Ont. restaurateur may take medical marijuana feud to court
TORONTO – A Burlington Ont. restaurant owner facing a human rights complaint for refusing to allow a patron with a medical marijuana licence to smoke outside his establishment said he plans to take the dispute to court.

Ted Kindos, owner of Gator Ted’s Tap and Grill, said he will seek a declaration from the Ontario Superior Court that the provincial laws – prohibiting marijuana possession or consumption in licensed establishments – trump former patron Steve Gibson’s right to light up.

Gibson filed a complaint with the OHRC alleging Kindos discriminated against him by not allowing him to smoke his marijuana outside the bar and for making no effort to find any solution – such as smoking outside the back door.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission maintains Gibson’s case is about the bar owner’s duty to accommodate someone with a disability.

Osgoode Hall law professor Alan Young said the dispute is venturing into uncharted waters because there hasn’t been a court case addressing where Canadians with medical marijuana exemptions are allowed to smoke.

The federal government’s Marijuana Medical Access Regulations do not specify where marijuana can be consumed for medical purposes. But anyone who has an exemption is advised in an information package not to consume controlled substances in a public place and not to expose others to any effects related to the inhalation of secondary smoke, a spokesman for Health Canada said.

This is going to be an ongoing battle in the culture war.  We’ve seen the war on tobacco smoking escalate to the point where there are many places in the world where you cannot smoke indoors in any public building or even with 50′ of one.  Some places even bar tobacco smoke outdoors!

The smoking bans are predicated on the notion of harmful secondhand smoke.  Your rights to smoke tobacco end where my healthy cancer-free lungs begin.  But what of the secondhand smoke from cannabis?

We know that cannabis smoke inhaled firsthand does not lead to increased incidence of head, neck, or lung cancers, and that, in fact, the THC in inhaled cannabis smoke may have protective anti-tumoral effects.  But the secondhand cannabis smoke would presumably be free from most of that THC.  Would it then be as harmful as secondhand cigarette smoke?

The other side of the issue is that, unlike cigarette smoking, we’re talking about delivery of a medicine that enables disabled people to live more normal lives.  You have your rights, but you must make reasonable accommodation for the disabled so they may enjoy their rights.

What is the fair solution?  Should restaurant customers be forced to put up with cannabis smoke, or should disabled people be forced to suffer needlessly if they wish to dine out?

(If you ask me, the restaurant owner is a fool to fight cannabis smoking on his patio.  What could be better for appetizer sales than bar customers with a secondhand contact high and a case of the munchies?)

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The Irony of Holland’s Smoking Ban: You can Still Have Your Joint, but Only if it’s Pure – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
In July, the Dutch government will introduce a nationwide smoking ban in bars, cafes and restaurants, aimed at protecting workers. But it will also make life a lot harder for the country’s infamous coffee shops, where customers will only be allowed to smoke pure cannabis.

…Dutch Health Minister Ab Klink has no plans to make any exceptions. Coffee shop employees, he argues, also have the right to protection from tobacco smoke.But [a coffee shop owner] claims it’s a specious argument. After all, people who apply for jobs in a coffee shop know that smoking is the company’s core business. “If the boys are old enough to be sent to Afghanistan, then you can’t tell me that people want to protect them from smoke in the workplace. They’re old enough to decide on their own. They can vote, they can go to war — but now they won’t even be allowed to make this decision?”

Perversely, the law, intended to protect workers from smoke, only applies to tobacco. In the Netherlands, that has resulted in a rather bizarre result: Smoking pot or hashish in coffee shops will remain legal; it just can’t be mixed with tobacco. If someone wants to roll their joint with tobacco, then they have to smoke it outside….

Besides, it will be difficult to monitor whether someone has secretly rolled his joint with tobacco or not. [Another coffee shop owner] feels the world has been turned on its head in Holland. “In every other country they do just the opposite — there they check whether there is cannabis inside,” he says with a laugh.

There are exceptions to the ban. If an establishment can set up a separate room or add a glass partition to ensure that employees are not exposed to tobacco smoke, then smoking is permitted in those rooms as long as service is not provided.

It’s also possible that officials will place a low priority on policing the smoking ban in coffee shops and, in a typically Dutch fashion, a situation would be created in which smoking would be officially banned but still tolerated.

I’ve always been leery of the indoor tobacco smoking bans being promulgated in the US and around the world.  I was a musician for many years and would have loved to have sung in a smoke-free room.  I get the point about employees not being subject to dangerous secondhand smoke.

On the other hand, some jobs have risks.  We still let men go into the bowels of the earth and mine coal for thirty years and they’re breathing far worse air than a part-time server would at a smoky tavern.

I can see banning smoking in public buildings, but I wouldn’t have banned smoking from bars (or in this case, coffee houses.)  Instead, I would tell workers that they have the choice whether they wish to work in an environment with dangerous air, but I’d also tell the management that they must cover at 100% any health care costs of their workers (that’s a US argument, obviously, since the rest of the world has some form of national health care.)  You’d see these business owners doing what they could to provide cleaner air, whether that was air scrubbers or banning smoking.

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