Let’s call it a debate, because that’s all we’ve been doing for decades and more than likely all that will be done for decades on this topic.
This Pot debate has been a major social issue ever since I was in grade school and answered a teacher’s question of what would I want to be when I grow up and I answer “a beatnik“, resulting in a very concerned call to my home from the principal’s office.
I think it is safe to say that I’ve been a non-conformist ever since.
So for over a half a century I’ve watched this absolutely ridiculous issue remain an intellectual quandary for over five decades and now have seen the first glimmer of maturity (proposing legalizing it) already starting to drift into the ether!
We are scheduled to see legislation to make pot legal hit the House of Commons in a couple of months but you can rest assured that legal recreational marijuana is probably still a decade or so out there.
Why?
Because we’ve given oversight over to a bureaucracy that knows little about the product, industry or impacts on society.
Today’s politicians have been socially conditioned on the concept of “weed” and as you know Pavlov’s dog salivated even when there was no reward.
My concern is with the greater issue which is having it regulated at all.
It is a natural product that anyone can grow (it is, after all, literally a “weed“).
We’ve seen it kind of “back-doored” into some areas of modern society under the “medical marijuana” banner where it has been indisputably recognized as beneficial to pain sufferers and the critically ill.
Yet, today we still have misguided and misinformed commentary published by supposedly legitimate sources that continue to obstruct its acceptance.
To me it is excessively hypocritical to continue to impose criminal records, jail time and tax payer money fighting a war on drugs that never should have legitimately included this “natural plant product“!
When at the same time we have laws allowing alcohol consumption, which has proven to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, tobacco which again has proven a mass killer and prescription drugs, is just beyond my intellectual capacity to understand!
But that one natural weed, having struggled against prohibition for half a century now in my lifetime, still carries huge penalties and criminal records!
Former deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan told CBC: “I think one of the things we were struck by was how complex this transition actually is, and not only in terms of drafting legislation at the federal and provincial levels and putting in place all the infrastructure and training, but the psychological transition. Going from something that has been prohibited for decades, to a world where it’s a legalized product, sold in a regulated market — so the transition is going to be enormous“.
To put that into normal people speech, “It is going to take a long time for us to get our heads around this“.
This offers up the same problems as trying to fix Condoland.
Highly educated people getting paid to solve social problems that they don’t understand.
And, as usual, our government seems to be looking for the easy road to riches.
They are caught up trying to see how much tax revenue they can squeeze out of this product, which will only strengthen the black market, which is already well entrenched.
States with laws that allow people to grow their own (and not trade in it) have proven that this simple approach is really the only viable approach.
Governments (especially governments who’s platforms were built on legalizing something) have to stop looking at how much tax revenue can be gained and start looking for ways to better serve the people.
Our Prime Minister promised to do something that so far has not been done and now we see the decade long “suspended animation” approach being applied to implementation.
For God’s sake, if you are going to allow people to pollute themselves and everyone around them with cigarette smoke, and allow people to pick up whatever alcohol they want at pretty well every street corner, or take endless cocktails of pharmaceutical drugs daily, isn’t it a little more than hypocritical to spend so much time, energy and resources debating such a simple issue.
There is no rule that governments have to tax everything to death (if you can buy an ounce of pot off the street from the black market at $200, why would anyone go to a government accredited outlet and pay four or five times that much?
Will the substance be legal if it doesn’t come from a government accredited facility?
This is what I mean when I say governments screw things up more than they appear to resolve things.
I’m Charles
