Government goes for reefer monopoly madness
It’s the worst possible provincial legalization plan: Ontario’s Liberal government has announced a state monopoly on the sale of legal nonmedical cannabis, combined with a massive crackdown on the existing cannabis industry.
Legalization wasn’t supposed to be like this. Canadians increasingly supported ending cannabis criminalization after watching billions of tax dollars wasted by law enforcement going after peaceful people for pot.
Marijuana has been grown and consumed in Canada for decades without any measurable negative impact on the health and safety of society. In fact, the impact has been more positive than negative, especially for sick and suffering citizens.
Licensed producers of medical marijuana exist because of lawbreakers winning court orders declaring Health Canada must provide access to protect the Charter rights of medical consumers.
Civil disobedience is the only reason cannabis law reform has happened. No government willingly increases cannabis freedoms. Lawbreakers had to force change through the courts, protests, election campaigns, media messaging and other forms of outreach.
Canadians, especially regular marijuana users, know the vast majority of growers and suppliers are peaceful and non-violent. That’s why they support legalizing the existing pot industry and dispensaries. And Justice Department records support that perception: 95 per cent of cannabis growing cases in court have no connection to organized crime or gangs, and the people charged were otherwise law-abiding.
This is what’s supposed to be legalized: the tens of thousands of providers who are currently defined as criminals by government policy. They want to be legal. They want to come into the light, but the government forces them to stay in the shadows.
Governments at every level have fought against cannabis for years with law enforcement and propaganda. Now that the laws are changing — thanks to advocates and legal activism — these same anti-pot politicos want federal control of production and provincial monopolies on distribution.
Even worse, these governments have declared war on “illegal” growers and providers, denying them the option to transition into legality, while promising to send officials with guns to shut them down — for being unable to transition into legality.
We also know some former politicians and cops have founded or bought into legal medical marijuana companies, hoping to cash in on legal recreational pot after calling for and profiting from raids against independent retailers. It is a very rotten state of affairs.
Member of Parliament Bill Blair, the former undercover drug narc and police chief of Toronto, gleefully announced a quarter of a billion tax dollars will be provided for “legalization law enforcement costs.” That’s on top of the hundreds of millions of tax dollars already funding anti-pot policing — but that’s what happens when you put a police officer in charge of legalization. So instead of legalization reducing the money wasted on law enforcement, we’re adding to it.
Additionally, the province of Ontario is going to spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars setting up a new pot bureaucracy that isn’t needed or even supported by taxpayers and cannabis consumers. Why won’t Ontario legalize the current suppliers, who are already meeting consumer demand?
Cannabis legalization should mean the end of criminalization. Unfortunately, it seems the only thing being legalized is a sure-to-fail government attempt to monopolize an industry that already exists.