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The Current Transcript for October 15, 2018

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE: Before I begin, please join me in a moment of silence for all those who sacrificed their lives for peace in Mali and the Sahel.

CONNIE WALKER: At the United Nations earlier this month the secretary general Antonio Guterres paid respects to the peacekeepers who have lost their lives in Mali. The mission there has been described as the UN's deadliest act of operation and there are about 250 Canadian Forces personnel there now as well. We're starting today with the latest assessment from the United Nations about the situation in Mali and the prospects for peace because according to the UN's own report, the situation there is grim and getting grimmer. Then shifting gears to the warm and fuzzy world of our pets and our dogs in particular because as any dog lover will tell you, they're particularly gifted in the IQ department.

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VOICE 1: Oh my God, Brian, there's a message in my Alphabets. It says oooh.

VOICE 2: Peter, those are Cheerio's.

CW: While Brian the dog on Family Guy may be an extraordinarily smart pooch, but when it comes to their place in the animal kingdom, recent research shows that dogs may not be as smart as we often give them credit for. We'll explain in about half an hour from now. Plus the rehabilitation of marijuana takes a major step forward this week with its official legalization. It's a long way from the days of reefer madness.

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VOICE: Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.

CW: The CBC's Jeff Turner walks us through the history and future of marijuana and Canadian law. I'm Connie Walker filling in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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Canadian peacekeepers can accomplish 'very little' in Mali conflict, says expert

Guests: Adam Thiam, Oumar Barou Togola, Bruno Charbonneau

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VOICE: We are committed to contributing in ways that bring the most value to the UN mission in Mali. We believe it's important for Canada to play a role in peace operations around the world, but the safety of our men and women in uniform remains paramount during all operations.

CW: It's been three months now since about 250 Canadian Forces personnel were deployed to Mali to help in a peacekeeping operation there. And according to a new UN report on Mali, the situation on the ground has deteriorated significantly since then. It says that security in the western African country has dramatically worsened in recent months and the need for food and supplies has grown. Since June, Canadian troops have been flying in aid and medical help by helicopter to Mali, but life for everyday Malians continues to become more dangerous with each passing day. Adam Thiam is a freelance journalist and author of a book in French, called "The Center of Mali: The Making of a Neglected Crisis."He is in Bamako, Mali's capital. Hello.

ADAM THIAM: Good morning.

CW: How would you describe the security situation in Mali right now compared to three months ago?

AT: OK. Exactly I will try as the UN did, I mean if the security situation, both in the north and the center of the country is getting very, very serious. It's due to violent extremism. This has increased the last three months in the center of the country particularly, the center meaning the Mopti region, which is 600 kilometres from the capital city Bamako and the north of the region, which is just a three hour drive from the capital. And the kind of actions we have been experiencing for quite some time now, ambushes, ethnic clashes, anti-personnel devices, extrajudicial execution, it is very very serious.

CW: What is making the situation worse?

AT: We really don't know. I think the failure of the state to be able to fight the real jihadists, the area itself being a conflict prone area due to conflicts over lands or real production etc., the ethnic clashes and also the situation that I mean last crops have not been good. We had a very bad rainy season last year and you know it results in hunger and the very, very difficult situations for a country whose economy depends on cattle mobility for instance.

CW: So Canada we mentioned has peacekeeping troops in Mali who have been there for about three months now. Is their presence and that of other peacekeepers helping?

AT: Yeah I have read and seen, I did not have personal accounts from the field that the Canadian and the French troops etc., have been involved recently in humanitarian actions. I mean this is very well appreciated because on top of the jihadist threat, the people are also experiencing some very severe food shortage, health problems et cetera and I know that the Canadians and the French and the Dutch have been involved in trying to mitigate the humanitarian situation, as well as deploying troops around the villages so that I mean the jihadist groups would not get close to the population.

CW: So what help does Mali need?

AT: Mali need I think to develop for itself a strong capabilities of its own army. We also need some really good development plans, especially for the regions, which are now experiencing this insecurity. But also they need just a fair administration and a fair justice system because the situation is that I mean if people are now getting close to the jihadist group, it just means a failure of the modern democracy.

CW: All right, well thank you very much for joining us Adam. We appreciate it.

AT: Thank you.

CW: Adam Thiam is a freelance journalist. He was in Bamako, Mali. Among those keeping a close eye on the situation in Mali is Oumar Barou Togola. He is the founder and chairman of Farafena, a Canadian company that distributes food products grown by female farmers in Africa, including in Mali. He still has family, including his parents in Mali, some of them in the conflict zones. He's worried both for the farmers that work for him and for his family members. He joins us now from Vancouver. Hello.

OUMAR BAROU TOGOLA: Hello, Connie. Thank you for having me on the show.

CW: Well thanks for joining us. Oumar have you heard from your family in Mali recently? What are they telling you about the situation there?

OBT: I do. I do speak to my family on a daily basis. My parents currently live there. What I'm hearing from most of my family and relatives is a lack of opportunities right now in Mali. The young Malian that I've spoken with are eager to find investment opportunities. You know with this abundance of natural and agriculture resources, people are seeking to connect differently with the outside role in showcasing credible products Mali has to offer. So really to answer your question, the people of Mali and want to show how diverse, united and resilient we are and that's what you know they're not getting currently with all the things going on right now.

CW: Well the UN report talked about a deteriorating situation there, particularly in the last three months. Your parents live in the south, but have you, you also family in the north, which seems to have more conflict. Have their lives been different in the last three months?

OBT: Things have been different in Mali. The last three months of being, I mean been very hard, but really I could sit here and say that I'm concerned about the need for peacekeeping mission and the safety of the Malian people. But my biggest concern right now, you know as a son of this amazing country is that it's been you know looked as a warzone, but the real question aside from everything that's going on right now, is that what is currently going on in Mali? And encouraging information is that there are companies and organizations working at a grassroot level that are trying to improve the daily lives of everyday Malians.

CW: Well we mentioned your company in the in the intro that operates in Mali. Can you tell us about it?

OBT: Yes so Farafena, which means Africa in Bambara Dyula, the official language in Mali after French. We are an African-American North American company that works with women farmers in African villages to provide nutritious food to the world and the vision is very simple, to provide I mean to improve the lives of women in their communities in Africa, providing the opportunity to share their food with the world.

CW: How concerned are you for the women that you work with there?

OBT: Things are, I've been very you know blessed to be working with these amazing women. So let's take to two years ago, when we I mean two years ago when we started this company. We started with a group of 20 women and currently we work with over 850 women farmers in nine different villages and their lives have changed for the better. They have you know, it helps them achieve financial independence, which include earning above the national average. The women also are paid very fair wages. This time like micro businesses, build homes, educated children, so it's been incredible.

CW: But how has this conflict or this deteriorating situation affecting them?

OBT: The farmer, the part of Mali where we are currently, we have not seen any sort of you know major issues. I know I'm not physically in Mali, which actually I'm looking forward to. I'm going there in about three weeks with my family and we're looking forward to sitting down with these farmers to see what is going on and how we as a family can help them through all these difficult times.

CW: So this conflict has obviously been ongoing for a long time. How has it affected the country and its potential in your view?

OBT: I feel like you know the people of Mali are not being regarded, highly regarded at all. It's been unfair in a way because a lot of attention is being based on what is going on politically in Mali, instead of us actually focusing on the people that matter, the people of Mali, especially women farmers and women in general in Mali. I feel like if we were to invest our time and effort into women and the next generation you know this amazing country and this continent would be better off.

CW: So very quickly, what do you think the Western forces like the Canadians should be doing in Mali?

OBT: I feel like we need to connect with the people. We need to sit down with people and the people of Mali and have hard conversation. How do we make this country better, instead of you know deciding what's better for the country. I feel like it's good to have a good heartfelt conversation with the people of Mali, understanding you know core what is really going on.

CW: OK. Thank you very much for joining us, Oumar.

OBT: Thank you so much.

CW: Oumar Barou Togola is the founder of Farafena, a Canadian company that distributes food products grown by women in Mali. He is in Vancouver. When Canadian forces landed in Mali this summer, they knew it would be complicated and dangerous. Bruno Charbonneau specializes in the politics of African conflicts and is watching developments closely in Mali. He is Professor of International Studies at the Royal Military College in Saint Jean and director of the Centre FrancoPaix in conflict resolution at the University of Quebec in Montreal. And that's where we've reached him. Hello.

BRUNO CHARBONNEAU: Good morning, Connie.

CW: So we just got a sense of how entrenched this conflict is. But what do you make of the latest UN report that the conditions there are deteriorating?

BC: Well for those of us who have been studying and working on Mali and with Malians for a while, it's not news. These reports are regularly published and they've been basically saying the same thing that the security situation has been worsening since at least 2015. Having said that you know that situation is definitely getting worse every year. So it's not news, but at the same time we should take notice indeed.

CW: Can you help us understand the sources of the conflict. Why has it continued to get worse?

BC: Well at its core, I mean in 2012 and 13, really what we have is a continuing history of North-South confrontation and struggles. Rebels that allied themselves with more extremist groups that took over the territory of the north against the government of Mali for all sorts of political and economic reasons that we can go on and talk about if you want, but the conflict has evolved since then and as now, I think where most people are worried, I mean your first speaker talked about the centre of Mali and that's definitely where the situation has gotten really really worse since 2015. And that conflict or those conflict dynamics are much different than that North-South confrontation.

CW: How are they different?

BC: Well what we see is basically a retreat of the state. The state is not there to provide justice and some form of stability and security. The justice system is unable to accommodate for conflict resolution, basically traditional conflict resolution mechanisms are also being dismantled and so the community is fracturing along ethnic lines or other lines that make it very difficult to solve such communal conflicts. And so what we see is really dismantlement of social and political structures in a place where even the Malian army is sometimes seen as a potential enemy because it's been guilty of human rights abuses like last June, the UN found the army guilty of such abuses, after they were attacked by a group of related extremists. So the situation in the centre is much different than what the peace agreement of 2015 seeks to address, which is the North-South confrontation. And so you really have two sort of conflicts going on right now in Mali. The 2012-13 North-South conflict that is supposed to you know change through the peace agreement and then this sort of civil war going on in the centre of Mali. And the two are obviously related, they're not totally separated. The fact that in the centre the state has retreated has meant that some extremist groups, traffickers and others have used that opportunity to infiltrate or to in some cases provide services that state can't provide.

CW: So what has been the situation for Canadian peacekeepers since they arrived? What is the situation that they are facing in Mali?

BC: Well from what we know, I haven't been there yet. I'm hoping to go in early 2019, but talk to them, but basically they're just replacing the German that were based in Gao. That's a region in the south east of the northern region of Mali and Gao is very central. They're providing necessary means for the UN mission that is especially in terms of like copters and medical evacuation, that sort of thing. But you know, if you're asking me what the impact of Canadian contribution is to the UN peacekeeping mission, well it won't change much, given the fact that it doesn't have any impact on how the mission actually operates, much it's necessary for the mission, but it's business as usual for the UN mission.

CW: So there's been a lot of debate about what this mission should look like given the violence and the extremists. Can it be called peacekeeping?

BC: That's a really, really difficult question to answer because it's, you know Mali has become the place, the if you will conflict, upon which a lot of people debate about the future of UN peacekeeping in New York and elsewhere. The fact that the UN mission what some people don't know is that the UN mission is deployed in Mali alongside the French counterterrorist mission and there's also Sahel joint force that is trying to deploy as well. So you have two parallel operations in a sense, your peacekeeping mission and a counterterrorist mission. And these two are contradict each other at times because their objectives and their modes of operations are not the same. Peacekeepers are supposed to promote conflict resolution. They're supposed to provide minimum stability for Malians to actually talk to each other and find a political solution, while counterterrorism forces wage war against terrorists. So you have sometimes, you have a paradox basically in Mali that means that the peacekeeping mission is undermined sometimes by counterterrorist operations. And so the future of UN peacekeeping in Mali is indeed tied to that sort of parallel operation.

CW: So we asked the Department of National Defense if there has been any change to the 12 month mission and they said no. It is scheduled to be complete at the end of July 2019. What do you think can be accomplished between now and then?

BC: Oh very little, to be quite blunt and honest. Because like I said, it doesn't change the parameters of the mission. They're just replacing the Germans used to provide the helicopters needed for the UN peacekeeping mission. And if we are indeed retreating next summer, I mean we're almost you know a quarter through or what not, I mean what exactly are they doing right now? I'm sure some are already planning the exit strategy. And so it's kind of a weird contribution in that sense. Certainly very limited in its objectives, if you, you know you've put in all these efforts, all that pontification, all these soldiers on the ground and the people working in Ottawa to support them and that sort of thing and you get out after 12 months, that would be I think, I wouldn't say a waste, but that's probably too strong a word, but definitely a wasted opportunity to do more.

CW: Well Canada has also spent $60 million in emergency aid to Mali since 2012. Has that had any impact?

BC: Well of course it has. Some projects are fairly well known for those of us who work on Mali and they have you know their import and I don't want to undermine those projects, but $60 million is very little in terms of the overall challenges that the Malian state and Malian people face. I mean we're basically talking about rebuilding a democracy that collapsed more or less in 2012. The rebellion that started in January 2012 was followed by a coup d'etat in March by the Malian army. So you have to rebuild these structures, these institutions in Bamako, but you also have to somehow go to the centre of Mali and go to the north of Mali and convince people that these institutions and structures of the state are legitimate and that's not the case right now. People are fighting the state in some places. People reject state authority in the centre and in the north because they see it as, they see it as predatory in some places. So the challenges are huge and $60 million like I said, it's you know, you can't spit on that. It's definitely made an impact, but given the huge challenges that Mali faces it's small. It's a small commitment.

CW: OK we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us.

BC: Thank you.

CW: Bruno Charbonneau is a Professor of International Studies at the Royal Military College in Saint John. He is in Montreal. We requested an interview with the Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan, but he was not available.

[Music: Theme from The Littlest Hobo]

CW: The theme from The Littlest Hobo, the classic TV series starring man's best friend and one of the smartest animals of them all, a dog. But new research suggests that maybe canine cognition isn't quite as extraordinary as we've been led to think. That's after the CBC News. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

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New research suggests dogs aren't exceptionally smart

Guests: Stephen Lea, Daphna Buchsbaum

CW: Hello. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

CW: Still to come, this week the decades old laws against marijuana in this country will go up in smoke. It's a major shift in the law of the land. And if you've ever wondered just how marijuana came to be illegal in the first place, well the CBC's Geoff Turner, who hosts The On Drugs podcast, will bring us the history of marijuana prohibition. Coming up in half an hour. But first, rollover Rover. Why dogs might not be at the very head of the pack.

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[Dogs growling]

VOICE 1: You know where to get a rope, son?

VOICE 2: Yeah. You have a pencil and a piece of paper?

VOICE 1: Yeah.

VOICE 2: Here Lassie, take it to gramps.

VOICE 3: Gramps, man in well. Bring Rope. Jeff. That's Jeff's writing alright. Nobody else spells like that .

VOICE 4: C'mon girl.

VOICE 5: Get me out of here.

VOICE 1: We're waiting for a rope. You sure that dog understood son?

VOICE 2: Sure she did. Here he comes.

CW: If ever there was a smart dog, it was Lassie. In that 1955 episode, the clever Collie helped his young owner save a man who fell down a well. Lassie of course was the original genius dog, while Benji and the Littlest Hobo carried on his remarkable rescue missions over the decades. Today, a quick search for smart dogs on YouTube turns up an endless supply of canine feats.

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Sounds from Youtube dog videos

CW: Well it turns out we shouldn't be all that impressed with canine beverage collection and admittedly bad piano playing because a new study says dog intelligence isn't anything special. Stephen Lee did a review of 300 studies of cognition in dogs and related animals and found that dogs aren't any smarter than similar animals. In fact, he found researchers may be over interpreting dogs' abilities. Steven Lea is the former editor of the journal, Animal Cognition, and an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England. And that's where we've reached him. Hello.

STEPHEN LEA: Hello.

CW: So that clip was just a very small sampling of some of the impressive canine feats that you can find on YouTube. One owner had his puppy peeing in the toilet. Isn't that impressive?

SL: Yes, it's impressive. It's not, doesn't speak however very much to the question of intelligence in the sense in which we use it within the area of animal cognition because it's something that can be trained and a surprising variety of animals can be trained to do a surprising variety of things. And the techniques for doing that have been known, of course they've been known to practitioners for centuries, probably millennia. They've been known to science for a considerable time too. They aren't the criteria for intelligence.

CW: So walk us through your study review. What exactly were you looking at?

SL: We were looking at studies of dogs ability to solve a variety of different cognitive tasks and we were particularly interested in tasks where what you're looking at is the animal's spontaneous solution of the task without intervening training. I think that the Lassie case is a really interesting one and obviously it's fiction and entertainment, but there have been a number of experiments trying to find out whether dogs would spontaneously do things to help their owners or handlers if they got into difficulties. Now the results of those are not entirely consistent and they're certainly controversial, but the thrust of the data is that dogs don't spontaneously understand when an owner is in difficulty. But I have no doubt that you could train a dog to react to a particular kind of owner difficulty. In a very quick and effective way. The example that comes to my mind would be a dog owned by someone who used a wheelchair. It would be a straightforward matter I think, to train a dog to recognise the situation where the wheelchair had fallen over and to take the appropriate action and finding the nearest available human and getting them to come. And you could see, I think if you're a dog owner or dog trainer, how you would train that ability, but you'd be setting yourself up for disappointment if you thought that the dog would do it without any training.

CW: But this was also comparing dogs to other animals, right. What other animals were you examining?

SL: Well we looked at three broad groups of animals because there are three broad groups to which dogs belong. In the first place the most obvious thing biologically, is that dogs are member of what we call the mammalian order Carnivora, carnivores which includes cats. It also includes all the weasels and that sort of thing. It includes bears, it includes hyenas, obviously wolves and other very dog like things. Also, seals and sea lions. So that's the sort of biological family to which dogs belong, but they belong to a couple of other families as well. There's what we might call their ecological family, dogs themselves of course generally get their food out of a bowl, domesticated, companion or working dogs, but genetically speaking, dogs are very close to wolves. They've been descended from wolves or something very like the modern wolf, relatively recently. And wolves are quite unusual animals, in that they get their food by hunting cooperatively. They get together to chase after other creatures and in this way they can deal with creatures bigger than themselves, like caribou or something like that. And that's pretty unusual. And if you look at other animals that have that way of getting food, you come up with a few other dog like animals like the wild dog of Africa, the painted dog. And you also come up with chimpanzees, which is interesting. They're not and primarily chimpanzees and bonobos are fruity eaters, but they get a certain amount of their diet by group hunts of usually monkeys. You also come up with bottlenose dolphins and they're are a couple of interesting ones because they're both animals that we types of animals that we do think of as very.

CW: Very intelligent, right?

SL: Intelligent. And then there's.

CW: Sorry go ahead.

SL: There's a third group, which is interesting because obviously dogs are domestic animals and if you look at the other domestic animals that includes horses and it also includes pigs and goats and sheep, cats and a few odd things like chickens and pigeons. All those animals actually have been shown to be quite smart in certain ways. Yeah, sorry that was a long speech.

CW: No problem. So but I mean just in comparison to all of those other, some of the very intelligent animals, what did you find in terms of dogs? Are they any more or less impressive?

SL: No really where comparisons have been done. I want to come back some point to a case where a comparison that hasn't been done, which is a really really impressive dog achievement. But it's quite difficult to say is one animal more intelligent than another overall because what you usually find is that some sorts of tasks, one kind of animal does well and other sorts of tasks another kind of animal does well. Dogs have been shown in in recent years to be particularly good at some of the social tasks. They're good for example to interpreting human points, pointing, or following human games. And there are one or two tasks like that, where they even do better than chimpanzees, which is interesting. And those are tasks often where an element of cooperation is needed and you can see how you might get that from being descended from a co-operative hunter, whereas chimpanzees are a much much more competitive. On the other hand, there are tasks that dogs are really pretty poor at relative to other animals in these groups and these include what we call physical cognition tasks. For example there's really very little evidence that dogs can manage even with a lot of training using tools. Whereas, famously of course chimpanzees use tools in the wild. Jane Goodall's studies showing they fished termites out of nests using straws are well known, though actually long before Jane Goodall's studies, we had information that some species of monkey use stones to crack open shellfish and actually interestingly, there's one other carnivores that does that naturally too. Another famous animal, the sea otter, famous for being almost unbearably cute and they will get stones and use them to crack open clams.

CW: So maybe we've been underestimating the intelligence of other animals, but you're not saying that dogs aren't smart or that they're dumb. Obviously.

SL: We're certainly not saying that dogs are dumb and I think you're right that our thrust is more on saying that we haven't realized that there are plenty of other animals out there that are actually very smart indeed. And of course we focus a lot on dogs. They are very convenient for people like me to study because there's a lot of them around and you don't have to keep them in a laboratory or a zoo to study them. Unlike for example working with bears, an interesting animal, but it's challenging to work with them.

CW: Alright, well thank you very much for walking us through those interesting findings. Professor Stephen Lea is the former editor of the journal, Animal Cognition, and an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England. Thanks for joining us. As you heard from Professor Lea, there's a wealth of research out there looking into the cognitive abilities of dogs and some of it's being done right here in Canada. In fact, a small basement space at the University of Toronto is a hub of canine research activity. It's part of the university's Canine Cognition Lab, where members of the public bring their furry friends to help scientists understand just how dogs think. Our producer Alice Masemann took a trip there to see a golden retriever named Loki in action.

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VOICE 1: Loki come here. He's like, but she's got all the cookies, right. yeah. Sit.

VOICE 2: Hi, I'm Dr. Daphna Buchsbaum. I'm an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto and I'm the principal investigator of the Canine Cognition Lab at the university, as well as the Computational Cognitive Development Lab.

VOICE 3: My name is Julia Espinosa. I am a PhD student in the Department of Psychology.

VOICE 1: I'm Melanie Mascarenhas and I'm an undergraduate student here at U of T and I'm also the lab manager for the dog lag. So containment is a short series of exercise and this time the treats are not going to be visible. So we're interested in seeing if whether or not dogs are able to have the same level of success searching for treats when we hide them in different ways. Yeah that's scary. Sit.

VOICE 1: So we became interested in this because hiding, it sounds silly, but hiding treats in cups is just a very common method people use and we thought wait a minute, how are dogs' reasoning about inside and under versus behind.

VOICE 3: I'm not making eye contact with him. And then as I pick the cups up, since this is a containment condition, I want to turn them over to make sure that the dog is aware that I'm not starting out with anything in the container to begin with. Then I put them down, show my hands to make sure that I have let go of the treat. There's nothing in them. Hands on my knees and I say OK, give them a cue to go. And I take the other plate away so he's not allowed to search exhaustively, otherwise he's just getting a treat either way. And if he did get the right one, which he did the last time, then he would get the treat and know that he made the right choice. Good job. You got it. He's a very good boy, as you can see.

CW: That's a small taste of the experiments going on at the University of Toronto's Canine Cognition Lab, Daphna Buchsbaum, the lab's principal investigator joins me now in studio to talk more about the work and explore why dog owners are so keen to find out whether their own best friend might also have superior intelligence. Hello.

DAPHNA BUCHSBAUM: Hi. Thanks for having me here.

CW: So we heard some of your work there, including an experiment on containment. Tell me more about what that tells us about a dog's cognitive ability.

DB: Yeah, well so, one of the areas of dog's cognition that we're currently exploring is a variety of studies looking at what's often referred to as intuitive physics. So animals understanding of the behaviours of objects and their environment. Do they understand that physical objects are solid and can't pass through other objects? Do they understand that objects continue to exist even when they go out of view and does that change depending how they go out of view? And so this is actually something that come from work on infants, where it's been seen that.

CW: Object permanence.

DB: Yeah exactly. But there's sort of some nuances to it that for instance, infants can understand that an object can vanish behind another object, before they fully understand that it can go inside a hollow container. Right? You can sort of see how that's a more sophisticated concept and we went to see if that was the case for dogs as well.

CW: Is it?

DB: That work is actually still ongoing, but it seems like it may be. So dogs seem to be able to reason about those kinds of object permanence, but it may be more challenging for them to reason about a container than to reason about one object behind another.

CW: So what are the challenges in doing that kind of research, like how hard is it to get reliable data from dogs in that kind of setting?

DB: Yeah well I think Melanie and Julia actually did a great job touching on some of the challenges. So one thing is and this comes from Stephen's research paper as well is that dogs are very attuned to us as humans, right. And so when we present a problem to them, we want to make sure that they're solving the problem we think they're solving. So you may have heard of Clever Hans. He's a well-known horse from a period in history. He was known for doing mathematics, that's why he was clever. And it turns out the Clever Hans was clever, but he was particularly clever at was reading human social cues. He read very subtle cues that even his owner didn't realise he was giving, that allowed him to figure out the mathematical solution and that's the kind of thing we actually want to avoid.

CW: So he wasn't doing math, but he was reading the faces of the people who were asking the questions.

DB: He was reading very subtle cues for when he was giving the correct mathematical answer, exactly. So we try to avoid giving the same kind of cues. I guess another challenge is actually that owners are very very eager to understand their dogs cognition and intelligence. And we are studying dogs as a species to sort of understand what their abilities are as a group, not the intelligence of individual dogs. So when we bring dogs into the lab, we're really interested in seeing what they can accomplish and that might mean that they're not going to succeed on the task we're presenting them with. And so we want to make sure that people understand that that's okay and it's not a reflection of their individual dog's capabilities.

CW: So I mean just give us a sense of how many dogs would you typically study for one project and would you test a variety of breeds?

DB: Yeah actually that's another important challenge, which is the amazing variability of dogs. They come in so many breeds and sizes and have so many different kinds of training histories and we try to sample a range. And so all adult dogs are welcome for studies in our lab and actually we may be starting some for puppies as well. And for a typical study you know it really depends, but we might run as many as 100 dogs in a given study, so we're always looking for more participants.

CW: So what do you think of the research that we just heard from Stephen Lea. What does it add to our knowledge about dog intelligence?

DB: Yeah well so I think it's a really great paper and one thing I think that it highlights is the way in which our studies are often very human centric. We often ask questions about how dogs and other animals think like us or the ways in which they're different from us and his paper really broadens that perspective by asking, well how are animal minds like other animal minds, right? Dogs are domestic animals who live with us in our day to day environment, but they're also carnivores and they're also social hunters. And by looking at other animals like chimpanzees and dolphins and others, we can learn more about what generates dog's behaviour.

CW: And so do you feel like there's been too much or there has been previously been too much emphasis on how they're more like humans or how we're trying to understand how they're like us?

DB: Yeah I think you know that's a natural way that we as humans tend to look at the world and it's also often an easy way to justify the research. Right? We can tell people well we're studying dog behaviour or animal minds in general, to understand ourselves. But I think it's important you know and I think probably dog owners have the same intuition, that understanding dog cognition is also interesting in its own right. Right? We want to understand how dogs think like dogs, not just how dogs think like humans.

CW: Is there such a thing as emotional intelligence in dogs, as like a distinct category that should be studied?

DB: Well you know that's an interesting question and I think it touches on this idea of you know what does it mean for an animal to be intelligent. And you know, even as humans we have an understanding that you can succeed and be accomplished in different ways. Right? That one person might have more empathy, while another person might have more problem solving ability. And I think that's certainly true across animals as well. And again, one of the ways in which we're maybe somewhat focused on humans is we often judge animals intelligence by the kinds of things that we feel like make you a smart person. But of course animals can accomplish all sorts of tasks that we can't accomplish in humans and maybe that's another kind of important intelligence.

CW: So you're obviously always interacting with dog and dog owners and when they have definite ideas about their own dogs intelligence and then bring them into your lab. Are they usually right?

DB: You know it's funny I think that, maybe I shouldn't say this on the air, but dog owners often have very strong intuitions about their dogs intelligence and they go both ways. So we have people both saying my dog is really smart you know and giving us all sorts of anecdotes about the problems they've solved and also people who often tell us you don't want my dog in your studies. My dog is not that bright. And this isn't something we've officially studied, but just anecdotally it doesn't seem like there's necessarily a correlation between how smart the owner thinks their dog is and how well the dog does on a given task that we present to them.

CW: That's interesting. So maybe it says something about the owners as well.

DB: Yeah you know there may be an interesting study there about what makes an owner perceive that their dog is intelligent and again actually, maybe that's social or emotional intelligence. Right? Maybe those dogs are more attuned to the behaviour of their owners.

CW: That's right. Well thanks very much for coming in to join us and talk about this.

DB: Thanks for having me.

CW: Daphna Buchsbaum is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at its Canine Cognition Lab. Well tonight in Ottawa, The Current is going into the weeds, as Anna Maria Tremonti hosts a town hall on cannabis legislation in Canada. Cannabis legalization in Canada. The conversation will explore the complex picture of regulation across the country and to help paint that picture, Current producer, Geoff Turner, has put together some pot facts from across the country. Here's a sample.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The Northwest Territories is the place to be if you want one stop shopping for your altered states. Most of the country seems worried about you getting your psychoactive chocolate in your peanut butter, but not the NWT. The government will sell you cannabis, right alongside the booze at most of its government liquor stores, provided you're 19. But folks, keep the rules in mind when you're driving home with your bag of fun. While in a vehicle, cannabis products must be in enclosed packaging and not within reach of the vehicle driver or occupants. It's just too tempting. That said, you're all good to burn that fatty on the icy trails and roadways of the territories, as long as you're not in a vehicle. Back to you Connie.

CW: Well thanks. Hear more about what marijuana legalization will look like across the country, as The Current goes into the weeds. If you're in the Ottawa area, join the conversation in person, tonight at the Museum of Nature starting at 7pm. It's free. Visit our website to reserve tickets. Go to cbc.ca/thecurrent and tune in on Wednesday. We'll broadcast the event here on the show. Coming up in just a few minutes, we'll have more from The Current's Geoff Turner. He is our guide on marijuana's long strange trip through the Canadian Criminal Code, from prohibition to legalization in just a few days. I'm Connie Walker and you were listening to The Current.

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The ban on cannabis in Canada is ending — do you know how it started?

Guests: Geoff Turner

CW: I'm Connie Walker, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. The date is fast approaching. Recreational marijuana will officially become legal in Canada on Wednesday, marking the end of 95 years of cannabis prohibition. Goeff Turner is a producer here at The Current and was the host of the CBC original podcast, On Drugs. Last February, the podcast examined marijuana's long road from prohibition to legalization. And Geoff spoke to Anna Maria about that sometimes sordid history on this program. With the countdown to legalization now down to T-minus 2 days, we thought it would be worth revisiting their conversation. Here are The Current's, Anna Maria Tremonti and Goeff Turner.

AMT: So we're just months away from legalization and while everyone is talking about the end of an era and looking for the future you're looking back investigating the roots of cannabis prohibition.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes I am. Because I think even if people have a sense of why pot is being legalized now, the story of why it was prohibited in the first place is not as widely known.

AMT: So how did cannabis come to be outlawed in the first place?

GEOFF TURNER: Usually I think when governments go to the trouble of making something illegal, like say lawn darts, it's because that thing is creating problems like poking out eyes.

AMT: Lawn darts. What? They were banned what, in the eighties, after a bunch of injuries.

GEOFF TURNER: Sometimes governments want to signal something politically to register concern or revulsion. But in this case as near as anyone can tell at the time cannabis was added to the list of banned substances in 1923, it was a non-issue as a recreational drug in Canada.

AMT: And what do you mean a non-issue?

GEOFF TURNER: According to the historians I spoke to, most Canadians had probably never heard of it and they certainly had no access to it as a drug.

AMT: So why was it banned?

GEOFF TURNER: .And there are a couple of different versions to this story. One that's been popular for a long time among marijuana activists especially, gives the credit or blame to a woman named Emily Murphy.

AMT: The Canadian suffragette Emily Murphy.

GEOFF TURNER: The very same Emily Murphy. She's finally remembered as one of the famous fine of a group of Canadian suffragettes. In 1929 they fought and won the right to have women declared persons under the law. She's also believed to have been the first female judge in the British Empire. So on the one hand she's this accomplished credible person.

AMT: And there is always a but.

GEOFF TURNER: Murphy is less fondly remembered for her support of eugenics and forced sterilization. She also wrote a very problematic book about drugs called The Black Candle.

AMT: Why problematic?

GEOFF TURNER: Well the book was essentially a collection of articles about drugs that had already been published in McClain's magazine over the previous decade. There was stuff about cocaine and some other drugs but most of it dealt with the scourge of opium and her fears about that drug were all bundled up with some pretty racist depictions of the role of Chinese Canadians in the drug trade, worries about white slavery and the idea that white women were especially vulnerable to the nefarious Chinese pushers.

AMT: What did she have to say about marijuana?

GEOFF TURNER: Well not very much actually. There is one seven page chapter on cannabis titled Marijuana the New Menace and I'll read you a choice passage from that. This is a quote that Murphy attributes to the then chief of Los Angeles police who said: "Persons using this narcotics smoked the dried leaves of this plant which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Well in this condition they become raving maniacs who are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility".

AMT: And this about marijuana?

GEOFF TURNER: Yes. Does that sound at all familiar to you?

AMT: She's writing this in what year?

GEOFF TURNER: 1922.

AMT: What does the public conversation about marijuana at this point?

GEOFF TURNER: Well more or less non-existent. So the popular history is that Canadians including policymakers get hold of this sensational book by Emily Murphy and they all rush out to ban cannabis.

AMT: Is that true?

GEOFF TURNER: Well according to University of Guelph Historian Catherine Carstairs the truth is probably a little more dry and bureaucratic than that.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Certainly she spearheaded a moral panic about drug use. But it was a 400 page book and this one seven page chapter about marijuana in it. I don’t think that was the deciding factor. What happened was cannabis discussion at international meetings that were being held and I think Canada came away from those meetings and that 'well, okay, this might not be much of an issue in Canada but clearly there is a problem elsewhere and so we'd be better off just adding it to the schedule now'. So there is virtually no discussion or debate around cannabis to the schedule of restricted drugs.

GEOFF TURNER: So Anna Maria as much as I love the story of a dodgy piece of propaganda capturing the hearts and minds of Canadians and their leaders. It actually doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

AMT: Too bad the facts massing up a story do that.

GEOFF TURNER: I know.

AMT: So interesting. So what sort of effect did prohibition have?

GEOFF TURNER: Well funnily enough when you ban something that nobody is actually using, nothing much happens. In fact the first conviction for cannabis possession wasn't until 1937, so 14 years after the drug was criminalized. And for even four decades after that there were rarely more than a couple of dozen cannabis arrests in a year. As late as 1961 there were only 21 police reported cannabis offences in all of Canada.

AMT: But we know it didn't stay that way forever. So what changed?

GEOFF TURNER: Well one thing that really changed is the policy on the south of our border. From 1930 on the US was at war against cannabis Harry J. Anslinger was the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 32 years and he was kind of obsessed with the stuff. He fed the media these lurid and violent stories of marijuana users gone wild.

AMT: And you've got examples of that?

GEOFF TURNER: Well he favoured tales that implicated Mexican migrant workers or anything that had any kind of undercurrent of interracial sex. These stories get really wide play in American papers and magazines. This is also the era of films like Reefer Madness and Assassin of Youth films that we know played in Canada and got the tacit support of Anslinger and his crew. And here's a little bit of the theatrical trailer for Reefer Madness.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: These high school boys and girls are having a hop at a local soda fountain. Innocently they dance - innocent of a new and deadly menace lurking behind closed doors: Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.

AMT: The burning weed with its roots in hell!

GEOFF TURNER: It's a really subtle approach. And in case people think that this picture of marijuana use was just a product of an American propaganda machine, I want to play a little clip from CBC Radio. This was originally broadcast on February 13th, 1959 on a program called Assignment and I want you to pay special attention to the framing of this first question.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Well now the beatniks of San Francisco and New York have frequently been damned as the worthless riffraff of the farther out bohemians rather lazy wastrels who smoke marijuana and indulge in orgies, this is the popular concept, is this at all true?

VOICE 2: Oh yes certainly.

AMT: Well that is a loaded question, eh. That is on CBC, 1959.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes. I think the T-test not to frame questions in quite that way, these days.

AMT: And to call people lazy wastrels, yes.

GEOFF TURNER: I find that clip fascinating for a couple of reasons. Obviously that question is a zinger for one but you also hear marijuana being associated with a counter culture and a rejection of conventional values. That tape from 1959 so we're about to enter the decade when everything changed and for a sense of that I talked to Susan Boyd. She's the author of Busted: An Illustrated History of Drug Prohibition in Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think you could say that it was in some ways a rejection of consciousness or what would be called conventional consciousness and an exploration of altered states of conscienceless.

GEOFF TURNER: And Susan Boyd says that that desire for altered consciousness went along with some other big factors. People were travelling internationally in large numbers for the first time and having exotic experiences abroad, maybe bringing a little something home with them like drugs. And of course you have this huge generation of young people, the baby boomers with time and money on their hands. So nearly 40 years after it is outlawed Canadians started to actually discover marijuana.

AMT: And how did the law respond to that?

GEOFF TURNER: Well at last there was enough marijuana actually being used to make use of the law. As late as 1964 there were only 39 arrests for cannabis possession in all of Canada but by 1967 that number was up to 431 and by 1971 there were 8,389 police reported incidents involving cannabis.

AMT: So some would see that as a late vindication of prohibition.

GEOFF TURNER: Right, depending on how you view the social cost of marijuana. Absolutely and those cannabis related arrest numbers might have been broadly seen as an appropriate response, except for who was getting arrested.

AMT: And who was getting arrested?

GEOFF TURNER: Well if these were in fact the murderous sex fiends that Emily Murphy and Harry J. Anslinger imagined that would be one thing but according to Susan Boyd that's not at all who was getting busted.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think eventually parents across Canada felt that their children were being treated unfairly. I mean these are families that had never heard encounters with criminal justice before and it frightened them at that time that their child for one joint to two joints of cannabis could be sent to prison.

GEOFF TURNER: Keep in mind that up to this point a lot of anti-marijuana propaganda associated the drug was socially and racially marginalized people.

AMT: That's really important. So it's one thing when it's dangerous beatniks and people love colour. And another thing when it's the good white kids from the so-called nice families.

GEOFF TURNER: Essentially, yes. I found something again in the CBC archives that demonstrates how this reckoning was going on in public. This is from 1969.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The CBC explores controversial areas of education, visiting Canadian high schools. Today from York Mills Collegiate, Willowdale Ontario, our topic is drugs and the teenagers, with It's Debatable regular moderator Elwi Yost.

[Applause]

Kate Levitt is the use of drugs is really widespread or not among teenagers, particularly high school teenagers?

The opinions range from about 40 percent to 60 percent of high school students have tried marijuana once and are perhaps regular users.

I can only talk from my own experience but the number of kids that I have met that take grass is just phenomenal. Like athletes too. [Laughter] Supposed straights are like doing grass now.

AMT: I don't know where to start with one Geoff, the [unintelligible] and on the CBC so serious have had those bad teenagers.

GEOFF TURNER: Amazing isn't it.

AMT: Really.

GEOFF TURNER: Remember the contrast with that tape about the beatniks how that place marijuana use way at the fringes of society. Here we are 10 years later, York Mills Collegiate and we're trying to get a handle on just how many middle class kids are smoking weed.

AMT: So how did policymakers respond to all of this?

GEOFF TURNER: Yes well almost immediately the government of Pierre Trudeau moved to address what they saw as a big problem. The same year that clip from York Mill's collegiate 1969 the government formed the Commission of Inquiry into the none medical use of drugs which we now know better as the Ledain commission. This was a response to the general explosion of drug use among young people, LSD, speed, heroin, cocaine but a lot of the attention was paid to cannabis. The commission published several interim report but the one from 1972 really created a stir.

AMT: So what were the findings from that commission?

GEOFF TURNER: Well I read from the list of recommendations on cannabis because that's what's important to us here. It read: "The cost to a significant number of individuals, the majority of whom are young people into society generally have a policy of prohibition of simple possession are not justified by the potential for harm of cannabis and the additional influence which such a policy is likely to have upon perception of harm demand and availability. We therefore recommend the repeal of the prohibition against the simple possession of cannabis". So that's not legalization in the sense that we're about to see in Canada in 2018 but that was pretty bold language in 1972.

AMT: Sure sounds like it. The government gets this report with that language, how does it respond?

GEOFF TURNER: Well in the grand Canadian tradition the government thank the commissioners for their excellent work and then they put the report on the shelf and they basically ignored it.

AMT: So nothing changed.

GEOFF TURNER: Nothing significant. And for many marijuana to us this marks the beginning of the dark ages. So you remember in 1971 there were a little more than 8000 police reported cannabis offences. Well six years later the number was 50,168. And except for a dip towards the late 80s and early 90s that's roughly around the number that it would remain per year up to the present day.

AMT: So how do we get from that to the verge of legalization now in 2018?

GEOFF TURNER: Well I have to narrow it a little bit here and it would be very hard to tell this story quickly without giving short shrift to a lot of people who have been fighting for legalization for a long time. But there are two people that we have to hear from. One of them is the BC lawyer John Conroy. One of his colleagues told me that he has probably argued more marijuana cases than any other Canadian lawyer. I can't verify that but I know he's done a lot.

AMT: And when does John Conroy enter the picture?

GEOFF TURNER: Well coincidentally he started practicing law in 1972, the very same year the Ledain commission recommended the decriminalization of possession of cannabis and pretty quickly he started taking a lot of cases of young people in trouble for pot.

AMT: And so he becomes an activist.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes. And in 1978 he helped charter the group NORML Canada the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. And the stated mandate of the group is to eliminate all civil and criminal penalties for private marijuana use through government lobbying, public education, research and legislative and judicial challenges.

AMT: And I think I know the answer to this but how successful were they?

GEOFF TURNER: Well it's hard to calculate the incremental effect of what they were trying to do but on a case by case basis it was a very tough slog. He wound up having to find novel legal arguments including this one involving the 1993 arrest of a BC man that made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: A fellow called Randy Caine approached me and he had been at the beach at White Rock with a friend and they got in the car, and an officer came to the side of the car and because he'd seen him smoking a joint and busted in for simple possession. So Randy came to me and wanted to challenge the law. So we said well John Stuart Mill said that you know you shouldn't be - I am paraphrasing - using the criminal law, the big stick for something that's not causing any harm to others. You should reserve the criminal law for important serious things. Unfortunately at the end of the day the Supreme Court of Canada didn't agree so they upheld the constitutionality of the law. But they made it pretty clear in their judgement. They've summarized of the lack of evidence of and work there was and what there was in turn also repeated a couple of times you know Parliament can easily undo this.

GEOFF TURNER: So basically Anna Maria the majority opinion said nice try with your fancy John Stuart Mill references but it's really up to Parliament to decide what kinds of harms are tolerable in society.

AMT: So what changed the political calculation for Justin Trudeau and the liberals?

GEOFF TURNER: Well this is where it gets really interesting to me because it's at least partly thanks to a teenage girl from West Vancouver named Hilary Black. In the early days she just wanted to be a dead head.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: My dad made me promise that I would wait till I graduated high school before I went away on Grateful Dead to her and as soon as I graduated from high school I took off and went to a bunch of Grateful Dead shows and I learned about hemp and about how hemp could save the planet. Hemp for fuel, hemp for fiber, hemp for fun, hemp for nutrition, hemp for medicine.

GEOFF TURNER: So Hillary was keen and when she came back from a tour she started hanging around hemp B.C a store which had just opened in 1995 and she hung around there until they hired her and it was during this time that Hillary made a crucial connection.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There was an older women who used to call the store all the time with her questions about medical cannabis and she was bed ridden with pretty serious arthritis and eventually she wanted to try it. So she was the first person that I ever really gave cannabis to. And I went over to her apartment and she buzzed me in and then I climbed up on her bed with her and I rolled a joint and we smoked it together. She was like a block and as the effects of the joint sunk in she became like a cat, like a cat stretching is what I mean. And in that moment I saw like a big wall and one side is this plant and on the other side is this ocean of people that are suffering and that their suffering can be affected by breaking down that wall.

GEOFF TURNER: So Anna Maria I don't want to get into the relative merits of medical marijuana here, that's a whole other complicated question. Lots of debate to come. But Hillary black just describe what many people advocate as the therapeutic use of cannabis.

AMT: Hmm. And that becomes the political driver.

GEOFF TURNER: Yeah and it's not completely obvious at first but at this point very few people are talking about the possible health benefits. It's 1996 and Hillary does some hemp related travel to Amsterdam in California and she comes home with a fire in her belly about the potential for marijuana as medicine. And in this next clip you're going to hear an important word that I want you to listen for.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Back then in the mid nineties HIV and hepatitis C were being transmitted at epidemic rates in Vancouver and probably the first 100 or 150 people that I was distributing cannabis to were mostly all from the HIV and AIDS community. So they would take me out to their events and pass out my flyers and introduce me to whatever politicians were out at the events that they were taking me to and I remember my like four differing big jars of cannabis, then I officially opened my doors and that was May 1st, 1997.

GEOFF TURNER: So Hillary is describing the origins of the Compassion Club the first medical marijuana dispensary in Canada. And you probably caught the important word in there Anna Maria.

AMT: I think it's the word politicians.

GEOFF TURNER: Exactly. So right from the beginning, barely out of high school Hillary black recognized that whatever the social and medical implications of the Compassion Club it was fundamentally a political endeavour. Then for a long time some people thought that what she was doing was weird but then she noticed attitude started to change.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So my grandma when she would go to the yacht club or go to bridge her friends would say to her 'oh I saw that pot dealing granddaughter of yours in the newspaper again,' and there was some stigma around it and then David Suzuki and The Nature of Things did a special on my Compassion Club. And that was a absolute landmark moment for us in terms of shifting the acceptance and the stigma around the work that were doing. Now my grandma's friends were saying to her 'Ah! I saw your granddaughter on The Nature of Things with David Suzuki.

AMT: Oh my goodness so the interviews change on the CBC [laughs].

GEOFF TURNER: Yes and the next thing you know Hillary has members of the Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs touring the Compassion Club.

AMT: So suddenly she's getting the political attention that marijuana activists have been longing for.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes and so where most of the big court battles for marijuana rights had gone nowhere, for proponents of medical marijuana it was one legal victory after the next. And I should mentioned also that John Conroy who was involved in a lot of these battles as well. He was actually Hillery's go to lawyer and he chartered the Compassion Club.

AMT: So eventually these winds around medical marijuana shift the political landscape.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes. Hillary and others normalise the idea of cannabis as medicine and the courts affirmed that.

AMT: But still that was 20 years ago, Geoff.

GEOFF TURNER: That's true but you may remember Paul Martin's government had plans for decriminalization that died when parliament was dissolved. So they got close. And even under Stephen Harper's Conservatives who were opposed to legalization, the legal momentum for medical marijuana just kept building.

AMT: To the point where Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party actually campaigned on a promise to legalize marijuana when they get to power.

GEOFF TURNER: And Canadians elected them and here we are. This legislation that were we're looking at now is essentially based on the same calculation that the Dean commission arrived at 45 years ago that the harms associated with marijuana don't warrant criminal penalty.

AMT: So you've given us a picture of a couple of key players on the road from prohibition to legalization. What happens to them once the legal battle is no longer there to fight?

GEOFF TURNER: The people that I spoke to have certainly landed on their feet. Hillary Black is now the director of patient education and advocacy at Canopy Growth. If that name sounds familiar it's because Canopy is Canada's biggest licensed marijuana producer. Just for perspective, Constellation Brands this is the company that owns Corona beer and my Modelo beer, they bought a 10 per cent stake in Canopy for 245 million dollars.

AMT: Big business now. What about John Conroy? Doesn't legalization mean that he's essentially fought himself out of a job?

GEOFF TURNER: You would think so. Not according to him. When John and I parted ways he gave me his card which now reads International Cannabis Consultants Ltd. He'd recently been to a cannabis Expo and after seeing the vast array of vendors he thinks the future is bright.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: This is really the sort of interesting quote from the days of coming in from Los Angeles, bringing in a couple of kids was the Arlo Guthrie line if you remember to walking around in there is these booths and there is all of these products; pet treats and all these things. A huge industry. There are going to have to somehow be brought in and they're going to need lawyers like me to help them do it [laughs].

AMT: It sounds pretty optimistic about their job prospects there but it really does underline how big an industry it already has.

GEOFF TURNER: Yes and I think he's well positioned for that. It's a brave new world and he's been a part of that for a long time.

AMT: So fascinating Geoff Turner thank you.

GEOFF TURNER: My pleasure Anna Maria.

CW: That's The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti and Geoff Turner speaking on the program in February. And we have an update as well. Goeff just mentioned how large an industry marijuana has become and how one of the major players in Canada is canopy growth. While alcohol heavyweight Constellation Brands announced over the summer, that it will be upping its ownership stake in canopy growth and its investment to the tune of $5 billion. Marijuana it seems has hit the big leagues. And if you're in the Ottawa area tonight, join Anna Maria as The Current goes into the weeds. It's a free event at the Museum of Nature, starting at 7pm. Visit our website to reserve tickets at cbc.ca/thecurrent. And tune in on Wednesday, the day that recreational marijuana becomes legal in Canada. We'll broadcast the event here on The Current. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Today, members of the Polaris Prize winning Toronto hardcore band, F'ed Up will be on the show. And remember, you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again or listen live to your local CBC station, right from your smartphone or tablet. It's free from the App Store and Google Play. Finally today, after our discussion of the history of marijuana prohibition and its upcoming legalization, here's a song that might just sum up some people's celebrations later this week. It's Reefer and Champagne performed live by the Rolling Stones with Muddy Waters. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Champagne & Reefer" by the Rolling Stones and Muddy Waters]

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October 15, 2018 episode transcript

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