For police, enforcing cannabis prohibition must be like playing Pokémon Go except, instead of catching digital creatures, they are destroying people’s lives, depriving others of medicine and wasting real, scarce, resources on an action no one can stop paying for.
Ontario Provincial Police busted two Ottawa men for a hydroponic production in an old meat processing plant in Backwash Township, Ontario.
The RCMP in Prince Edward Island wasted resources on prohibition promotion.
While advertising implies a business devoting its revenues to demonstrate value to potential customers, the RCMP are a mandatory service of the state, free market competition is non-existent. Their self-promotion is more akin to propaganda than advertising.
Even if prohibition was desired by community standards, how could the police allocate all the necessary resources without the feedback loop of entrepreneurial loss?
Police in Canada are state bureaus, and if history of the modern state has taught us anything, “Just following orders,” and “we don’t make the laws, we just enforce them,” are not adequate answers.
In the realm of profit and loss, people are accountable for their actions. An interlocking heterogeneous array of capital goods constitute part of the market. Entrepreneurs and labour are subject to ever-changing consumer valuations.
The capital structure supporting our standard of living can be invested wastefully. The OPP’s “elaborate” investigation into the Ontario “grow op” is such an example.
Consumers had demonstrated by their many, localized exchanges that the two farmers involved with the former meat-processing plant were the most equipped to handle 2,000 cannabis plants, along with the capital goods and hydroponic equipment required to sustain the operation.
Naturally, a free market works best, and while prohibition isn’t perfect, police overruled everything by initiating aggressive force.
But why not? With tacit consent of the state-educated populace, the drug war can continue unabated as propaganda fills the airwaves about “the children” and “organized crime.”
“If you see something, say something,” says the PEI RCMP.
But not just anything, they want cannabis growers “who do not value the land” or sell “for a profit at the detriment of our youth and neighbourhoods.”
Forget the harder drugs, or better yet, idleness like the fire department without a fire, the PEI RCMP rank cannabis as a top priority.
Now, for all I know the cannabis market in PEI really is run by gangs and organized crime. But that makes cannabis an effect of an ultimate cause. The ultimate cause is the police’s failure to undermine gangs and organized crime.
The RCMP’s propaganda on cannabis isn’t checked by the necessary financial loss such a move could take in a free and fair market.
What options do Prince Edward Islanders have if they prefer a different governing service, one that takes a laissez-faire approach to cannabis cultivation?
Until then, the RCMP are offering cash rewards for narcing on neighbours.
We have truly entered an Orwellian age.
How many prohibitionary Pokémon can the police catch before the Liberals pass new legislation? And even then, how many will they catch afterward?