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Canada has an extensive and deeply ingrained drug culture
<discuss>

Rich.

I think this depends on how 'drug culture' is defined.

To be honest, I don't think many Canadians (at least Canadians I know) really consider marijuana to be a drug anymore than they would consider beer to be a drug. Obviously there are Canadian who do but personally, I think of pot as just beer in herbaceous form that you inhale rather than drink and I don't equate the abundance of pot and pot-related shops, political parties, paraphenalia, etc... as really a part of "drug culture" anymore than beer commercials are.

There is definitely a cannabis culture though but I see that as different than ''drug culture' - at least as how I would define drug culture.

Beer (like all forms of drinking alcohol) is a drug, just as nicotine is a drug. The only differences between the those two and cannabis\marijuana\pot\weed whatever you want to call it, is over 50% of research shows pot to be less addictive and less harmful to health. Oh and of course the western world (govts and big business) makes more from alcohol and tobacco.

(yes I drink and I smoke and so yes I'm a drug user)

Where would 24 hour petrol stations be without it?

The other major difference is that alcohol and nicotine are legal

Marijuana is illegal in Toronto like exceeding the speed limit in a car is illegal. We're not great smokers, a quarter lasts us three months and I haven't lit up for a year and a half, but we always have some weed for visitors; the accountant, my colleagues, one of my daughters and so on. If we go to the pub, any of the local pubs, there's always a joint on offer. In our champagne socialist corner of town tobacco smoking is a greater taboo than marijuana.

Oddly enough, this is true of much of the US as well, I've brought weed back from Florida (a shrink wrapped brick), Texas and California as trinkets for friends and family and last summer we brought back my virtual-mother-in-law's Vietnam era paraphernalia as an heirloom.

In North America marijuana use is common but to some extent it's of an era, something more popular among people of an age. We might liken it to bitter in the UK, not an old person's drink like stout or mild but not fashionable among the louts of today either.

An interesting point that I'll add is that in this country (England), tobacco was illegal because of the health problems it caused and the addiction, until the King of England realised the amount of tax he could collect on it. It is only hundreds of years later that we are daring to even think of slowly reversing that.

Money is power

Is that true?

Over here the face of smoking weed is very much changed from what it was when I first started smoking the stuff, twenty or so years ago. Then it was very much the thing that students, hippies and "pot-heads" did (pretty obvious for the last example I'd have thought) and was fairly underground.
Nowadays unfortunately it's very much part of the scally/chav/ned image. Many of the morons parade around joint in hand or behind the ear and have some marijuana associated bling - a "weed sovereign" or something like that - which leads to the question: why are they such troublecausers?! In my day, getting stoned involved very much being sat at home with friends or on my own watching some bizarre video or listening to some chill-out tunes. We were never went and hung out around shops and harrassed the public. But that's a whole other debate.
The "people of a certain age" still smoke, but in lesser numbers and are very quiet about it - if anything, it's gone further underground. Any sort of 'cannabis culture' seems to be more fragmented than it used to be.
I've not really smoked for a couple of years now, more due to supply problems than anything else, but to be honest it's an aspect of my life in Canada that, sad as it may sound, I'm quite looking forward to! I've not been stoned for ages.

I think it's true but then I may be observing a strange crowd.

The age group I see smoking the stuff on a daily basis is 13 - 35. Admittedly, this is because of what I do, but smoking that junk is, as always, an door opener for the other crap that the kids end up doing. Hey..look..smoking a doobie did me no harm, pass the crystal meth and I'll try a point of that. Practically all the child addicts I work with started with marijuana, almost without exception.

I expect they all played on swings and rode in strollers as well. It doesn't follow that all stroller users will graduate to crystal meth.

This gateway drug theory has gained a lot of ground. And the criminality of access to so called soft drugs in my experience does at least bring users into contact with "harder" drugs. However I think the problem is with the addict in the first place and they would probably self medicate with whatever they could get there hands on, the underlying issues which led to this self distructive behaviour are the problem. I've never met a problem user who did not have some trauma in early life.
From my experience with users and personal use the hardcore drinkers were in the worst state from the drug. Other class A users generally had problems with criminality and poor drug quality etc
Canadians do seem to drink large quantities but I've never witnessed the problems associated back home, better social filters I guess.
This area of life here is a definite bonus plus not witnessing the constant shouting/abuse of parents in the UK towards their offspring, which is probably an indicator of the poor parenting skills a lot of us posses.

the same probelms are here, its just that most Canadians drink at home rather than in bars...

and your average 'piss head' here is not found wandering the streets looking for a fight...
but more often found driving his pick-up truck!

Like I said, people drinking at home and pissed up pick-up drivers are not problems I need to have much contact with, obviously if I get hit by one it could be problematic.
To my shame I was once one of these oafs wandering the streets looking for grief, a long time ago before a generation was weaned on alco-pops.