Interesting report on the first year of the Canadian experiment, users still use criminal suppliers who undercut taxed legal stores, I stand back in amazement!
When Canada became the second country, after Uruguay, to legalise cannabis last year, executives, growers and investors were euphoric.
www.telegraph.co.uk
So far only Limp Dems and Greens on the bandwagon here.
Give us this day our daily weed. Or, at least a bit of 'erb for the weekend!
I can't read the original article, as it's paywalled. However, it was originally expected to take years for the legalised industry to ramp up from almost nothing (there was a legal medical cannabis industry producing some) to being big enough to supply demand.
The federal government can and has changed the criminal code to legalise cannabis and created a regulatory framework, but the actual practicalities of delivery are in the hands of each individual province, who take a variety of different approaches.
I don't' smoke pot, and I don't personally know anybody who does (that I am aware of), but I am familiar with the news as reported in Ontario. The current Conservative government in Ontario are committed to making the industry a success in Ontario, but the number of licensed retail outlets is still limited. They are rolling out new licenses on a regular basis through a lottery system, but are limiting the rate of increase to what the growers can supply. There's no point in opening shops with no inventory to put into them and they don't want shops with nothing on the shelves. The result is that the retail coverage is still quite limited. It will take years yet to change that. The situation is similar in other provinces.
With regards to which political parties support the idea, plenty of politicians who were opposed to the idea of legalisation changed their opinions rapidly upon legalisation when they saw there was money to be made.
Here's former Conservative cabinet minister Julian Fantino two years after his defeat in the 2015 election opening his new pot business in his former riding. Fantino had previously rather famously said that legalising pot was like legalising murder. When legalisation began to look like becoming a reality, he had a sudden change of heart on this which he said was inspired by his love and concern for soldiers returning from the wars abroad who were suffering from PTSD and needed to smoke the odd joint to deal with it. Fantino was not alone among prominent politicians in his sudden road to Damascus conversion on this subject.
Former police chief who once said legalizing pot is like legalizing murder launching weed-related company
I'm not a fan of pot, I don't smoke it, and I don't like the smell of it. In fact if there is anything that I have to say against legalisation it is that pot smokers now don't have to hide the foul rancid stench of pot smoke wafting about the neighbourhoods around their homes and clinging to their hair and clothes in public. But then again the difference between pot smokers and tobacco smokers in this regards is a matter of degree rather than kind, it's like living next to a pig farm in either case. If you're going to outlaw pot at this point then you may as well outlaw tobacco while you're at it and for pretty much the same reasons (I'm not in favour of outlawing either, by the way).
There's loads of black market cigarettes sold in Canada, many of them smuggled from the US. US legal tobacco companies make them specifically for the illegal market (Canadian smokers like a different type of cigarette than Americans apparently). They don't typically contain the additive which makes them go out by themselves, and as a result they cause a significant number of fires from careless smokers. Since tobacco smokers do their thing much more frequently than cannabis smokers do, this is a much more significant problem for society than cannabis is. Oddly enough I'm not hearing anyone say that the solution to this problem is to criminalise smoking tobacco.
