Many of our readers may be pleased about the soon-to-be legalization of marijuana. These same readers may find themselves feeling slightly relieved, as gone are the days where smoking pot also meant breaking the law. Right? Wrong.

Although cannabis is about to become legal in Canada, there are still many important legalities that must be borne in mind, or else you could find yourself in some hot water.

The City of Calgary is looking at four potential public cannabis consumption sites and wants public feedback.

The sites are meant to address a legislative shortfall, where cannabis is legal but it's not allowed to be consumed in public, in condos and apartment buildings or in hotels. 

In short, unless you own a house or are a guest in someone's house, you're out of luck when it comes to partaking in legalized marijuana. 

Under Calgary legislation, a ward can be considered for a site only if it's requested by the local councillor. In this case, all four areas are in the ward of Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra, the only one of 14 council members to make a request.

In preparation for legal cannabis sales nationwide, Canadian Justice Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould has approved a new roadside test to check for drug impairment.

The Drager DrugTest 5000 will be the first equipment for saliva screening to be used by Canadian law enforcement. It has the ability to test for THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana.

The Liberal government has promised $161 million in funding for drug-testing equipment and for police training over the course of the next five years in conjunction with a public awareness campaign about the risks of driving while high.

The new equipment will be made available to law enforcement across Canada but police forces will be able to decide on their own what equipment they use.

With Ontario delaying the opening of storefront pot shops until the spring, cannabis producers are pushing back against a proposed federal levy on their sales.

Health Canada wants to slap large-scale marijuana producers with a 2.3 per cent fee on their gross revenue to cover the federal government’s cost of regulating the nascent industry – a job pegged at $82 million over the next fiscal year.

But an industry umbrella group is urging the government to suspend the levy until after April 1, when bricks-and-mortar dispensaries will open in Ontario, giving cannabis companies a better idea of what their sales numbers will look like.

Come October 17, weed will be legal in Canada. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be available everywhere.

While some provinces, including Ontario, simply won’t have a brick-and-mortar retail scheme set up by that deadline, other municipalities have opted to ban weed shops outright.

Markham and Richmond Hill in Ontario, and Richmond, the city of North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Tofino, Abbotsford, Pitt Meadows and Whistler in BC, have decided not to allow pot shops in their jurisdictions. Canadians who live in areas that don’t sell pot will have to use a mail order system, similar to how medical cannabis is provided now.

Marijuana legalization is around the corner, but university students may have to think twice before reaching for their joints, pipes and bongs between classes.

Universities across Canada are prepping for legalization on Oct. 17 by crafting policies that limit cannabis use on campus. Multiple schools said they will follow municipal, provincial and federal regulations pertaining to marijuana consumption, adding that harm-reduction efforts are in place to educate students, staff and faculty.

When most people talk about Canada's impending legalization of marijuana, they talk about the future. When Kevin Sabet talks about it, he worries about history repeating. 

I think it's a really bad move- Kevin Sabet

 "There are huge misconceptions, I often feel like we're living in 1918, not 2018," he said."When I say 1918, I mean 1918 for tobacco when everyone thought that smoking cigarettes was no problem and we had a new industry that was just starting." In 1918, soldiers returning home from the trenches of the First World War brought cigarettes home with them and unwittingly sowed the seeds of one of 20th century's biggest health epidemics. 

A lot of people are pretty happy that they’ll soon be able to smoke pot in public (without getting into trouble). But not everyone is completely comfortable with legalization, given how little we actually know about the safety of cannabis consumption.

Many, like Dr. Tim Holland, president of Doctors Nova Scotia, an association representing all physicians in the province, say we need more research—and we need it now. “Thus far, research has been quite limited and some of it has been questionable because it was conducted by the proponents of the cannabis industry,” he says. “A big part of the problem has been a lack of funding, and also that marijuana was illegal, making it harder to study.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford should be congratulated for improving Ontario’s marijuana market structure last week. He decided to privatize the retailing of marijuana in the province. That decision represents a reversal of the previous government’s choice to place retailing in the hands of a high-cost government monopoly. This is good news.

The country will only be the second in the world, behind Uruguay, to allow for both medical and recreational cannabis consumption. However, Canada reigns supreme in the emerging global cannabis market. In this next phase of legal cannabis, Canada’s established licensed producers (LPs) are expected to have a first-mover advantage both at home and abroad.