Revenuers run the joint

I hadn’t been planning to start smoking pot even though it’s now legal, but the reality of legalization is hurting my brain so much I may have to reconsider.

The situation in Ontario is particularly mind-bending. For several years now, dozens of dispensaries have been operating quite openly. (They call themselves dispensaries to further the narrative that, like your grandmother’s rye, marijuana is for medicinal purposes.) Only now, with pot use becoming legal, are these dispensaries being shut down — although Toronto’s chief of police says not right away, as he doesn’t have the person power to do it all at once.

If they don’t shut down, they may forfeit their chance at a licence to sell pot legally once licensed retail operations do finally start in the province on (when else?) April 1 of next year — 166 days after legalization. Why would they not be granted a licence? Not because they trafficked in marijuana when its use was strictly illegal, if seldom prosecuted. But because they continued to traffic in marijuana after it became legal but before the government gave them a licence, an offence that will be prosecuted slowly, if at all.

Silly me. I thought marijuana legalization would simply say that after a certain date the police wouldn’t arrest you for having such-and-such an amount of marijuana in your possession. End of story.

Yes, we do live in a society that is health-and-safety paranoid, so I suppose it was inevitable we’d also get regulations about the strength and toxicity of what could be sold legally. But that kind of regulation requires only that sellers demonstrate they’re complying with the rules. No other test is necessary. If you meet the health and safety standards, come on down and jump into the market with everyone else who wants to see if they can make a go of it. Some will succeed, many will not, but there’s no reason for you to stop doing what you’ve been doing until April 1, even if you’ve been doing it for years to the satisfaction of legions of customers.

Yes, in a society governed by law it’s obviously preferable that people not break even the dumber laws. But a main reason we’re legalizing marijuana is because so many Canadians have been breaking the law for so long, subject only to enforcement that has been haphazard, arbitrary and therefore unfair. On Wednesday, legalization day, StatCan published a report showing that about 4.6 million Canadians 15 or over had used marijuana in the third quarter of this year, about the same as throughout 2018. According to the usual ratios, 1.8 million of them would have been Ontarians. Nearly two million people are a lot of Ontarians. The dispensaries who at least partly facilitated this use are really going to be banished from the industry unless they take a 166-day hiatus — during which all 1.8 million Ontario users supposedly are going to get their supplies from the government’s new online retailer? The obvious question comes all too easily (so accept my apologies, but…): What have they been smoking at Queen’s Park?

In Quebec, there’s no equivalent silliness but only because private retailers are simply and utterly forbidden. All sales must be through governmentowned cannabis stores, of which four opened Wednesday in Montreal (although one is nearly impossible to get to because of pandemic street repairs that have paralyzed city traffic for what seems like years). Thus will profits and rents be seized by overpaid government retail employees.

In Saskatchewan, by contrast, there are only private sales, which is good, but the number of retailers is closely controlled, with several towns limited to only one. We don’t want profit to be a dirty word in Canada but we also don’t want governments to guarantee businesses’ profits, as the granting of a local retail monopoly will do.

Countrywide, as the Financial Post’s Vanmala Subramaniam recently reported, a big roadblock to timely legal supply has been the need to seal products with federal excise revenue stamps. But there’s only one supplier and the stamps come without adhesive. Stamps! In 2018!

In American movies of the 1930s and 1940s, moonshiners and bootleggers waged war against “revenuers,” federal agents charged with levying excise taxes on booze. It seems the revenuers have now taken charge of Canada’s marijuana industry. You might plausibly argue that the former illegal market operated in the interests of consumers. There seems little doubt the new legal market will operate in the interest of governments, their unions and their revenue departments.

When cops did enforce the country’s no-toking laws, they could plausibly tell themselves they were doing it to protect young people and other innocents. Now when they enforce the laws they’re doing it to protect legally privileged producers against producers who find themselves offside with often arbitrary licensing laws. Protecting kids was one thing. Protecting cartels is quite another.

THE NEW LEGAL MARKET WILL CLEARLY OPERATE IN THE INTEREST OF GOVERNMENTS.