Ottawa Public Health to Regulate Places for Marijuana Use

Ottawa Public Health to Regulate Places for Marijuana Use
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Next year, federal legislation in Ottawa will come into practice and it will enable marijuana to be consumed. However, there are lots of things that are unknown yet. For example, people don’t know where would they be able to consume cannabis.

Many Things to Figure Out

Ottawa Public Health has been considering this in the past days. They are also talking to other municipal agencies and they may even include on their list health and social service agencies, together with early intervention and treatment agencies.

The health authority in the city does not agree with the idea of coffee shops that allow cannabis use, just like it happens in Amsterdam. For the moment, they are having discussions with local stakeholders with the purpose of assessing what does it mean for the local dynamics if cannabis is legalized. This might even mean designing some special spaces for the cannabis users.

Special Spaces

However, for the moment we cannot say what the spaces will look like and who can access them. Gillian Connelly, who works as a manager for disease prevention and health promotion, said that the Ottawa Public Health institution hopes to work through prevention, protection and promotion towards a goal of advocating and improving health. They oppose creating spaces in public for this purpose and they would agree with a ban for consuming it at the workplace.

Connelly declared that they don’t want to make an environment that would make this kind of consumption normal. The risk here would be the fact that people might think that marijuana is a benign substance. The truth is that there are indeed several health risks that are associated with regular consumption, and people have to be aware of this.

Surveys have shown that around half of the students in Grade 12 in Ottawa and 15% of the adults have used marijuana in 2016.


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Anna is an avid blogger with an educational background in medicine and mental health. She is a generalist with many other interests including nutrition, women's health, astronomy and photography. In her free time from work and writing, Anna enjoys nature walks, reading, and listening to jazz and classical music.

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