'Some of these guys are going to disappear': Slump hits cannabis industry

Well, that didn't take long.


But... but... they said legalization would make the black market go away!

Exactly. It happened in Washington state and it happened in Colorado but it would never happen here.

Not to mention the fact that the roll out was something more akin to a Monty Python skit than a solid plan, nobody is going to buy that crap they're selling in the gov't store at grossly over inflated prices and this is the consequence. Everybody and their dog thought this was going to be the wave of the future, well it isn't. All legalization did was ensure that people smoking the stuff wouldn't go to jail. Something that wasn't happening anyway.

Hell even the people of BC were so disinterested in legalization that they couldn't get enough names on a petition to have it included as a referendum in an election.

Actually, what it also did is deny people who had been growing (good) pot for decades the ability to grow it for a living, and make a lot of rich white guys, richer.

If they actually wanted to hit the black market, moving the growers to the legal side seems like a smart first step. But making a clean criminal history a pre-req to getting a growers license means the growers who have been caught before stick to the black market.

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Actually, what it also did is deny people who had been growing (good) pot for decades the ability to grow it for a living, and make a lot of rich white guys, richer.

If they actually wanted to hit the black market, moving the growers to the legal side seems like a smart first step. But making a clean criminal history a pre-req to getting a growers license means the growers who have been caught before stick to the black market.

Money talks and bullshit walks. The big grow companies paid alot of money to get the stuff legalized all while thinking that they were going to have the market to themselves. Problem is that the small growers provide, better service, better product at much lower prices than the gov't and their friends are offering.

The second issue is that organized crime owns but doesn't run legalized pot shops so they're in essence shell companies which means that a criminal record check is nice but doesn't really eliminate the problem. Back about 10 years ago the police raided most "legal" medical marijuana shops in town because they had evidence that they were owned by either the Hell's Angels or their partners the Vietnamese gangs. Evidence that took years to accumulate and act on.

They shut most of them down and within two weeks they were all open again under another "owner" who had a clean record and no attachment to organized crime.

So that one isn't likely to work and if all levels of gov't were serious about stopping organized crime they'd shut EVERY pot shot and grow op down, home grown included and only allow the product to be sold from their own stores. Then, in 30 or 40 years when they've brainwashed the populace into thinking the only place you can get the good stuff is from the gov't store you can start to do the same as they did for alcohol and relax the laws to allow home grown and different types.

The first mistake was handing the responsiblity for the legalization over to the provinces who immediately handed it over to the municipalities, cities and towns which means there's no way they can stop organized crime with the hodgepodge of rules and regulations that are in place now.

Organized crime is the 75 tr old next door. Our friends who've grown a couple dozen plants for the last 40 years. The online store they simply won't license
THe real organized crime are the goodie two shoes Church Lady types who stack every city council and committee so a year later there are NO stores. And make rules like was on vapes and edibles with max 10 mg so you gotta eat a whole box.
The BC online store doesn't even have any hash... not that I ever order from that one.