The influential Ontario Chamber of Commerce is urging Premier Kathleen Wynne to allow recreational marijuana to be sold by government-licensed private retailers as long as local municipalities approve.

In a letter being released Wednesday, the chamber’s president urges Wynne “to immediately begin a robust consultative process aimed at developing a regulatory framework for the distribution of recreational marijuana.”

At TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF event on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the military should be more flexible about hiring people who’ve previously used marijuana or other federally illegal drugs.

Few have said more about the benefits of cannabis than author, lecturer and psychedelic drug enthusiast Terence McKenna.

McKenna used cannabis regularly as a creative aid meant to induce higher consciousness, bring a sense of mental clarity and make the expression of deep thought easier. He didn’t consider its use something to be ashamed of, but embraced.

He often spoke of the plant’s practically endless uses, and on one occasion, he quit for a short period of time while working on a book only to realize after completing it (without having used cannabis the whole time he wrote it) that the book was terrible.

Obviously, his experiences are unique and don’t apply to everyone.

Not Much of a Difference

A new poll is fuelling uncertainty about how Californians will vote come November concerning Proposition 64.   

The poll, released by the Southern California News Group and KABC/Eyewitness News on Monday, found that voters are likely to approve the proposal to legalize the recreational use of marijuana – but only by 52 percent. Forty per cent of those polled stated that they would vote No on Proposition 64, while eight percent stated that they were undecided. Zero per cent stated that they would not be voting at all.

Past polls on the question of Proposition 64 have come up with mixed results.

Business leaders have estimated sales in Ontario for recreational marijuana will range between $1 billion to $2 billion by 2024 should it be legalized by the federal government.

So, the economic stakes are high — both locally and across the nation — should pot be legalized as planned.

That is why the Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber is among groups pushing the provincial government to get going on what needs to be done to ease the transition toward marijuana legalization.

“Whether you agree with the decision or not, the federal government is proceeding on this,” said local chamber CEO Matt Marchand. “That’s already been decided.

“Someone should have flown to Colorado”

There’s more to it than just warring ideologies. Rural governments are small. They have modest budgets and overworked staffs. A big city like Seattle can pull in experts from half a dozen departments to deal with recreational marijuana. A rural municipality, by contrast, might have a single employee charged with regulating a crop that was, until recently, criminalized. “Keep in mind that no one had a line for marijuana [in their zoning code]”, says Perry Houston, head planner in Okanogan County. When it came to legalization, many rural counties and cities were more or less winging it. That made mistakes all but inevitable.

Law enforcement officials in California for the first time have field-tested a pioneering marijuana breathalyzer, which also has been touted as the first device of its kind to detect edible pot products on drivers' breath.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by Hound Labs Inc, an Oakland-based scientific-device company that was founded in 2014 by Dr Mike Lynn, and emergency room doctor and reserve deputy sheriff with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.

The company's marijuana detector, dubbed The Hound, promises to give law enforcement immediate measurements for the few hours that tetrahydrocannabinol - the principal ingredient in marijuana - is present in a person's breath.

Australian Sex Party MP Fiona Patten has introduced a motion to Victoria's Upper House calling for the legalisation of cannabis for personal use.

Ms Patten argued for the legalisation of the drug to reduce the burden on the courts and generate income through regulation.

She told Parliament about a third of Victorians admit to using, or having used, the drug and in some age groups there were more people smoking marijuana than tobacco.

"I'm probably the only leader of a political party in Victoria who's admitting to occasionally smoking marijuana for personal use," she said.

"I'm kind of guessing that probably about a third of people in this chamber may have at one stage, maybe not inhaled, but may have at one stage tried some cannabis."

PHARMACEUTICAL EXECUTIVES WHO recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

McLellan said there are “important lessons” to be taken from places that have already loosened marijuana laws — chief among them to introduce change slowly.

Anne McLellan, leader of the federal task force on how to legalize pot, says it’s critical that Canada “go slow” on reforming marijuana laws.

In an interview with Torstar News Service as the task force concluded public consultations and begins to winnow recommendations to government, McLellan said there are “important lessons” to be taken from places that have already loosened marijuana laws — chief among them to introduce change slowly.