Your human right to smoke pot in someone's restaurant

More news from the front lines of important "human rights" work in Canada. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is grinding an Ontario restaurateur who asked a customer to stop smoking marijuana in his doorway.

Light up a cigarette in an Ontario restaurant, and you're breaking the law. Light up a marijuana joint, and the restaurateur is breaking the law if he tries to stop you. Here's an excerpt:

Kindos has already spent nearly $20,000 of his own cash, and estimates he could spend upwards of $150,000 more fighting an Ontario Human Rights Commission complaint launched by Steve Gibson, who is licensed to smoke marijuana by the feds to manage the chronic pain of a neck injury that has kept him out of work since 1989.

Fighting the case, which will be heard by the province's Human Rights Tribunal in May, could send Kindos' business into bankruptcy and is playing hell with his health, he said.

"If this thing goes to the tribunal, that's it, we're done. Our restaurant is done," he said. "We've already been told we can't win.

"I had a heart attack at 38. I've already had a quadruple bypass. The business pretty well killed my dad (who died of a heart attack at 48 in 1991) and now, with all this stuff going on, it's killing me ... I'm under so much stress right now."

:::

Even Canada's own Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, said common sense and reason are paramount in this issue to effectively balance everyone's rights.

"I don't see people with insulin bringing their syringes out in the middle of restaurants and giving themselves injections," Emery, who is facing a 10-year jail sentence at the U.S.'s behest for selling marijuana seeds, said from his home in B.C., noting that since Gibson was drinking alcohol at the time of the Burlington incident in 2005, he could have ingested the cannabis via an alcoholic tincture that would have been just as effective and more discreet.

"It's important, when you're a minority, to appear to be reasonable about your needs and requirements," he added. "Clearly, it's an imposition on businesses to have to monitor the quality of certain smokes outside their front door. That's unreasonable. When you're balancing your rights against the rights of others, there is a certain sense of reasonableness required."

Emery has it right. This isn't about the pro's or cons of medical marijuana. On the face of it, it's about common sense and politeness. But much more importantly, it's about private property, and the right of a restaurateur to run his business as he pleases -- not to have an unwelcome smoker, and his band of government "human rights officers" run and ruin his business for him.

Is this really what human rights commissions were built for?

Hat tip MB