DO WE REALLY NEED MARIJUANA VENDING MACHINES?
I did a double take when I read the headline recently that, “Vancouver gets 1st licensed pot shop.” A little searching found that there are somewhere between 90 and 100 dispensers selling marijuana in the Vancouver area and they have been doing it for years. Of course, they have been deemed to be illegal, but the police have turned a blind eye for over a decade to dozens of marijuana store front operations. Now that pot has become legal in Canada, the noose may soon be tightening on illegal outlets - and maybe not. It is quite a confusing mess.
The couple that has been granted the first provincial license to operate a recreational cannabis store have undergone incredible scrutiny. The new owners reported the licensing process was “extremely, extremely thorough.” “The province worked really, really hard to make sure there’s no organized crime in this industry. They went back 20 years with me and my wife to find out every job we’ve had and every vacation we’ve had,” said the new licensee.
On one hand the government has done a 20 year audit on the lives of the two new owners to determine if they were “clean” and not connected to any organized crimes. At the same time, dozens of illegal marijuana outlets seemed to operate with very little inspection or scrutiny. The current illegal outlets are usually called dispensaries or clinics, under the guise that they are dispensing medical marijuana. A kind of pot head pharmacy. The whole scenario smells a little skunky to me!
Last year, one marijuana dispensary in Vancouver introduced the first pot vending machine in Canada which introduces another interesting twist into the pot purchasing program. You can now stop at vending machines for a pop, a bag of chips and a bag of weed on your way home from work. The current machine has an employee on hand who will be checking ID before anyone can make a purchase. Future vending machines will have a customer set up an account using a government-issued ID and then uses a fingerprint scan to verify the buyer, before allowing a purchase.
It seems to me that the amount of government money spent on regulating, scrutinizing and licensing marijuana sales could be better spent in areas like child welfare, low cost housing and work projects to get people off the streets and into a better position to develop a more healthy life style. But what do I know!
Aren't these vending machines putting some honest, hard-working citizens out of a job?
ReplyDeleteThe western world seems to have thrown its hands in the air and said, I give up on this marijuana thing. The argument has always bene that marijuana offences take up too much police time, too much court time and prison costs. If it's legal then the government can save all those costs and also tax it. I worry though that this same logic may be applied to murder.