Time Immortal

Ezra Levant chronicles the tale of an Ontario restaraunteur who has been hauled before the Ontario HRC because he forbade a patron of his eatery from smoking a joint whilst on the premises.

Light up a cigarette in an Ontario restaurant, and you’re breaking the law. Light up a marijuana joint, and the restaurateur is breaking the law if he tries to stop you. Here’s an excerpt:

Kindos has already spent nearly $20,000 of his own cash, and estimates he could spend upwards of $150,000 more fighting an Ontario human rights commission complaint launched by Steve Gibson, who is licensed to smoke marijuana by the feds to manage the chronic pain of a neck injury that has kept him out of work since 1989.

Fighting the case, which will be heard by the province’s Human Rights Tribunal in May, could send Kindos’ business into bankruptcy and is playing hell with his health, he said.

“If this thing goes to the tribunal, that’s it, we’re done. Our restaurant is done,” he said. “We’ve already been told we can’t win.

Even allowing for the fact that Mr. Gibson smokes marijuana for medicinal reasons, one cannot escape the fact that, in addition to the known link between pot smoking and psychological disorders, pot is as much as five times more carcinogenic than cigarettes. Ontario, in the interest of public health, has banned cigarette smoking within businesses — by law. Should it not be every bit as illegal, then, to light up a joint within those same businesses? Should not any person who does so be subject to fines? Especially when reasonable alternative methods of marijuana consumption exist to persons who, for whatever reason, have need of it?

Even Canada’s own Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, said common sense and reason are paramount in this issue to effectively balance everyone’s rights.

“I don’t see people with insulin bringing their syringes out in the middle of restaurants and giving themselves injections,” Emery, who is facing a 10-year jail sentence at the U.S.’s behest for selling marijuana seeds, said from his home in B.C., noting that since Gibson was drinking alcohol at the time of the Burlington incident in 2005, he could have ingested the cannabis via an alcoholic tincture that would have been just as effective and more discreet.

The human rights commisssions seem, at times, to exist solely for the benefit of those who think only of themselves — for people, in other words, who feel that every other consideration is secondary to their slightest whim or desire.

Mark Steyn comments thusly:

As with last week’s shakedown of a cosmetic surgeon who declined to perform a labiaplasty for a transsexual dissatisfied with her new parts, the eventual verdict is largely irrelevant: The process is the punishment. It seems almost certain that this restaurateur will lose his business. The trick is not to attract the attentions of the “human rights” enforcers. But, even if you’re not a notorious hatemonger like me, in an age when Canadian “human rights” have dwindled down to the human right to a labiaplasty even when the guy says he wouldn’t know what he was doing, and the human right to smoke pot in some other fellow’s restaurant, trying to avoid catching the eye of this racket is harder than it looks.

Too alarmingly true.

Interesting:

Smoking a joint is equivalent to 20 cigarettes in terms of lung cancer risk, scientists in New Zealand have found, as they warned of an “epidemic” of lung cancers linked to cannabis.

Studies in the past have demonstrated that cannabis can cause cancer, but few have established a strong link between cannabis use and the actual incidence of lung cancer.

In an article published in the European Respiratory Journal, the scientists said cannabis could be expected to harm the airways more than tobacco as its smoke contained twice the level of carcinogens, such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons, compared with tobacco cigarettes.

The method of smoking also increases the risk, since joints are typically smoked without a proper filter and almost to the very tip, which increases the amount of smoke inhaled. The cannabis smoker inhales more deeply and for longer, facilitating the deposition of carcinogens in the airways.

“Cannabis smokers end up with five times more carbon monoxide in their bloodstream (than tobacco smokers),” team leader Richard Beasley, at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, said in a telephone interview.

“There are higher concentrations of carcinogens in cannabis smoke … what is intriguing to us is there is so little work done on cannabis when there is so much done on tobacco.”

The researchers interviewed 79 lung cancer patients and sought to identify the main risk factors for the disease, such as smoking, family history and occupation. The patients were questioned about alcohol and cannabis consumption.

In this high-exposure group, lung cancer risk rose by 5.7 times for patients who smoked more than a joint a day for 10 years, or two joints a day for 5 years, after adjusting for other variables, including cigarette smoking.

Well, isn’t that something? Certainly, it would seem to be bad news for those who defiantly assert that there’s nothing harmful about pot.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Ace)