Pot plant plan postponed
It will be Russian giants again this summer. No, not Vladimir Putin. Russian giant sunflowers, which the seed package promises can grow up to eight feet high. We plant them every year for fun, and built a two foot by eight foot flower box especially for them, so we can have a veritable field of rising Russkies. (Tip: put the seeds in the dirt in late May, and you’ll yield a swath of yellow by early September.)
This year, the Russian giants were to be supplanted by marijuana plants. Again, just for fun.
That plan was buried by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals, who extended pot prohibition for another year. Marijuana “legalization” won’t take place until 2018. Apparently, it takes time to get rid of a bad law.
The Liberals’ proposed pot law is “legalization” only in the slimmest sense. More accurately, it is a cannabis cash grab. Companies have been formed and are preparing to reap profits from legal pot. Governments are calculating their potential tax take.
Lost amid the cash counting is the idea that an unjust law must be overturned for the simple and single reason that it deprives citizens of a reasonable right: the freedom to smoke marijuana if they so choose.
The hippies and stoners have been proven right. They’ve been right all along, way back to the 1960s or earlier. How odd, then, to see in this age of liberalization that cannabis is going corporate.
Most people probably thought that when the Liberals promised to legalize marijuana, it would become, well, legal. That they could, if they wanted, toss a bunch of seeds in the garden and watch pot prosper.
We should have known better. Liberals are, after all, Liberals. They twist and torture language until it means only what they say it means. So, Canadians will have “legalization,” but not legal marijuana.
You won’t be allowed to grow more than four plants per household. You won’t be allowed to sell it. You won’t be allowed to possess more than 30 grams at a time.
This is preposterous. It is laughable, even without a toke. It certainly is not making pot legal.
Marijuana, in terms of health and safety, is less dangerous than beer. Will the Liberals now decree home brewers can produce a maximum of four bottles of beer? When they go out, will they be limited to taking one bottle?
The Liberals’ betrayal of their promise to legalize marijuana is egregious. The appropriate public response would be a “war on drug laws.” Hopefully, some young, using lawyers are planning just that.
If lawyers won’t lead the battle against the Liberals’ irrational new laws, perhaps gardeners will. The so-called pot problem has always been one of supply and demand. As many people have long said, rightly, illegal drugs guarantee the involvement of organized crime. A benefit of legalization, presumably, should be that easily available marijuana will put gangs and criminals out of business.
The Liberals have other ideas. They will restrict production, supposedly to control the market, protect children and youth, etc.
This might or might not force gangs to seek other sources of income, but it will definitely guarantee profits for the newly created cannabis cartel.
Speaking of which, it’s such an irony. Conservatives have been the loudest opponents of drug legalization. And yet, here is the business crowd, ready and eager to make profits from pot.
What is needed is a non-profit cannabis clearinghouse that would distribute marijuana for free. Hobby gardeners could grow marijuana for fun — no different than flowers or veggies — and donate the produce, outsmarting the Liberals, who failed to declare, “Thou shalt not give away pot.” Gardeners could bring down the gangs, foil the opportunist pot capitalists and destroy governments’ greedy plans for a big tax grab.
The Liberals’ betrayal of their promise to legalize marijuana is egregious. The appropriate public response would be a “war on drug laws.” Hopefully, some young, using lawyers are planning just that.