Active History

Touring Tilray: Navigating Canada’s New Marketing and Selling of Medical Cannabis

March 30, 2016 1 Comment

By Cynthia Belaskie and Lucas Richert

We weren’t left to wait in the B.C. rain. After presenting our IDs at the security station outside Tilray’s medical cannabis facility in Nanaimo, and once we were confirmed as being on the official “list,” it took less than a minute to enter the recently constructed $30 million, 65,000 square-foot facility.

There were four of us taking the tour of Tilray, one of Canada’s licensed producers of medical marijuana. We were part of a SSHRC-funded conference in the history of drugs and alcohol at Vancouver Island University, and this was one of the activities available to us as participants in the event.

Our guide was Philippe Lucas, Vice-President of Patient Services at Tilray. He walked us through the electric gate and led us into a cozy holding room filled with bottles of San Pellegrino, a weigh scale, and a flat screen TV flashing images of the building’s construction. A former city councilor in Victoria, an expert witness on marijuana in Canada, and one-time dispensary owner, Philippe was handsome. He spoke quickly, laughed easily, and possessed an air of mischief, too.

Over the past ten years, Philippe has published peer-reviewed articles on cannabis’s therapeutic effects on patients in top academic journals around the world. Continue reading →

Medical Cannabis: The Canadian Physicians’ Perspective

March 30, 2016 No Comments

By Murray Opdahl, MD, BSPE, CCFP

As of April 1, 2014, Health Canada stopped authorizing use of marijuana in Canada and placed this responsibility on physicians who were not particularly interested in having this responsibility. Currently, physicians can choose to provide a “medical document” that authorizes the patient to obtain marijuana from a licensed producer.

Under the previous system, physicians completed a document that was provided to Health Canada, which would then decide whether to grant a patient an exemption to allow the patient to possess or grow marijuana themselves. There were listed conditions for which a family physician could support a patient’s use of marijuana, but now the decision to provide a medical document to the patient is placed solely on the physician and there are no longer any categories of medical conditions for which it can be prescribed.

Health Canada’s only role currently is to license producers to grow and sell marijuana for medical purposes. In fact, the Health Canada has suggested it does not “endorse” marijuana, which is not an “approved” drug, but “the courts have required reasonable access to a legal source of marijuana when authorized by a physician.”

As it stands, physicians are the sole gatekeepers in authorizing legal access to cannabis for medical reasons. However, due to lack of robust supporting published evidence, personal reasons, and advice from multiple associations, many physicians continue to be reluctant to authorize this remedy. Clearly, more research in the basic science and clinical use of cannabinoids is required to address the fact that society’s demand for this remedy is way ahead of the evidence that is available for safe and effective use of cannabis as a medical treatment. Continue reading →

Cannabis cultures: Notes from the west coast

March 29, 2016 1 Comment

By William Knight

It is a bright Friday afternoon in a Vancouver cannabis lounge. It is busy after lunch and all the coffee tables are occupied by people vaporizing or otherwise imbibing various strains of cannabis. Pink Kush. Sour Diesel. Lemon Haze. The lounge replicates, my guide explains, the Amsterdam model for recreational use: you come to a café, order cannabis off a menu, and consume it on the premises. In this lounge, no one needs a medical authorization, a requirement for legal marijuana purchase. This puts the lounge (and similar ones opening in other Canadian cities) on the frontier, if not beyond it, of the rapidly changing terrain of cannabis in Canada.

I recently visited British Columbia on a multi-purpose curatorial trip: as curator of agriculture and fisheries with the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corp., I was on the west coast to study closed-containment aquaculture. But an opportunity to visit a licensed medical-marijuana grower snowballed into a tour of Vancouver’s cannabis scene. This was a quick orientation to an old yet new agricultural industry, and a chance to collect some of its material culture.

Vancouver is a nexus for cannabis advocacy, production, and consumption in Canada. It is a zone of détente: police do not prioritize the enforcement of federal criminal laws (growing, possessing and selling are still crimes), while city officials regulate cannabis dispensaries—which are technically illegal—through municipal zoning by-laws. The cannabis supply chain is also complicated. Licensed producers may only sell cannabis to registered users with prescriptions via mail-order. Dispensaries, in contrast, obtain cannabis from unlicensed growers and sell to walk-in customers who obtain a “prescription” from the dispensary itself.[1]

Cannabis production and consumption thus occurs in a grey zone where legal and extra-legal markets intersect and overlap. With an established and legal medical-marijuana system, and the federal government promising legalization, the Canadian cannabis industry is now preparing for the opening of a recreational market.[2] But large questions remain: who will be allowed to grow and sell marijuana for this sector? Continue reading →

Waiting to Inhale: Marijuana’s past and future in Canada

March 29, 2016 1 Comment

By Erika Dyck and Lucas Richert

In 2001 Health Canada approved the use of medical marijuana for a strict list of health complaints ranging from different pain applications to seizures from epilepsy. During the last federal election in 2015, Justin Trudeau boldly promised to go further down the path of legalization, suggesting that he will decriminalize possession for recreational use.

A month after this election promise, The Economist showcased the blurry future of Canadian pot and suggested, “converting a medical-marijuana industry into a recreational one will not be easy.” While legalization is probable under the newly elected Trudeau Liberals, many questions will have to be addressed and the transition could be rocky. As a Colorado marijuana enforcement official told the National Post, “It’s going to be a lot harder to implement than you think. It’s going to take a lot longer to do it. And it’s going to cost more than you think…”

The Liberal campaign promise of legalization has invited a new host of critics. John Ivison has reconceived of Canada Post as Canada Pot, the major domestic system of distribution throughout the country. Sylvain Charlebois deems marijuana a “gateway” drug with high upside. Dan Malleck has argued that liquor control boards should control recreational marijuana, whereas Ronan Levy has suggested that the recent Allard ruling will create regulatory uncertainty at a most inopportune time.

Regulating marijuana use remains highly contested and the path forward is anything but obvious, but historically there are some insights into drug regulation that may prove helpful in informing the public debates over the next chapter of ‘reefer madness’. Historians have a vital role to play in these debates, particularly for their capacity to weave together a big picture narrative amongst the cacophony of players from policymakers, journalists, physicians, researchers, interest groups, recreational users and the pharmaceutical industry, each of whom have been investing in their own particular messages about the pleasures and pitfalls of pot. Continue reading →

Alternative Histories of Work and Labour: The Workers History Museum

March 26, 2016 No Comments

Active History is proud to present a video each week from New Directions in Active History. The conference took place at Huron University College on October 2-4, 2015 and brought together scholars, students, professionals and community members to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to active history.

In this week’s video we hear from David Dean, a Professor of History at Carleton University, as he discusses alternative histories of work and labour in the national capital region. He primarily discusses the Workers’ History Museum in Ottawa, and how it focuses on some of the lost stories of unionized and non-unionized workers. Nicknamed “The Museum without Walls”, Dean discusses how they manage to function as a museum without a physical location. Much of their work is articulated through a powerful website, in which they display exhibits and research, as well as hosting historical walking tours through Ottawa. Dean also discusses the museum’s travelling exhibits, of which they have three or four that they are able to bring to schools, universities, heritage fairs, labour conferences, and many other events. Through this museum and their work, one of the goals is to increase public knowledge of labour unions and their history, attempting to battle the negative stereotypes surrounding the idea of unions. The most recent project in which the museum is engaged their Bank Street Project, which is developed around the historical stories related to work and business along Bank Street in Ottawa.

Work Always in Progress

March 24, 2016 No Comments

By Veronica Strong-Boag

All contributions to debates about a feminist future need a good dose of herstory. No one person or one group speaks for feminism in its entirety. That reality was not reflected earlier this month in the Globe and Mail’s choice of Maureen McTeer and her daughter, Catherine Clark, both white upper-middle-class women of a certain background, to answer the question “Is the Work of Feminism Finished?” The reprimand found in Septembre Anderson’s “Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible,” to any such stunted version of feminism provided a salutary reminder of diverse, even conflicting, outlooks, even as it made white women rather than patriarchal and capitalist structures the enemy. The potential for a more nuanced response came from the far more diverse group featured in “How We Succeed.” None of this is new. In fact feminism has always been multivocal and diverse. This has been both its weakness and its strength. Individuals and groups commonly seize particular causes that touch their own lives most directly.

Canadian feminists have wrestled with how to speak with many voices since the 19^th century. Continue reading →

A Tribute to John Long

March 23, 2016 6 Comments

On March 2, the history community lost a major figure, great scholar, and terrific colleague when John Long passed away in North Bay, Ontario. Born in Brampton on December 18, 1948, Professor Long’s career as an educator and researcher took him across the country, but the Mushkegowuk people and Treaty 9 territory had a special place in his life and work.

As an undergraduate student, Long studied anthropology at the University of Waterloo before heading to North Bay for teachers’ college. Following his return to southern Ontario to obtain master and doctoral degrees in Education at the University of Toronto, he moved to Moose Factory where he taught and served as a principal in the community’s public schools. His educational career also included appointments as an advisor with the Mushkegowuk Council and as principal at Francine J. Wesley Secondary School in Kashechewan.

Nipissing University and North Bay have been Professor Long’s home since 2000, when he joined the faculty of the Faculty of Education to teach new generations of educators the lessons he had learned through his career. He was particularly pleased when Ontario required all teacher education programs to ensure that students were exposed to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit traditions, cultures, and perspectives.

Treaty 9 In 2010, he published his groundbreaking book Treaty No. 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905. The book shows how the government omitted and misrepresented central elements of the treaty in its conversations with the Mushkegowuk people. In its description of the book McGill-Queen’s Press says that that it “sets the record straight while illuminating the machinations and deceit behind treaty-making.” In a review, historian J.R. Miller writes “Dr. Long has done the First Nations of far northern Ontario an enormous service, and shows scholars of Native-newcomer relations how ethnohistory should be done.” Long’s research inspired award-winning filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s latest documentary – Trick or Treaty.

Continue reading →

Celebrating Graphic Herstory

March 22, 2016 No Comments

The Graphic History Collective

It Ain’t Me Babe, the first comic book produced entirely by women (1970).

Historically, the comics industry has been male dominated, with male writers and male illustrators (working for companies owned by men) depicting women in stereotypically demeaning and derogatory ways. This is especially true of Golden Age comics in the 1940s and 1950s, with the possible exception of Wonder Woman in the United States and Nelvana of the Northern Lights in Canada.

By the 1970s, however, things had started to change. As second wave feminism emerged, writers in the U.S. like Sharon Rudahl and publications like Wimmen’s Comix and It Ain’t Me Babe challenged the exclusionary nature of the industry and created space for comics for women, by women, and about women. In Canada, a feminist group known as the Corrective Collective released their own project, a historical comic book: She Named It Canada Because That’s What It Was Called. When it was first published in 1971, She Named It Canada provided a critical – and quite radical – alternative feminist perspective on the establishment and development of colonial Canada. Continue reading →

Recognizing THEN/HiER

March 21, 2016 No Comments

By Tom Peace

I first encountered the History Education Network (THEN/HiER) in late 2009, when Jennifer Bonnell, the graduate student coordinator at the time, approached Active History about the potential for coordinating a workshop series in Toronto focused on teaching history. Over the intervening months we worked together towards the first in a series of events that brought together teachers, curators, professors and civil servants known as Approaching the Past. This was the beginning of a six-year partnership between Active History and THEN/HiER. At the end of the month, THEN/HiER’s mandate will draw to a close. I want to use this post to draw attention to our collaboration, some of its key moments, and the influence that Anne Marie Goodfellow, Jennifer Bonnell, Penney Clark and many others have had on ActiveHistory.ca and the Active History project more generally.

Logos Continue reading →

Lies, Damned Lies, and Peterborough

March 19, 2016 No Comments

This week’s video is a part of the Storytelling through Film, Graphic Art & Performance panel. Matthew Hayes, a PhD candidate at Trent University, explains two art projects that he undertook in the summer of 2014 in Peterborough, Ontario. Through these projects he sought to explore the persistence of the myth of objectivity. Along with another artist, Hayes displayed a series of 8 posters around Peterborough during an arts festival. The posters, drawn in black sharpie, were based on historical fact, but not entirely true. Hayes explains how his project met with some resistance by critics who felt that it was dishonest or misleading.

Although many of the posters were either taken down or destroyed by the elements, others remained and citizens posted photos of the installations on social media sites. Hayes explains that while he set out to explore the effects of the project, due to the ephemeral nature of the art, it was difficult to draw conclusions. However, he was able to speak with some members of the public. Through these conversations, he discovered that some knew the information was not entirely true, whereas others took the information as literal truth and even passed on the stories. This left Hayes asking the question of what made the posters believable and how their belief relates to the larger question of the myth of objectivity.

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