WARMINGTON: Welcome to Toronto: The Good Stuff

For the first time in Toronto’s history, stoners will be able to score their pot on Queen West without fear of being busted.

As of Monday, you’ll be able to legally purchase your pot in stores as lawfully as you can your chips, pretzels and cheezies for when the munchies set in.

And, just three blocks away, heroin and crack addicts will still be able to get their needles and pipe kits at the city’s safe injection site office in Dundas Square.

No April Fools day prank. The lineups at both are real too.

Move over Toronto The Good — meet Toronto: The Good Stuff.

“I can’t wait to try the product,” said Caryma Sa’d, a cannabis lawyer who with her assistant Marie Kamara were the first in line at the legal The Hunny Pot Cannabis Shop on Queen St. West, 24 hours before they become Toronto’s first legitimate pot shop.

And like they were camping out for new Nikes or U2 tickets, they erected a tent to stay overnight free of the snow.

They know they will be warmed up and baked soon.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Kamara said of the legal pot soon to be sold at the privately-owned Hunny Pot.

“I also wanted to be part of history.”

Expecting a large line Monday, as well as questions surrounding if legal marijuana supplies will meet demand, Sa’d said for her this day is both personal and professional.

She says the store’s opening is a positive in efforts to ensure legal pot is sold in retail stores instead of the LCBO model.

That said, however, she hopes that it won’t just be business people with deep pockets benefitting long term.

There was so much interest in this store that people were already showing up on Sunday trying to score some weed.

One was 19-year-old Indigenous artist Parr Josephee who was told to come back Monday.

“I am not making any promises I will make it that long (before buying it illegally.)” he teased.

But it was not lost on him that when this and other stores open, and with the online Cannabis store, the basic day-to-day world of the pot head has changed.

Up until now every time one bought their fix, they were breaking the law and in the back of their mind were worried a police officer may come calling.

Not anymore.

“It’s definitely a relief,” he said. 

Meanwhile, there’s been lots of chatter and criticism over the provincial government’s decision to  cease funding for three of the city’s four so-called safe injection sites.

The one at Victoria Street and Dundas Ave. E. — jammed with clients Sunday looking for syringes and pipes — is staying put.

One of the people in line was crack enthusiast Stephen Tran, who told the Sun he sees “both sides” of the issue.

“It’s good for people like me to get a clean crack kit,” he said. “But when you get given this stuff it does help you to keep being able to do it.”

He said he enjoys doing crack but understands the danger.

After he leaves the Toronto Health facility, he said, he heads to George Street for a fix.

“I don’t know how I am going to get the money,” he said. “But even for $5 you can get a little bit.”

Toronto the Good is changing. I wonder if old Mayor Nathan Phillips would have ever thought that just 200 metres from the public square hat bares his name, there would be a store selling legal marijuana?

Who knows what’s next?

With them already hand out free pipes and syringes, maybe crack and smack dispensaries!