While LPs profit, long-time cannabis activists are imprisoned.
While people with no growing experience and who have never even smoked the herb are profiting from the emerging legal regime, those who have fought for legalization by risking their personal freedom continue to be the subject of harassment and police enforcement.
As Dana Larsen so brilliantly pointed out in his Huffington Post editorial, the fact that police are targeting cannabis when there are so many other more serious crimes going unenforced is downright criminal.
And like I’ve stated time and time again, we don’t really need the police, that is, government police. Of course, we need security and law enforcement, but without contracts, without market competition, without the ability to withdraw funds and cease paying for subpar services, police actions will always be political.
And right now, the politics of Justin Trudeau is no different from Harper. I wasn’t being sarcastic when I wrote that Harper was the better choice.
I merely assumed that Justin’s idea of legalization would be no different from Harper’s MMPR and therefore, since Harper was running on a platform of tax cuts and balanced budgets, and given that people generally disliked him, I concluded that he was a better choice as a Prime Minister than the selfie-taking drama teacher that has plunged the country into the red and has comforted Canadians with a warmer persona despite no real change in policy.
Certainly, his approach to cannabis isn’t all that different from Harper. Harper introduced the LPs and fought with medical patients over the right to grow. He called cannabis “infinitely worse than tobacco” and claimed the plant was illegal because it threatened “the children” and was tied to organized crime.
Claims, by the way, which evidence in the courtroom has long since debunked.
Fast-forward to Justin’s 2015 win and we’re faced with the same mantra.
Government-approved LPs are the only legal suppliers and it appears it’s going to stay that way.
Marc Emery is back from an American prison but possibly facing life in jail in Canada.
Meanwhile, whenever he’s asked about legalization, Justin repeats the same soundbites over and over, as if he’s never given this topic any real thought. It’s all about the “children” and organized crime. It’s literally the same propaganda bullshit we heard from Stephen Harper.
But again, Harper’s government balanced budgets and cut taxes. His coldness and dictatorial tendencies reminded everyone that the government is not “us,” that a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” is a ridiculous notion so divorced from reality that only a fool suffering from some statist indoctrinated Stockholm Syndrome could believe it.
If Justin Trudeau’s legalization is no different from Stephen Harper’s medical cannabis regime, then Harper really was the better choice.
At least with Harper, the public was on the side of the cannabis activists. Harper’s imposition that cannabis was worse than tobacco persuaded no one but the hardcore social conservatives who already believed this fallacious statement.
With Trudeau, the public tide has turned. The hardcore activists opening dispensaries are stepping out of line, they should wait for the proper regulations to come into place. And surely, anyone who’s made the government-regulation argument before must be siding with Trudeau.
How certain activists could side with government regulations when it comes to everything else, but then praise the envelope-pushing of the Cannabis Culture stores baffles the mind.
Nevertheless, I hate to say I told you so, but, I “fuckin toad-a-so.” It’s not a matter of a broken clock being right twice a day but recognizing that the state does not work in the public interest. It has its own purpose, its own goals, and ambitions.
The Emerys’ arrest, the crackdown on dispensaries even in municipalities where regulation exists, the arrest of legitimate medical patients — is this what cannabis-consuming Canadians had in mind when many of them voted Liberal?
I hope these people now see the political world for what it is. Politicians don’t work for us, they work for special interests.
Democracy is the god that failed.
Trudeau never ran on the platform of recognizing the intrinsic rights of Canadians who consume cannabis. From the get-go, he promised legislation to legalize, restrict, and regulate cannabis.
In theory, democratic legislation embodies the will of the majority. In practice, as public choice economists have demonstrated ad nauseam, politically adept rent-seekers shape legislation to impose their will on others.
Hence, it’s better to have no legalization legislation than Trudeau’s crony-capitalist model. And thus, Harper was the better choice.