Photo courtesy of Canopy Growth Corporation

Hilary Black is tired. “Really fucking tired,” actually, she says. She’s been doing this—fighting prohibition, advocating for the rights of medical cannabis patients—for 21 years. And now she’s at the outset of an entirely new chapter: She is in charge of the social responsibility and patient advocacy arm of Canopy Growth Corporation, one of the country’s most prominent cannabis companies, as it’s on the brink of a legalization explosion.

So yeah, she’s exhausted. “It feels like I’ve done 40 years in 20 years’ time,” she jokes. Black is 41, and has spent virtually all of her working life fighting for the rights of medical cannabis users, from her early days with the BC Compassion Club Society (which she opened in 1997) through her 2015 hiring at Bedrocan and subsequent rising through the corporate ranks to her current role as the director of patient education and advocacy with Canopy.

But now, as she helps lead the charge into the legalization era, she’s facing a new challenge: What do you do when you get the thing you’ve wanted your entire life? You stay a little bit angry, that’s what. You recognize that for every step forward the world makes with cannabis, there will always be someone who still needs an advocate—like the patient who can’t afford her medical cannabis (Black recently testified at Parliament against the $1-per-gram excise tax on medical cannabis); or the victims of the opioid crisis, for whom medical cannabis holds promise (one of Black’s recent projects was the creation of a research position at the University of British Columbia on cannabis and battling addiction).

Like many other activists now working in the corporate world, she sometimes gets accused of being a sellout, of turning her back on her activism. She gets it, but she doesn’t buy it: She’s trying to make the position work to her advantage. “I’m very empowered working with Canopy, because it’s such a financial engine,” she says. “I have a lot of influence inside the country.”

Her influence comes from a unique perch within Canopy: As a woman, driven by an activist’s sensibility, she is in one sense at odds with much of the rest of the male, high-finance cannabis world. That role affords her a voice—she has a deep activist pedigree that carries weight throughout the cannabis industry, legal or otherwise—and allows her to act as a role model in a way that few people in the industry can. “I want every single cannabis company in the world, whether you’re a massive company like ours, or you make lip balm, I want everyone to have a corporate responsibility initiative,” she says.

She still doesn’t shy away from compassionate rebellion against the law, even if on a different scale. Black’s dog, Ringo, is sick, and nearing the end of his life—bone cancer. Vets said he had two months. She says, heavy doses of CBD have given him seven. Strictly speaking, this isn’t legal; her dog gets CBD through a small act of compassionate civil disobedience. “He has access to it because he has me,” she says. “I want all the suffering dogs to have access to it.”

Once an activist…

An overlooked aspect of recreational cannabis legalization in Canada is the privacy implications of the distribution systems, especially in the online environment.

The privacy and security risks are substantial, and protecting the online rights of consumers needs more attention. Highly sensitive personal information will be exposed to the risks of redistribution and data breaches, and these risks are magnified if the data is stored or processed in the United States.

In the province of Ontario, the framework put in place by the former Liberal government has been dramatically changed by the new Doug Ford government. While the Liberal’s plan had its flaws, the problems will be exacerbated by the premier’s move to privatize retail sales.

The previous plan was to centralize sales through the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), a subsidiary of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). In reversing this plan, the government is essentially handing over a new and lucrative market to the private sector.

A 2018 Deloitte report estimates Canadians will spend as much $7.17 billion on cannabis products in 2019, with about 35 per cent of that estimated to be online. Under Ford’s plan, the OCS will only handle online sales with physical retail outlets under a private model, expected to open in April 2019.

With this policy shift, legislation will need to be hurriedly amended and, not surprisingly, the reversal is controversial. While applauded by industry interests, it’s been denounced by other groups. Their concerns shouldn’t be ignored in the rush to meet the self-imposed deadlines for online and retail sales.

Will consumer data be transferred to the U.S.?

OCS is a public agency, but the actual online transactions will be handled by Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce platform. When recreational marijuana use becomes legal in October, consumers will have no choice but to use this online system until the retail stores open in 2019. This gap is where serious privacy concerns come into play.

Canadian privacy law requires that organizations holding personally identifiable information comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The law’s purpose
is to protect Canadians regarding the collection, use, storage and distribution of their personal information. Yet data breaches are a growing concern, and different rules apply when data crosses the border.

With cannabis transactions, a security breach or even a routine data transfer to a U.S. affiliate could have far-reaching negative effects on the consumer. Insurance companies, employers and local police could be interested in accessing this data.

Personal stigma is an important issue, but perhaps the biggest problem concerns data transfers into the U.S. Once across the border, U.S. security agencies could obtain information about the cannabis consumption patterns of Canadians who have joined the online system. This could lead to increased border crossing delays, more intrusive questioning and searches, and could result in orders banning Canadians from entering the U.S. because of their cannabis consumption.

Shopify’s privacy policy states:

“While Shopify Inc. is a Canadian company, we provide services to individuals and our technology processes data from users around the world. Accordingly, Shopify may transmit your personal information outside of the country, state, or province in which you are located.”

and

“Shopify works with a variety of third parties and service providers to help provide you with our Services and we may share personal information with them to support these efforts.”

This third-party sharing includes Google Accounts, PayPal Express and Apple Pay. When a Shopify account is opened, partner accounts are established, each having their own terms and privacy policies. This framework is inappropriate for online cannabis sales because excessive data sharing with more parties increases the risk of breach, and the likelihood of data crossing into the United States.

What about data breaches?

The security of online personal information is a growing problem. Data is increasingly susceptible to being breached, leaked, hacked or misplaced. Breaches like those at Ashley Madison, Equifax, Hudson’s Bay, Yahoo and eBay get significant attention, but breaches have become so widespread that a 2015 Ernst and Young report says “…cyberattacks are no longer a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’”

PIPEDA requires security safeguards, but its language is vague. A 2017 report about the Internet of Things concluded the current safeguarding language needs to be strengthened to reflect technological developments. These considerations apply to online platforms like Shopify.

While Shopify claims it will protect its customers’ data, the details of how they will do so haven’t been disclosed, and too many questions remain unanswered. How can Shopify guarantee this same high level of commitment on the part of their U.S.-based third party affiliates with whom they share information?

With online delivery starting in October, many important operational details must still be determined and disclosed. Since Ontario lacks the data localization requirements present in British Columbia, these details are all the more urgent. For consumers to make informed choices about whether they want to risk online transactions, more transparency and certainty is needed.

Privacy must not be an afterthought

The problem of online security extends beyond cannabis sales and isn’t going to be resolved overnight. The same challenges confront other online retailers. But online cannabis data is particularly sensitive, and the stakes are much higher. While the former Ontario plan didn’t fully address privacy concerns, the new changes will add complexity, making things worse.

If consumers lack confidence that their sensitive information will be fully protected, or worry it could cross into the U.S., the system will fail. The 2018 Deloitte Report states emphatically that privacy concerns are vital:

“Cannabis consumers worry about the privacy and security of their personal information, and they expect that information to be protected, especially online. Retailers will need to ensure they invest in robust privacy and e-commerce cybersecurity.”

Without such strong confidence, cannabis users will likely continue their current purchasing practices, and the implementation of legal sales will not be effective.

In Ontario, the Ontario Cannabis Store/LCBO is well-positioned to implement sales in a safe and secure manner, but their online practices also need to be scrutinized. Adding so many new private retailers into the mix, as Ford is now doing with his privatization plan, will only magnify the problems.

Privacy concerns can’t be an afterthought; they must be designed into the system from the outset, and there is little comfort this is happening.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) faced a monumental task: Not only did it need to build a credible recreational cannabis business to manage consumer demand, but it had to outflank the drug’s illicit market, all while undercutting head shops. In figuring out how to balance it all, the LCBO turned to its control-centric history of alcohol management and adopted an approach generously described as happily repressive.

Gone are the resistant values of 1960s counterculture, along with any notion that marijuana was a key element of the era’s mind expansion and generational definition—not to mention a statement of alienation, especially by minority youth, facing police and an unforgiving justice and legal system.

Counterculture, with cannabis at or near its core, was always about experimentation with consciousness. But with the advent of Ontario Cannabis Stores, the arms-length agency created by the LCBO to oversee legal weed sales, any liberatory value that marijuana once had to challenge mainstream culture is gone. Come July 1, there will be nothing left of the subversiveness of pot.

More than 50 years ago, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse described how the loss of antagonism and an undercutting of subversion leads to an indifference to all things under a system of consumerism run amok. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse dubbed this “repressive desublimation.” While sublimation reroutes our impulses toward expressions of different realities, desublimation strips creativity of its inherent resistance, offering instead promises of immediate gratification.

And in Ontario, what restrictive pleasure it is! In historic LCBO fashion, whereas bottles of booze were fetched in brown paper bags, provincial Cannabis Stores won’t even permit self-service. There will be no open, well-stocked shelves of little green bags with unique, outward-facing branding. Virtual interfaces with products will abound, augmented by samples hoarded by sales consultants for smelling purposes only. Crowd management will begin at the door.

But will it end at the door? For its first five decades of operation after its founding in 1927, the LCBO kept records on every drinker, every purchase made, every employee, every drinking establishment and bottle of alcohol. The mandate of control was applied to sales and sites of consumption, with the agency deploying permits, order forms, region-specific stamps, interdiction lists, purchase reviews, and consumer investigations. Purchase privileges were cancelled for those deemed undesirable.

This is our predicament: anti-establishment values have given way to social permissiveness on pot, albeit tightly controlled

Government agencies cooperated fully in the passage of personal information during the LCBO’s early years, creating a kind of social sorting system. Membership in a First Nation, being a woman, or any application initiated by police and judges were met with more severe restrictions. Although this invasive and consequential surveillance system slowly disappeared in the 1970s, the LCBO occasionally still finds itself scrutinized by the province’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner for overextending its gathering of unnecessary personal information, as was the case with intelligence assembled on wine club members circa 2013. Not for nothing did the LCBO pay $250,000 in legal fees to fight scrutiny of its data collection practices.

With Ontario Cannabis Stores, history looks to be repeating itself. Will the LCBO trace every gram of cannabis sold? Can Shopify, the Ottawa-based online retail company hand-picked to run Ontario’s online and in-store cannabis sales, guarantee that consumer purchase data will not end up on U.S. servers? Can the LCBO?

The cannabis retail experience will confirm that a properly calibrated and carefully controlled effort to make marijuana mainstream will bring quick satisfaction in the form of easy-to-purchase legal weed. Yet it may come at the cost of relinquishing personal and purchase information, which could be consequential for already marginalized groups, those at border crossings, or anyone applying for jobs or insurance.

Flashback to 1970. John Munro, Canada’s then-minister of national health and welfare in the government of Pierre Trudeau, was promising to legalize cannabis when conditions were right. They never were. In the intervening 50 years, we’ve ditched what marijuana meant to those negating the mainstream but kept the cannabis. The open road to decriminalization beckons but still has not been taken, despite high use rates and normalized status among cannabis’ many champions.

This is our predicament: anti-establishment values have given way to social permissiveness on pot, albeit tightly controlled. “Pleasure, thus adjusted,” wrote Marcuse, “generates submission.” If estimates about the magnitude of the cannabis market are accurate, submission to one-dimensionality will be massive. And what comes after dashed counterculture promises?

Assurances that the system of control will evolve are hollow. It’s not the system that needs to evolve, but the mental, social, and environmental ecologies of cannabis culture that must find new paths in a radically altered landscape.

The company that patented OxyContin, Purdue Pharma LP, has earned over $30 billion (US) from the drug since it was introduced in 1992. An aggressive marketing campaign focused on the drug’s revolutionary ability to treat severe pain over long periods of time, but the company has long been accused of concealing the risks of addiction inherent in its signature product.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma was forced to pay a $635-million (US) fine after three of its top executives pleaded guilty in a US Federal Court to criminal charges that they deliberately misled the government, doctors, and patients about OxyContin’s addiction properties. It was the largest monetary penalty in US pharmaceutical history, but it was equivalent to less than the amount of revenue the company earned on the drug every six months! In 2017, the company settled a class-action suit brought against it in Canada for $20 million, representing 2,000 Canadians who had become addicted to OxyContin. The company and other makers of prescription opioids continue to face lawsuits and accusations in many US states and in Canada concerning addiction, negligence, and misrepresentation of the drug’s benefits. And all makers of prescription opioids, like Vicodin, Demerol, Percocet, and their many generic equivalents, are bracing for a crackdown.

Sure, millions have found pain relief from OxyContin and its opioid cousins, but at the cost of thousands dead and tens of thousands addicted. The Globe and Mail reported that, since the turn of the millennium, over 6,000 people in Ontario alone have died from opioid abuse. Billions of dollars have been earned, but at the cost of billions more to the health-care system to treat addiction, and to the economy in lost productivity. And the true cost to families—that may be impossible to put a number on. In 2017, we’re starting to learn the tragic truth about prescription opioids. And even though pharmaceutical companies have been lying to the government and doctors for decades, it’s hard to forgive their ignorance. After all, these are opioids—powerful narcotics synthesized from the opium poppy—the same drugs that many governments sought to ban in the early twentieth century before they decided that it would be politically easier to demonize cannabis — a non-addictive, non-lethal drug.¹

After my car accident, my doctors prescribed me opioids for the pain—morphine, Percocet and Demerol at first, and later the infamous OxyContin. I was taking up to 80 milligrams a day just to be able to sit up, walk, and get through my agonizing physical therapy. I never questioned my doctors — I just wanted pain relief. I wanted some part of my life back. But with each patented time-release capsule I popped, I was unwittingly sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss of depression, addiction, and bodily harm. I suffered through the side effects—vomiting, dizziness, irritability, headaches, a zombie-like state of constant drowsiness—because I so desperately needed the pain to go away. Recent studies have shown that prescription opioids can wreak all sorts of gruesome effects on the human body, including irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, swelling of muscle and organ tissue, and cyanosis (when your skin, lips and fingernails turn blue from lack of oxygen). We also know (now) that the most catastrophic effect of long-term or excessive prescription opioid use, other than simply death by overdose, is liver failure. The liver is responsible for metabolizing opioids (and other drugs introduced to the body, from Tylenol to alcohol and cannabis). Medical science is just starting to learn how the liver’s basic metabolic operations can become over-taxed by opioids, so severe is the process of metabolizing them. It’s like running your car at 7,000 rpm for hours on end—eventually the engine is going to overheat, the oil is going to burn out, and your car will break down in a smoking heap of charred metal.

Your liver uses special enzymes to metabolize drugs and introduce their beneficial (e.g. pain-killing) properties into your bloodstream. These enzymes essentially die off during metabolism and need to be regenerated. Your liver works hard to reproduce them—sometimes so hard that the organ itself becomes enlarged and starts interfering with other bodily processes. This is what happens with opioids like OxyContin. The liver can also simply start to decay from being overworked. With alcoholism this is called cirrhosis. With opioids it’s simply called failure. And it was, in truth, a massive failure, not just of my own body, but also of the people and institutions that recommended opioids to me in the first place.

***

My doctors told me I had a year to live—maybe less. This was after I returned home from Cuba, after I registered at Vancouver General Hospital for a course of chemotherapy that left me strung out and vomiting and barely able to stand, after I was prescribed a second, more intensive type of chemotherapy which also failed to work. When I treat or counsel people—anyone who’s suffered from the trauma of cancer—I know I can look them straight in the eye when I speak to them about the difficult choices they face. I’ve faced them too. “Get your affairs in order,” Susan’s oncologist told her. “Get your affairs in order,” Manni’s oncologist told her. That’s exactly what my doctors said to me in 2004. Chemo wasn’t working. My body was too broken. Within a year, the doctors told me, either my liver would fail completely, or I might hemorrhage and bleed internally to death, or the cancer would simply destroy my immunity and a simple infection would be the death of me. “One year to live.” Maybe.

A photo of the author.

Ironically, it was in Cuba where I met the first doctor who warned me about prescription opioids. When he saw my prescription dosage, he was alarmed: “You’ve got to get off those.” He was shocked my Canadian doctor had said it was okay for me to have even one drink. After the extent of my liver damage was confirmed back in Canada, quitting opioids became the first priority to salvaging even one year of life. It wasn’t easy. Opioid addiction is chemical — the receptors in your brain get used to the drug and can’t function without it. This happens to about 25 percent of regular opioid users.² The addiction is also psychological—after using opioids for 18 months to mitigate the extreme bodily pain from my car accident, I was dependent on them to get me out of bed in the morning, to play with my kids, to sleep through the night. And so I had to face a difficult truth that made me feel weak and retrograde: I, Sam Mellace, am an addict.

My wife helped me enroll in a Suboxone detox program. Suboxone is the brand name of a mild narcotic called buprenorphine, which is used to treat pain and can be addictive, and is slightly less destructive on the body. It’s a rehabilitation drug because it helps wean opioid addicts off of hard-core drugs, the way a sugar addict might go on a crash diet but still allow himself a daily spoonful of honey to ease the shakes. But quitting prescription opioids even with the help of Suboxone was a wild nightmare. I was insufferably irritable, and I couldn’t sleep. My joints swelled up, and the orthopedic injuries to my hip and back returned, which brought on a bout of post-traumatic stress as I found myself reliving the accident again, feeling sorry for myself, then becoming enraged and finally just tired. Moreover, the doctors worried that my liver might not be able to handle even buprenorphine, and the realization that my liver might just shut down at any moment made me anxious. It’s no surprise I couldn’t sleep.

For the salvation of my life in that hopeless moment, I give full credit to my wife. And not just in the poetic sense of giving me something to live for—she saved me in a very real and medical way. After I’d lost a few days in detox and was sure I couldn’t survive, my wife got on Google looking for “alternative opioid treatment” and after a few clicks she found herself staring at a recipe for marijuana butter.

She called a friend, who called a friend, and within a couple of hours she had an ounce of some powerful strain of kush, and she followed that recipe to the letter. Neither of us recalls the web page, but it was probably one of thousands in those early days of the Internet when half the things online seemed to be taboo. She made a small tub of highTHC butter, and then baked up an enormous batch of chocolate chip cookies.³

She brought them to me at the detox centre the next day. I think I ate just three of them, but after about half an hour, my body began to feel light. The pain in my back became tolerable, like a dull thudding ache rather than a searing bolt of terror. My anxiety and nausea melted away, I became relaxed and calm, and within another hour I was fast asleep. I slept for three days, waking up only long enough to eat more cookies. I quit detox then and there. I quit every other type of medicine. My future, whatever it was, lay in cannabis.

In the weeks that followed, my wife and I read everything there was to read about cannabis—about Dr. Mechoulam and cannabinoids, Pierre Trudeau and the Le Dain Commission, Jim Wakeford and Terry Parker. We navigated the bureaucratic terminology and convoluted guidelines of the MMAR, and decided I had to apply for a Section 56 exemption. With cancer I was eligible—at the time, only patients of cancer, AIDS, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and severe arthritis could apply. Today, thankfully, there are dozens of eligible ailments. Sure, I could have called my cousins and landed an endless supply of black-market weed to self-medicate, but even in my desperation I felt resolved not to rekindle my ties with my dubious past. Health Canada obliged me to have two doctors sign off on the prescription, which wasn’t terribly difficult given the horror of my medical chart.⁴ A few months after my diagnosis of cancer, diabetes, liver disease, and opioid addiction, I became the hundredth or so Canadian to receive a Section 56 exemption under the MMAR. The license was full of warnings and jargon, but essentially the government of Canada said to me: “Okay Sam, we hear you’re going to die, so here, get high on us.”

1 Prescription opioids like OxyContin are classified as Schedule II drugs in the US and Canada, meaning they have a moderate potential for addiction and abuse. You’ll recall from Chapter Three that cannabis has long been a Schedule I drug, implying it’s even worse. That level of gross negligence in drug policy is the most unforgivable aspect of the whole sordid story of the “War on Drugs.”

2 By comparison, some studies of cannabis have estimated that about nine percent of heavy cannabis users will become addicted. But cannabis addiction and opioid addiction are vastly different things, in terms of what your body endures.

3 As an emerging diabetic, cookies may not have been the best idea for me. But facing pain and death from all directions, I deserved a fucking cookie!

4 The two-doctor provision of the MMAR was a terrible obstacle to most patients back then, because most doctors still believed that cannabis was a dangerous psychosis-inducing drug and only people facing imminent death should use it. Remember, the endocannabinoid system was not yet common knowledge in the medical establishment. Even today most doctors still view cannabis with suspicion.

Excerpted from The Great Cannabis Conspiracy by Sam Mellace. Pre-order the book here.