A recent humour article described gang members, upset over the Liberals’ plan to legalize cannabis, protesting outside Parliament that regulation would put them out of work.
It was a hoax article, but the content of the article rang true and should act as a reminder that organized crime isn’t just your stereotypical motorcycle gang.
For many, organized crime is the state, the monopolist of ultimate decision-making that effectively treats us as slaves.
You could argue that democratic governments are far worse than any organized crime gang.
Prime ministers and presidents certainly have more power over the individual than a king or queen ever did. I don’t recall Charles II demanding registered horses and birth certificates from all his subjects.
The other type of organized crime are the non-violent, hard-working farmers of the BC Bud economy.
Because cannabis is in the criminal code, these farmers, unless they’re protected by medical documents, are technically organized crime, despite their only crime being the growth of a plant that a lot of people like to consume and are willing to pay for.
These people are entrepreneurs, not criminals. And this is why that fake article, despite being a hoax, had some relevant points to make.
“We estimate that prime minister Justin Trudeau’s radical proposition to legalize marijuana could cost us over a hundred thousand jobs,” a fictional gang member said in the article. “From growing operations, to trimming, packaging, transportation and selling, this new legislature will threaten the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers.”
The joke is that these are gang members saying these things, but consider if they were instead honest farmers growing a plant that is illegal for no good reason.
There is a diverse BC economy that is being forfeited to a crony-capitalist system. Even in Vancouver, dispensary regulation is putting good people out of business and creating the regulatory apparatus necessary for the economic rent-seekers to capture.
“I’ve been selling weed since I’m 12 years old,” reads another character in the article. “Do you think I’m going to want to go work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds at minimal wage? I don’t think so.”
This is the exact situation a lot BC farmers, extraction crews, and dispensary owners and employees find themselves in.
When Harper licensed new corporate cronies to take over the medical marijuana industry, the goal wasn’t to compete with BC Bud in an honest and free market. Harper tried to undermine the BC cannabis economy by literally forcing them to destroy their plants.
Fortunately, the courts stopped him, but the corporate producers like Tweed (now Canopy) and CanniMed continue to grow and be the voice of the Canadian cannabis industry at the expense of the actual BC Bud industry that predates these producers by years, even decades.
If BC farmers want to continue growing, they’re expected to become corporate employees to the producers that Harper may have set up, but have Liberal Party connections.
There is a clear continuity in government. It’s the same Desmarais-connected oligarchy we’ve had for nearly a century. Justin is merely the friendly face and his legalization scheme is another way for the Ottawa establishment to snatch up all the cannabis genetics in BC’s economy.
Legalization isn’t about free markets, or the liberty to do what you want with your own body. It’s about more power and wealth for a system that acquired massive amounts of power and wealth by waging a drug war – that is, the same war that kept cannabis illegal for so long.
But now that the people are demanding legal cannabis, this same corporate-state military-industrial system has the audacity to demand taxation and regulation.
That’s a scam. A bonafide fraud and it’s a shame to see so many people fall for the deception.