about where and how the drug could be sold.
Getting a head start on the possibility of marijuana being legalized was on the agenda when Belleville council’s planning advisory committee [2] met at city hall Monday night. The discussion came in the wake of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party winning the Oct. 19 federal election. The party campaigned on the promise of marijuana-law reform [3].
At least one committee member is outright opposed to retail marijuana stores setting up in the city. Coun. Mike Graham, a former Belleville police officer, said he would “argue against it until the sun fell out of the sky.”
Coun. Jack Miller said it was better to prepare for legalization, instead of scrambling after the fact:
http://www.qnetnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/selection-from-00030-rms.mp3 [4]The committee voted to recommend that council prepare for a federal decision on legalization by defining where in the city operations involving the production and distribution of marijuana could be located.
Two British Columbia residents who are interested in setting up a medical-marijuana dispensary in Belleville attended the meeting. Ross and Deborah Middleton, who run a non-profit organization called Canadian Medical Cannabis Partners [5] and a medical-marijuana business called bma Hydroponics [6], said they are worried that legalized access to recreational marijuana may “steamroll” the medical market for the plant.
“It shifts the focus from its current medicinal standing as far as legality goes, into a recreational market, which is a much larger market,” Ross Middleton told QNet News.
The Middletons’ organization is lobbying the federal government for what its website calls “dignified access for everyone that has the need for cannabis as medicine.”
As an alternative to traditional doctor-prescribed pain medications, some of which can have harmful effects, marijuana should not be illegal, Deborah Middleton said: