Canada takes the high road

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Canada takes the high road

Postby blehblah » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:14 pm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/senate ... -1.4713222

Senators have voted to pass the federal government's bill legalizing recreational marijuana by a vote of 52-29, with two abstentions, paving the way for a fully legal cannabis market within eight to 12 weeks.

"I'm feeling just great," said Sen. Tony Dean, who sponsored the bill in the Senate. "We've just witnessed a historic vote for Canada. The end of 90 years of prohibition. Transformative social policy, I think. A brave move on the part of the government."


Of course, there are plenty of details of the implementations which need to be ironed-out, and the entire thing is going to be a long series of trial and error to figure-out what works. Though this is a federal law, each province and territory has been trying to sort-out their go-to-market strategy. Some are looking toward private sales (the provinces with privatized booze sales) while others are either leveraging existing, provincially-owned booze sales networks and stores, or setting-up parallel systems (because letting people buy a bottle of booze and a bag of weed in the same physical location would, for whatever reason, be bad).

I think in the end, it will all turn-out to be a lot less dramatic than most folks figure. It's not like governments are going to be throwing launch parties featuring Snoop Dog and sponsoring school barbecues. Those who already smoke weed will keep smoking it, maybe switching to buying it from a different place, while those who don't smoke weed aren't likely to spark-up a giant spliff just because the man is a bit more chill.

I also don't see it being a sudden tax revenue windfall, at least until each province figures-out how to optimize the system (while simultaneously not promoting it - a fine balancing act). Over time, it will take a good chunk of money out of the hands of black-market types, and produce tax revenue, but that will be a bit of a journey for each provincial government.

Maybe at the next G7 meeting in Canada, the leaders can pass a bong around the campfire and discover some chill they didn't know they had. Or, you know, have a total reefer-madness-esque breakdown on Twitter. Either could be interesting.
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Re: Canada takes the high road

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:55 pm

I thought Canada only had one road.
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Re: Canada takes the high road

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Jun 21, 2018 10:21 pm

It's not like governments are going to be throwing launch parties featuring Snoop Dog and sponsoring school barbecues.


That's because you guys are lame!
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Re: Canada takes the high road

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Jun 22, 2018 9:04 pm

Interestingly, your experience may be a bit different from our experience here in legalization states like Oregon. Marijuana dispensaries here have had trouble accepting credit cards or getting things like loans and insurance because the big financial institutions are wary of the legal grey area they exist in, where they're legal under state law but illegal under federal law. By contrast, if Canada legalizes marijuana on the federal level there's no such tension between conflicting laws, which might make things easier for marijuana startups.

That said, my experience has largely been that legalization created two obvious changes if you're a nonuser. The first is that I occasionally see people openly smoking joints on the street now rather than finding a secluded spot. I never used to see that except on 4/20. The other is that pot shops have sprouted up like Starbucks on every corner, especially in areas that attract tourists. So all the tourist trap towns along the coast now have like fifteen pot shops for a town of five hundred people.

If you're a user, other than the obvious benefit of not having to fear the law the main benefit is that there's way, way more variety available. When you're buying from "a guy" you may not have any choice of potency or strains at all, and at best they'll have just a couple options on hand for you. Moreover, sativa strains are harder to grow clandestinely since the plants grow taller and are less dense, so finding those strains on the black market is typically more difficult. By contrast, once the legal market here found its feet the shops had dozens of different strains available at a given time, so you can try all sorts of different varieties, including famous sativa or hybrid strains like White Widow and Maui Wowie that used to be really hard to find here.

As far as more people using, it does seem like there's a category of older people out there who used to smoke when they were younger, but stopped as they got older because they didn't want to risk legal trouble and/or because they were no longer "cool" enough to know any pot dealers. I've known a few people who started smoking weed occasionally after the shops opened who didn't before, and they all fit that description.
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Re: Canada takes the high road

Postby blehblah » Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:48 pm

Here are some interesting side-effects of the uncertainty in the US:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/01/news/co ... index.html


MedMen, a Los Angeles-based chain of marijuana dispensaries, can't trade on Wall Street because cannabis is illegal in its home country.
So it listed in Canada.

MedMen started trading this week on the Canadian Securities Exchange, or CSE.

They're not alone. US cannabis companies are heading north to list on stock exchanges in Canada, where there's no federal ban on marijuana sales. Medical marijuana is legal there, and the country is in the process of legalizing recreational marijuana, too.

It's a two-way street. Some Canadian cannabis companies have come south to list on Wall Street exchanges, because they're not subject to the same restrictions that keep US pot growers away.

[...]

Canopy Growth (CGC), a Canadian cannabis company, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 24.

"You can list here [in the US] if you're not breaking any of the rules in any of the jurisdictions that you operate, and I don't break any rules because I don't operate in any jurisdictions where it's federally illegal, which unfortunately includes the US," said Bruce Linton, CEO of Canopy, which is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker WEED.


Note that the CSE is a secondary exchange - they are doing well off of this confusion.

The real question is, how will the US react?

I went hunting for clues using the power of Google News.

https://www.rt.com/news/430754-russia-c ... alization/

Moscow says Ottawa is trampling on international law by legalizing recreational use of cannabis. Canada is set to become world’s second nation to fully decriminalize production and consumption of pot.

The rebuke comes after Canadian lawmakers approved a law regulating production and circulation of cannabis for recreational purposes. Moscow believes that the law, which is to come into force come autumn, directly violates Ottawa’s international commitments, Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

[...]

“We expect, that Canada’s “arbitrariness” will merit a response from its G7 partners, since this group has repeatedly declared its commitment to the rule of law in interstate relations,” the ministry added.


Always with the G7 fuckery, Russia? What's next, busting balls at the NATO summit, quickly followed by a
party summit with Putin Trump?

Russia citing international law used to be hilarious.
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