Become a Clash Insider!
Big Tech is clamping down on conservative media big time. Don’t let Big Tech pre-chew your news. Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we’ll make sure to keep you in the loop.
Canada legalized pot in 2018. But the rollout hasn’t being going exactly as planned.
Pot has hit all kinds of snags as the government had to wrestle with what rules needed to be put in place.
Each province had its own rollout rules. Governments offered a ‘lottery system’ for which companies got the right to sell pot, they had to meet particular criteria, and there were limits on where these dispensaries could be opened, and how many in a given region.
Quality control was an issue as well. And that went South in a big way.
Last October, Canadian cannabis firms had around 1.1 billion grams of harvested or processed cannabis sitting in storage. Around 95 per cent of that weed is considered ‘largely unsaleable’ because it has been spoiled by time, and because there’s just too much existing supply to try and sell it.
The low quality of the products as well as the slow process by which the provinces allowed for licensed stores to sell the cannabis in the years since legalization is being blamed for the destroyed stockpiles.
…The warehoused cannabis combined with the destroyed products means that at least 1.6 million kilograms [3.5 million pounds] of marijuana went unsold as of the end of 2020.
Companies destroy the excess cannabis by either combining it with kitty litter or using either incineration or composting. — DailyMail
The government tried to micromanage the particulars of supply and demand. They wound up with way too much of a product that was ultimately worthless and wasted.
What about the argument that legalization proponents ‘real’ goal was to remove criminal cartels from the equation? How’s that strategy panning out? Eh, not so great.
Long after pot was legalized, Canucks STILL prefer to get their pot from their guy on the street than from some licensed store.
The move comes as Canada tries to fix its ailing pot market, where illegal producers sell more annually than hundreds of licensed cultivators, even over two years after the country became the first major nation to legalize weed in 2018.
Households spent more than $2.45billion buying non-medical pot from illicit channels last year versus $2.31billion of legal purchases, according to Statistics Canada data.– DailyMail
They can’t blame COVID for the surplus either. Churches and schools might have been closed during the pandemic, but booze and pot were necessities.
So Canada’s central planners tried to kickstart an industry where there was an existing ready market buying billions in product a year. They gave assurance of quality control. They made it legal. The government gave them everything advantage they could think of over the black market.
And the public still voted with their wallets… picking the criminal cartels over the government one.
The pot smokers voted for a product that government central planners could not give them.
Customers went to the criminal cartels. There they found the product quality they expected at a price they were willing to pay. That came with a delivery method or location that also met their needs.
Leave it to government intervention to find a way to lose money on selling marijuana. If the government can screw up selling drugs to the willing public, is it any wonder that they get the harder stuff like health care so very wrong?
