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What part of legal do they not understand?

They expect “beefed-up policing” and a “busier court system” once it’s NOT illegal? How busy are the courts with cases involving chairs, or spinach? What part of “legal” don’t they understand? Yet the ultimate decision to split the money 25-75 and cap the federal take at $100 million included cities getting some cash “to help them defray the cost of making pot legal across Canada.”

What’s the cost of making carrots legal? Obviously they come under laws of general application, from transportation to adulteration. But since marijuana is perhaps a $10 billion industry at inflated black market prices, it won’t contribute much to existing regulatory costs in a $2 trillion economy. Certainly not compared to the half-billion dollars a year now spent on prohibition. (As for government marijuana stores, please tell me they’ll make money. Government gambling and booze does.)

Part of the effort to bogart the tax revenue was concern about preventing stoned driving. But as with almost any other legitimate restriction on an intoxicant, this problem doesn’t get harder if you legalise it. Something like one in eight Canadians over 14 already uses pot at least occasionally. Do politicians really think none ever get behind the wheel high? Apparently so, since to date they’ve done nothing about it. Why do we only now need a marijuana breathalyzer? Was it safer to drive under the influence when it was illegal?

The job of the state is not to regulate our society in an orderly fashion

The elephant in this bathtub is Canadian governments’ conviction that they must foster everything worthwhile and discourage and plunder everything else. Thus outgoing Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin just claimed that internal free trade in alcohol risks “imposing a huge burden on governments to come up with some agreements quickly so that our society can be regulated in an orderly fashion.”