DOPEY THOUGHTS FROM ALBERTA

MLA SEES A LATENT COMMUNISM IN THE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA

Absolutely everybody in sight has had a go at Ronald Orr this week. Which, just as a polite heads-up to the man’s friends and family, is not going to stop me from joining in. Orr is the Alberta MLA who rose in the provincial legislature on Wednesday to discuss his fears about the “social and economic experiment” of marijuana legalization.

This happened during the debate on Alberta’s bill making arrangements to meet the federal government’s legalization deadline. Orr, a religious minister and former construction contractor, attracted national attention because he started gibbering about Chinese history, the Opium Wars, and the Cultural Revolution. The Vietnam War found its way in there, somehow. The fella jumped around quite a bit.

Orr was accused in some quarters of suggesting that legalized weed might lead Alberta to communism. He didn’t actually say that, and editors who have written that headline have been careless and unfair. However, I do notice, in reviewing Orr’s address, that he literally did not have a single thing to say about the actual bill under debate.

Early in his speech, Orr declared himself skeptical about the public revenue bonanza from marijuana. “This is supposed to be some kind of fantastic economic boon for governments,” he said. “Really? I don’t think it’s going to be. Nobody has done a serious business plan on this thing yet. What actually are the revenue streams?” Strangely, once he came around to China, this part of the argument turned upside-down: speaking about opium, he warned that “(Chinese) governments became utterly dependent on the taxes that fuelled the human crisis and the addictions.”

Far from criticizing the Chinese Communists, Orr seems to ... give them significant credit for solving that problem? “The Chinese culture was decimated by up to 10 million opium addicts,” Orr attested, aiming to demonstrate how the recreational use of a harmless little plant can spiral right out of control, given a century or two. “It wasn’t until the 1950s,” he said, “that China began to seriously eradicate the opium trade, the opium business, the opium tax revenue, and all of these wonderful things that are supposed to be generated from recreational use of drugs.

“They actually got so serious about it, their whole society was so broken down and debilitated by it, that it contributed to the Chinese Cultural Revolution under the vendors will set the price too high to compete with existing dealers. But it is not quite the point Orr chose to make. He seems to be convinced that licensed growers cannot compete with the black market at any price.

Why is it that criminals grow pot? Orr’s answer is not “because growing pot has, until now, been a crime.” That would be too easy. “Let’s look at it from a business point of view,” he suggests ...

“The black market doesn’t have to pay taxes. They don’t have to pay (workers’ compensation). In most cases they don’t have to pay for any capital expenditures on land or buildings. They don’t have to buy business licences. In many cases they don’t pay for power ... Anybody who tries to do this legally is going to have to pay all of these expenses, and you think you can compete financially on that level with them?”

This, of course, explains why, when we want furniture or shoes or chicken, we all invariably buy them in back alleys from underground businesses. But if Orr were to actually look around Alberta — even his own part of Alberta — he would see that lawful businesses do have some advantages.

Legal growers can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital markets not run by guys named Lefty or Snake. They can recruit scientists, professional marketers, and horticultural experts without having to hope Walter White shows up. They can exploit economies of scale. They can buy or rent acres of land without having to hide from helicopters. They can do business in broad daylight: they can rent billboards.

And meanwhile, it is not really as though illegal pot growers don’t have labour costs, or overhead, or capital and land requirements. Underground businesses that don’t pay “tax” still have to spend money, often more money, on the basic protective services that taxes buy the rest of us. Any economist could have told Mr. Orr as much. But I am afraid he got his economics out of the same Cracker Jack box his Chinese history came from.