The school district’s desire to ban marijuana shops from the immediate vicinity of all area schools is a little strange.
We’re not sure we get it. Are they trying to stop the kids from buying and using pot, or are they trying to protect the children from being exposed to the people who will be patronizing the shops? Both?
The law, much like with liquor sales, will take care of the first. Children will not be permitted to purchase marijuana. If there’s a store that starts selling illegally to kids, then there’s law enforcement to take care of that. As for the second, it presupposes unflattering things about the people who will be, totally legally, buying marijuana for their own consumption. That strikes us as rather ignorant.
What about liquor stores or places that sell cigarettes (which is virtually every corner story and grocery everywhere)? The British Columbia government moved to allow the sale of wine in grocery stores.
Are we now not going to want our kids anywhere near those places as well?
What about pharmacies? They sell any number of legal drugs.
Are marijuana shops really going to be any worse than any other shop? To the point that they needs to be segregated from certain parts of town?
It is likely that most schools in the district will not be affected by pot shops, as they will be unlikely to locate anywhere nearby anyhow. There just aren’t that many schools near commercial areas.
So what we’re talking about are villages like Crofton, Chemainus and Lake Cowichan, and the biggee: Duncan.
We’re guessing this last is where this request really comes into play.
But what it comes down to is this: we are not doing our children a service sheltering them from real life to the extent that we don’t even want them to view the outside of a shop that sells a legal substance, marijuana.
