How Donald Trump Could Cause Issues for Justin Trudeau’s Weed Legalization Plans

As Canadians await the legal weed they have been promised by Justin Trudeau, it's become obvious that Trump's America will inevitably share a border with a country whose drug policy it is increasingly at odds with. While Trump has yet to comment on Canada's looming recreational marijuana legalization and regulation, he has said that weed will be kept illegal at the federal level in the US.

University of Windsor law professor Bill Bogart says that Trump's stance on weed could cause "discomfort" for Canada.

"With Canada, the flashpoint could be the fact that when we legalize and regulate marijuana, we will not be in compliance with several international covenants that we are parties to that attempt to control drugs, and attempt to do that largely through prohibition," Bogart told VICE. "We will be departing from those conventions."

Bogart stresses that we should characterize our wonderings about Trump right now as speculation—the president-elect has somewhat flip-flopped on the topic of marijuana in the past. Trump once told the Miami Herald that the US needed to "legalize drugs to win" the War on Drugs, but last year in an interview with Bill O'Reilly he both expressed his support for medical marijuana and called Colorado's legal weed industry "a real problem." Mike Pence, who will soon be vice president, is against legalizing weed, and Trump's pick for attorney general, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, told the Washington Post in 2016 that "good people don't smoke marijuana."

"If Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions get together and decide that they're going to rekindle the War on Drugs, that could be a problem for the several states that have already legalized and regulated marijuana." But in addition to that, Bogart says it's possible the Trump administration could put a strain on Canada's legalization and regulation processes.

"It is conceivable that so much pressure could be put on Canada that Trudeau would have to say we can't proceed until we get the international obligations sorted out… I think it is more likely that if Trump and Sessions catch their eye on what Canada is doing, there will have to be a lot of diplomatic maneuvering and even wrangling," he said.

Another possible complication is that the illicit marijuana market in Canada, which will soon begin to be ousted by legalization, could cause issues with trafficking into the US.

"The illicit market is not going to disappear overnight. There will be remnants of it for a while, and part of it may be attempts to smuggle marijuana into the United States." While the legality of drug trafficking between the two countries is not going to change just because Canada legalizes marijuana, Bogart says that eventually we could be looking at a similar situation to how alcohol is dealt with at customs, when and if both countries legalize weed.

Ultimately, though, Bogart says he thinks that Trump and Sessions will have a lot to deal with and that marijuana might not be a big concern for them initially. "They could just say that they're going to leave marijuana alone, various states can legalize it and regulate it based on their own individual decisions, and Canada can have this experiment… They could just be indifferent and see where we are in four or five years."

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