After 50 years of oppression by three levels of Canadian governments (1965 being the first year for a notable number of marijuana arrests in Canada) and bullying Big Brother the United States looking over its shoulder for compliance, these same oppressors are now implementing “regulations” to achieve the goals of prohibition in the era of legalization.
Make no mistake, every elected Liberal member of
Parliament, including cabinet ministers, is on record supporting
legalization. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau directed his Minister of
Justice in a public mandate to implement this goal by the end of his
first term. “Legalization” is going happen, and Canada appears to be the
first democracy in the world where a government was elected campaigning
on a promise to legalize marijuana and is going to follow through.
But if legalization is the inevitable and unanimous policy of the governing body, why is it illegal now?
The
policy of legalization is the result of the acknowledgement of the
colossal failure of marijuana prohibition and the War on Drugs. In other
words, marijuana prohibition is morally wrong, it is counterproductive,
and it's an injustice to the entire Canadian cannabis culture, which
numbers in the millions.
It corrupts law enforcement, it lures tens of
thousands of young people into marijuana dealing and selling each year,
introducing them to the opportunities in gangs, black markets, and other
prohibition incentives.
There was no useful public
policy resulting from prohibition at all unless you consider the stigma
that has been applied to us for 50 years. I see that as the primary
policy goal of marijuana prohibition in Canada: to make members of the
cannabis culture feel on the defensive; third-class citizens who can
have their children, homes, possessions, bank accounts, and jobs taken
away at any moment should the "system" decide to make their marijuana
lifestyle an issue.
The inference is still there,
even from politicians advocating legalization, that marijuana use is
unhealthy, inadvisable, a moral failing, corrupting of children, it
makes you stupid, it's dangerous, and that we need to have non-cannabis
authorities restrict our culture for our own good and charge whopping
license fees and taxes, which get passed on to the cannabis consumer.
All those stigmas are inherent in the regulations being enacted in Canada, particularly in the City of Vancouver
Beer
and alcohol are dangerous, but any Canadian—with or without a criminal
record—can brew beer in their home or in brew places. You can personally
possess hundreds of cases of beer in your home. You can start a
microbrewery or a craft beer brewery. You can drink alcoholic beverages
in any one of thousands of alcohol lounges known as pubs, taverns, and
restaurants. Yet the damage caused to society by alcohol—just going from
our homes to the pub and back is a tremendous cause of carnage—is
undeniable and so enormous in criminogenic behaviour, relationship
abuse, traffic accidents, and fatalities that few people fully
comprehend the pervasive damage to every aspect of life that alcohol
consumption causes.
The presumption is, however, that as long as you peacefully use alcohol, you can do so without stigma or punishment.
Peaceful
honest lifestyles should be legal. Canada's Liberal government was
elected saying prohibition was a failure and therefore marijuana should
be legal. Implicit in that complete change in direction is the clear
belief that marijuana prohibition creates victims, is unjustifiable in
any way, and is wrong.
So
how can the Liberal government tolerate a law that is clearly immoral
and unjustifiably demonizing and punishing to millions of Canadians for
one day more? How can judges allow any marijuana charge to proceed in
their court while the new government has clearly promised to legalize
marijuana? All Crown attorneys should no longer lay any kind of
marijuana charges since all of them will be adjourned or appealed once
the government legalizes.
There is tremendous
hypocrisy in the three levels of government allowing certain Canadians
to be “legal”. If you have a federal medical exemption (MMPR), if you
are one of the 25 licenced producers, if you are a Vancouver, Toronto,
or Victoria dispensary, if you operate a mail-order marijuana service,
or if you live in Toronto, Vancouver, or Victoria, then marijuana is
pretty well legal for you. However, in rural B.C. or any part of Canada
where the RCMP polices, it's not legal and it's risky.
Legalization means legal.
As far as I know, no one goes to jail, court, or gets stigmatized or
punished for anything legal. Yes, the poor tobacco cigarette people are
demonized—ostensibly for their own good but also to make the health
Nazis in the population and bureaucracy feel smug in lording their
superiority over the tobacco people—but still, a pack of smokes is $10
and much less if a person rolls their own, whereas the
never-had-anyone-die-from-pot-let-alone-40,000-Canadians-a-year cannabis
culture currently pays $100 to $150 for a pack of 20 prohibition
joints, which are no more difficult to produce than that $10
20-cigarette pack of tobacco. The tobacco people think their taxes—$7 a
pack—are too high, so smuggling tax-free smokes is a huge underground
market!
We have allowed the governments to tax
alcohol and tobacco beyond mere PST and GST because before those 40,000
annual Canadian tobacco victims die of lung cancer or respiratory
diseases, they incur a huge cost to the health-care system that is paid
for by taxes, so most of us regard taxing cigarettes as a quid-pro-quo.
Alcohol has an even larger footprint when you consider the broad
destructive impact of widespread alcohol use, so we tolerate higher
taxes on that product.
But marijuana is neither of those.
No one dies from consuming marijuana—certainly not 40,000 deaths in Canada a year!
Marijuana
is not criminogenic. Alcohol is implicated in many homicides,
robberies, assaults, bank robberies, car crashes, unwanted pregnancies,
unprotected sex acts, and way too much bad behaviour to even mention.
Marijuana is not implicated in any of that stuff!
A
teenager, adult, male, female, anyone you love who is hanging out with a
"pot crowd" is way safer than that same person hanging out with
drinkers, tobacco smokers, and for that matter skateboarders,
cheerleaders, football players, prescription-drug users, hockey players,
snowboarders, gasoline huffers, and pretty well every other clique you
could belong to.
Cheerleading in U.S. high schools results in over
10,000 hospital admissions each school year in the United States. There
are tens of thousands of skateboarders in North America suffering
through an skateboard injury at any one time.
Marijuana
is not something that requires regulation. It doesn’t kill anyone. It
is not dangerous to the individual or society. It should be no more
regulated than coffee, a completely legal substance that causes ulcers,
hypertension, anxiety, and addiction. Growing marijuana is a wonderful,
life affirming experience. Marijuana that is legal will plummet in
price, as millions of hectares of farms across Canada will begin growing
it outdoors. Marijuana that is legal will no longer attract young
people and adults into the black market.
We do not need to fear 16 or 17
year olds smoking marijuana if they get it. Pray that’s all they
experiment with; every other substance or popular activity that youth
are exposed to is much more dangerous.
Legal
marijuana won’t need security. Legal marijuana is subject to PST and
GST, any other tax would be punitive and prejudicial and immoral. There
is virtually no social cost to legalization unlike that of
prohibition—the policy of right now—which is incalculably damaging to
civil rights, privacy, the price of consumption, dignity, national and
local police budgets, families, assets, livelihoods, and our reputation
as individuals who use a substance the government has demonized and
punished for 50 years,
Yet government officials in Vancouver want to:
- Ban cannabis edibles from marijuana shops;
- Wipe out cannabis culture lounges;
- Severely restrict the number of cannabis shops;
- Apply ridiculous and unmerited restrictions to essentially put 90 percent of the current dispensaries out of business, despite that the marijuana consumer market is made up of intelligent, thinking adults who know what they want and who they want to get it from.
City
officials hold marijuana use in disdain and are trying to discourage
it, so their rules reflect the unfathomable priorities of a government
bureaucracy, whereas the marketplace is always correct; that's why we
often see a coffee shop on each corner of an intersection. If it weren’t
profitable, and therefore serving the immediate consumer population,
they wouldn’t be there. People like choices, variety, and brand names.
Imagine
if the City of Vancouver rules for marijuana stores were applied to
Starbucks, a more reasonable extrapolation since coffee is legal but
implicated in a variety of health ailments as mentioned earlier. No
Starbucks could be less than 300 metres from any other Starbucks (or
coffee shop, say). No Starbucks could sell edibles because they are way
too full of sugar and trans-fats.
No Starbucks could be within 300
metres of a playground, school, community centre, or any place where
children may frequent. All baristas must be free of a criminal record
and police must have a list of everyone who works at Starbucks. Security
must be tight at every Starbucks. No Starbucks will be allowed in the
Downtown Eastside, Chinatown, or the Granville entertainment district. A
license for a single Starbucks location is $30,000, unless it is
communally owned, in which case it is only $1,000.
You get it.
Virtually
every model of “legalization” is proposed by so-called experts, who are
usually former or current oppressors from government or policing in
some U.S. state or Canadian province, or members of some local health
authority. They spout their vision of "legalization in a public health
model", a ghastly social-engineering dystopia beloved by most public
health officials in Canada.
These people have the ear of government and
come from the point of view that there's something wrong with marijuana
so it has to be controlled—who gets it, how much we pay, who can grow
it, who can sell it, where and how it can be sold (no advertising
allowed; no iconic cannabis leaves on the door, window, or signage), and
how it will be subjected to a punitive premium tax in addition to PST
and GST.
All these regulations are a prohibitionist
fantasy of how members of cannabis culture can be both exploited and
still punished for a peaceful, honest lifestyle choice. Legal but not
legal.
Marijuana is one of the safest substances on
the planet, yet when authorities talk about growing cannabis by these
“licensed” producers, it's like plutonium is being fissioned. The
fantastic extent to which unnecessary "security" is "required" is
bizarre and cruelly expensive; it is a gratuitous government edict with
the cost passed on to the cannabis consumers.
The DEA wears hazmat suits
in grow rooms along with their weapons ready when raiding peaceful
gardeners! The government that has been our enemy for generations is
still comprised of the same haters of our culture now, only now they get
to inflict punishment in those local and patriarchal ways that new PM
Trudeau specifically said were a thing of the past!
In
all the editorials and articles by the establishment’s gatekeepers that
have flooded the newspapers lately about how “regulation” should look,
virtually none are by any of the millions of consumers of cannabis in
Canada. It's like we are children who are having their rules given to
them by parents who know better.
But that's patriarchy, or rather with
50 percent of the cabinet women, including the Minister of Justice and
Health, that's hierarchy, where essentially the haters who have always
been in power are going to decide on the future of the cannabis culture
and how it will be in their interpretation of “legal”
For
50 years, the Canadian electorate and government enthusiastically had
the institutions of this country (police, courts, schools, employers,
prisons, children's aid, child custody, asset forfeiture, et cetera)
hunting us down and hurting us for a policy that everyone now admits was
really, really bad and wrong.
So, enough of the
rules from our oppressors. You have no moral authority. We are in the
right. We have been treated unjustly for 50 years.
We will not tolerate
and obey your rules when you haven’t even stopped arresting us, you
haven’t apologized for 50 years of abusive aggression against the
millions of us in the Canadian cannabis culture you wronged, you don’t
understand us, and you don’t even “get” us.
Stop telling us how to live; we know how to live with our plant.
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