Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has got it right — legalize don’t decriminalize marijuana.

And B.C. residents should take notice since they have an opportunity to lead the country on this issue.

A new campaign is underway across the province to get rid of criminal marijuana laws in the same way the province got rid of the hated Harmonized Sales Tax.

For 90 days starting Sept. 10, the Sensible BC activist group is hoping to garner 400,000 signatures — 10 per cent of the registered voters in each riding — to trigger a people-powered pot referendum in 2014.

If the organization is successful and wins that plebiscite, police would be ordered to stop enforcing the federal cannabis prohibition.

There is more than a good chance they will be victorious: 73 per cent in a recent poll said they support decriminalization.

Ending marijuana prosecutions, however, is only a start.

Decriminalization is a halfway house of pain that makes pot consumers happy, but leaves the rest of society dealing with the continuing black market and the violence it engenders.

Trudeau gets that.

Look at Amsterdam: The front door leads into a quaint smoking café, but it’s Hells Angels at the back door providing the pot.

This is not a solution — but it is a good place to start the conversation about how we should deal with marijuana.

Sensible BC envisions a commission being established to forge a new regulatory and taxation scheme, which is akin to what Washington and Colorado have done since they became the first American states to legalize marijuana in November.

I believe they are on the right track by legitimizing the plant and its derivatives so they can be properly taxed and regulated. So does Trudeau.

This moves the marijuana economy out of the shadows, robs organized crime of the low-hanging, high-profit fruit on which it thrives, and eliminates the need for violence.

It also, in my opinion, provides an opportunity to craft more effective and more honest drug education programs, deliver better health care, and re-task public-safety and judicial resources devoted at the moment to the futile War on Drugs.

The two U.S. states aim to address cannabis-impaired driving, channel the new revenue into health care, education and public safety, find ways of preventing weed products from leaving the state, and regulate marketing, labelling, retail and wholesale sales.

The success of last year’s ballot initiatives — which legalized cannabis even though it remains banned by U.S. federal law — has already spurred the capitalization of new pot firms.

With medical marijuana programs in 19 states, the plant is fuelling a burgeoning legal economy of box-stores and Internet sales that is said to top $2 billion a year. There are a handful of marijuana-related penny stocks hoping to cash in on what conservative estimates suggest may become a $40-billion-a-year business in the U.S.

Privateer Holdings Inc., in Seattle, recently became the first equity firm with plans to invest in pot companies — its first acquisition, leafly.com, a Yelp for medical cannabis, is putatively generating $100,000 a month in revenue.