Ontario Will Allow Pot Smoking Wherever Tobacco Smoking Is Legal

The Canadian province of Ontario will allow pot users to light up anywhere that tobacco smoking is also allowed — once cannabis becomes legal across the country on October 17.

The United States’ neighbor to the north will soon have legal pot on just about every street corner, and the Great White North’s ten provinces and three territories have just a few more weeks to nail down the details of how that will all shake out within their borders. The provinces will deal with many pressing questions. How many dispensary licenses will be awarded? How will cannabis be kept away from children? Where will users be allowed to smoke?

Ontario, for its part, is starting to look like it’s going to be the most “anything goes” province in Canada when it comes to pot, according to CTV News.

For example, Ontario will allow pot users to hit their joints, blunts, pipes, bongs, and vape pens anywhere that the smoking of tobacco is allowed. In Ontario — which includes Canada’s largest city, Toronto — that means that there is to be no smoking inside of bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies, and so on. You can smoke outside on patios — if they meet certain requirements — according to Smoke-Free Ontario.

You'll be able to smoke pot in the park, but not have a glass of wine in the park. Ontario to allow pot smoking wherever tobacco smoking allowed. https://t.co/XmvULRaG1q

— Metro Morning (@metromorning) September 27, 2018

Smoking around children, however, will be extremely limited by law. You can’t smoke in a car when children are in it, for example, and day-care centers must be smoke-free.

Ontario will take those rules one step further — prohibiting the smoking of cannabis in cars at all, whether you’re a driver or passenger. The same will be true on boats and aircraft, private or otherwise.

But in the main in Ontario, smokers of stogies and Pall Malls will generally be sharing the same space as smokers of Sour Diesel and Purple Nurple.

This may present a problem for apartment-dwellers. Already bedeviled by secondhand cigarette smoke, non-smokers who live in Ontario apartment buildings will soon find themselves dealing with secondhand cannabis smoke, says Robert Schwartz — a University of Toronto professor specializing in cannabis distribution and public health.

“It’s going to create challenges for people who live in multi-unit dwellings, but it’s already a challenge. There are already a lot of people in these dwellings who are complaining about second-hand smoke from cannabis and therefore there are some condominiums that are going smoke-free completely which is a good thing.”

Schwarts suggests that if you smoke pot and live in a building that’s going to go smoke-free because of Ontario’s new pot laws, that you take up vaping — that is, ingestion of THC via vaporizing flowers or oil, which produces less byproduct than smoking.