“If this is legalization,” an emotional Jodie Emery told the media last week, “then Justin Trudeau lied.”
Well, yeah. That’s what politicians do.
While certain activists were shilling for the Liberal Party in the last federal election, a number of us weren’t buying into the hype.
But not voting Liberal, we were told, was betraying the movement.
Of course, there were some disagreements about this. After all, it’s not like the Liberals were going to take a laissez-faire, classical liberal approach to legalization.
Liberty is not about being on the “right” of economic issues and on the “left” of social issues. That entirely misconstrues the philosophy, leading to a situation where, if cannabis legalization is all you want, then there is a libertarian argument for voting Liberal.
But that’s nonsense and it’s unfortunate that it took 43 police raids on Toronto dispensaries to drive home this fact.
All Justin Trudeau did was hijack the momentum for legal cannabis and then continue with Harper-era drug policies.
Don’t believe me?
Assuming that Justin won’t swoop in on a fucking unicorn to save the day, what has changed since Harper left?
Other than public relations, of course. Although, with Bill Blair in charge and all this talk about “the children,” I sometimes long for the days where Harper spent $7 million of taxpayer money on “infinitely worse than tobacco” advertisements nobody believed.
Like I’ve said before, at least with Harper, the drug war was obvious. We had the public on our side.
Now, the public is in love with the selfie-taking, male feminist and we are the radicals that apparently want “no regulation” and seek to harm children with our reefer madness.
It’s the ol’ bait and switch.
The Liberals campaigned on legalization, but with the intention of substituting a new form of prohibition — an inferior model complete with corporate cannabis advertising false THC readings and protected from free-market competition by their bureaucratic buddies in government.
Jodie told reporters that the Toronto raids were “worse than anything we saw under the Harper government.”
I agree, but unlike Jodie, I saw it coming. As did many others.
Are we psychic, do we have access to some crystal ball? Or did our stereotypical “paranoid” stoner mindsets tip us off? A situation where, as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
No, we saw what was coming — a corporate landscape where cannabis is tightly controlled and regulated — because the state is a gang of criminals writ large.
You can’t vote for better criminals, and the money, power and lobbying efforts of corporate elites will either overrule you or turn your fellow countrymen against you through their propaganda channels.
If any good has come from the Toronto raids, it’s that more of us are now aware that governments do not work in our interest.
“We” are not the government.
As Murray Rothbard once wrote, “If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.”