Restricting legal marijuana sales to a very select set of government-operated stores is like, some Soviet Russia-style-thing, man. Not a cool move, bruh.

From where I’m sitting (and watching cartoons and eating Doritos) there are two main issues with this most uncool of plans.

The first is that the government says they are going to have just 150 stores operating across the province by 2019. That’s not enough. There are more than 650 LCBO stores in Ontario, and since it’s basically the LCBO dudes who are going to be selling the weed, they should just sell it there. But they won’t because the province is saying you shouldn’t sell weed and booze in the same place, because it sends a bad message. The government is happy to sell you either of your preferred drug of choice, just, like, not at the same time, that would be crass.

So instead they’ll needlessly waste money opening new storefronts, which will inevitably lead to angry complaints when a new Weed-LCBO opens up and some old dude complains about them “selling wacky tobaccy in my neighbourhood.”

My other major problem with this plan is that opening all new government-owned weed stores means hiring a bunch of government-salary employees. This province is carrying $300 billion in debt, we need fewer people on the public payroll, not more.

Instead of adding thousands and thousands of jobs to a free market legal marijuana job sector, we’re adding about 700 to the government ranks to staff these communist weed shops.

But I’ve got a wicked awesome idea to fix this. To fill all 700 jobs at the new government weed shops, they should have to hire the non-violent “criminals” they made out of all the dudes who got unjustly popped with a record for a few grams of weed, the same weed the government is now about to package and sell to back to them; literally.

And I mean like, literally-literally, because provincial police agencies have stockpiles of kilos of weed, so they’re probably gonna take that same weed they threw you in jail for, and now sell it back to you. Mind blown again, whoa.

But whatever man, you can either be upset with Ontario’s predictably terrible decision on legal weed sales, or you can relax in the comfort of knowing that it doesn’t really matter because we’re all just living on a disc-shaped world, slowly spinning on the backs of elephants which are cosmically hitchhiking on the back of a giant turtle floating through space.



