If Canada’s legalization mimics any other jurisdiction, forget Colorado where people “went too far.”
It will be like Washington State, where the homesteaders, the original medical cannabis growers and vendors, were thrown under the bus.
The Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board issued 222 new retail licenses to replace more than 1,500 medical cannabis dispensaries.
Vancouver, British Columbia passed a bylaw that attempted to eradicate 90 per cent of the competition.
Federally, in Canada, the Liberals still miscategorize cannabis as a social harm, repairable by government’s “public health” central planning.
Peaceful cannabis farmers and vendors should not answer to Bill Blair and a Task Farce.
If Canada is still bound by the Lockean precepts that influenced the founders of this nation, then these agents of the state are the ones breaking the law.
Blair’s imprudent attitude toward BC’s “organized crime” ignores centuries of political thought. Political philosopher John Locke’s “right to revolution” legitimizes civil disobedience in a free, civil society.
Dispensaries should be applauded and the task farce ignored.
But, Canada today doesn’t operate exactly as John Locke described in his magnum opus, Two Treatises of Government.
Rational discussion is nowhere to be found in the cannabis debate, private property isn’t even on the radar.
And property, according to Locke, was life, liberty, and estate. From the Latin root proprius, meaning, what is one’s own, including oneself.
Locke wrote, “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”
But instead of intelligent political debate from the Liberals and opposition, we’re left with emotional appeals to “the children” and “organized crime.”
According to the National Post, Weeds dispensary owner Don Briere “remitted $688,449 in GST/HST collected from December to May.”
Farmers, dispensary owners, extraction crews, and other value-added producers all pay taxes and are asking that their peaceful actions become legitimated. Write them into the tax code if you must.
Briere said: “We’re part of the community and we’re draining the money away from organized crime who buy guns, heroin, cocaine and shoot at the police. We support the police, schools and hospitals.”
Indeed, that was the whole idea behind Justin Trudeau’s legalization. That’s why many people voted Liberal, and that’s why I think individual contracts should be involved, otherwise the state will continue to exploit us for its personal gain.
BC Bud pays their taxes, they have passed the Lockean test of “mixing their labour” with cannabis, and, thus, according to one perspective, they have natural rights to remain in business.
Cannabis prohibition criminalized otherwise peaceful people and legalization is supposed to fix that.
But if British Columbia receives an overbearing “control board” destroying the original homesteaders and maintaining the status quo of politically connected unions, quasi-private, and public sectors, disconnected from the market test of profit and loss — then Canadian cannabis legalization will be the worst thing to ever happen to BC Bud.