It’s 2018. Do we really need to follow outdated Soviet practices regarding our sanitation services? Our landfills, recycling centres, junkyards, transfer stations, and toxic waste sites?
Why should BC Bud farmers continually have to discard their stems and other byproducts clandestinely, in black garbage bags, to landfills?
Garbage doesn’t disappear into the aether. Figuring out our waste situation will do more for the environment than any amount of carbon taxes.
Why should Health Canada force Canada’s licensed producers to destroy their waste? Between them, hemp farmers, and Canada’s underground cannabis economy, tens of thousands of kilograms of cannabis/hemp byproduct gets destroyed each year.
Yet, cannabis waste is recyclable. There are opportunities for products like clothing, animal feed, paint, body lotions and essential oils, hemp-derived plastic, paper, construction materials like insulation, and even fuel.
Cannabis and hemp (technically the same thing) can even reinforce cement.
Cannabidiol (CBD) derives from cannabis byproduct. Right now, the costs of CBD are staggering. Yet, unlike with its psychoactive cousin, THC, people fearful or with prejudice of cannabis are finding medicinal relief.
CBD relieves pain and inflammation, regulates THC to eliminate any paranoia or anxiety, reduces anxiety in general, and helps fight cancer.
But similar to how Big Pharma will use intellectual property rights to artificially inflate the costs of their drugs, the government is prohibiting CBD from reaching the market sooner and in larger quantities.
How? By enforcing cannabis prohibition when it comes to waste and recycling. Imagine a world where garbage was no longer monopolized by the government.
Farmers should be able to openly sell their waste in a free and fair market. There is, after all, already private trash and recycling services. There is no need for government to monopolize sanitation services.
Indeed, it is nonsensical that such a vital aspect of our civilization gets handled by such an inefficient system as government bureaucracy. This isn’t the 20th century anymore. We can’t afford to hold onto these socialistic ideas.
It’s capitalism or bust.
A free and fair market for cannabis includes what we do with its waste and byproduct. Like with all trash — there are opportunities to find other uses than dumping everything into a landfill.
Without Health Canada — British Columbians can begin to use their economy’s natural resource to grow and industrialize without the need for fossil fuels.
Will it be hard at first? You bet, but with a robust set of property rights and economic liberties once guaranteed to our ancestors but increasingly verboten, we will prevail.