She was an intensely driven straight-A student; a church-once-a-week, confession-once-a-month Catholic teen who never used drugs and considered becoming a nun. Even as an adult, she rarely drinks and dabbled in marijuana only twice, calling the experiments a disaster.A high comes from chanting at a yoga retreat.On the surface, Annamaria Enenajor was an unlikely candidate to become the face of cannabis legalization reform in Canada.But as Canada edged towards decriminalizing marijuana, it was frequently Enenajor, as founder and campaign director of Cannabis Amnesty, on the airwaves pushing for the deletion of criminal records for the half-million Canadians with simple possession convictions. “I think it’s hilarious,” the Toronto criminal defence lawyer says of her leap from strait-laced legal eagle to passionate pot advocate. “I had this joke when I first started Cannabis Amnesty that marijuana was as significant in my life as oregano, an herb I thought about occasionally and didn’t really use.”As incongruous as it might initially appear, Enenajor’s path makes perfect sense. A zeal for social justice, combined with a determined focus to confront systemic racism, weaves through her life and a career arc that finds her now, at only 34, a partner in one of Toronto’s high-profile law firms and an emerging champion of legal reform.That passion to give voice to the often voiceless was evident when she was part of a team representing prisoners at Rikers Island in a civil-rights class action against New York City to end the use of excessive force. It was evident when, also in New York, she represented LGBT asylum-seekers, and staffed a legal clinic for Hispanic immigrants in the Bronx. And when she volunteered at a New Delhi human rights documentation centre, monitoring refugees in India.And it drives her work on the cannabis project. The government has proposed pardoning those with convictions, technically called a record ...
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