Too green to burn

I can’t stop laughing to myself at the crushing irony of the new marijuana laws. What was once a symbol of personal rebellion, freedom and anarchy has now been turned into an instrument of state control. Ontario is proposing quarter-million-dollar fines if you dare to keep your self-owned weed store open. Ouch! The penalties used to be much less restrictive when it was illegal. Even drug dealers don’t have to deal with that.

It is also hard to imagine how adults can stand in front of the public and claim that there is any hope in hell of keeping weed out of the hands of minors with the new regulatory regime. As far as the black market goes, seriously, there is a black market for all kinds of legal things — clothes, music, jewelry, cigarettes, etc. — so what makes anyone think this will be different? It just means a 19-year-old can buy or grow it legally and sell or give it to a 16 year old.

And don’t get me started on addictions. Coffee is addictive, video games are addictive, cigarettes, alcohol, harassing women, etc., etc., etc. Anyone that tells you weed is not addictive is living in a dream world. Not to mention brain development.

Then there is the issue of only smoking it in your home. Bad news for apartment dwellers, rock concert-goers and Queen’s Park protesters.

Then — and this is my favourite one — is there to be no legal distinction drawn between lawyers, doctors, teachers, police, air traffic controllers, pilots, nuclear power plant workers, etc., who want to get wasted after a hard day’s work? After all, we are trying to live under the banner of freedom, equality and brotherhood, which I have recently learned means freedom of all vice and lusts, equality of degradation and the brotherhood of the blind.

The bright side of it all is it will help us pay down the Muskrat Falls debt, and that I’m all for, the sooner the better.

Craig Noseworthy St. John’s