Instead of allowing adults to grow cannabis on their own property, the state is apt to rewrite the laws and ban tobacco home-growing.
Alcohol, of course, gets a free-pass as it always has. It’s socially acceptable and abundant in spite of state production and price controls.
There is no argument against home-brewing. The government has already been there. People made whiskey in bathtubs. It was a mess.
And now the same has happened with cannabis, except this time it’s in basements and hidden outdoors.
Legalization means moving the plant from the basement to the greenhouse and from the booby-trapped outdoor grows to privately owned fields with security fences.
But, this likely won’t happen.
What is happening is top-down command and control, a process consisting of people who favour bans on advertising and restrictions on production and distribution.
Will the Legalization Task Farce permit home-growing? It seems very unlikely.
Democratic governments routinely interfere with private property. Their entire existence depends on it.
The Task Farce will likely ban home-growing while the Liberals and Health Canada find loopholes in the Allard decision, restricting medical patient plant counts to the bare minimum.
So litigation will continue.
In the meantime, the argument that we can grow our own tobacco, and therefore, we should be able to grow our own cannabis, will only highlight the fact that the government can ban tobacco home-growing.
Not that they should, but this will be the general consensus of busybody politicians and bureaucrats who believe it is their business to interfere with your business.
After all, tobacco is responsible for death and disease and it poses a huge financial burden on the health care system.
And surely, the average Joe and Jill, who aren’t growing tobacco at home, won’t mind some new legislation that in no way affects their daily lives.
Will the Liberals actually do this? I wouldn’t put it past them, as H.L. Mencken said, “all politics are based on the indifference of the majority.”
Or to quote Groucho Marx, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Not only will cannabis connoisseurs continue to feel the heavy boot of the state, personal tobacco growers might get thrown under the bus as well.