Can Canada go Legally Green?

by **Hobb** Fri 1 Sep 2017 - 14:22

We are within a year of marijuana being legalized in Canada. This event will be a real test of Canadian sovereignty. Can the Canadian capitalists and government that stand to make so much money off of legalization overcome the truly reactionary puritan Trump picked as his Attorney General and all the police department who make big $$$ seizing assests and punishing inner-city marijuana users?

This is not some fictional battle about 'democracy' or 'human rights' - these are opposed coalitions of political forces with serious monetary and ideological consequences at stake.

I will collect information here on this thread.

Can money made from selling marijuana be put in US banks?

realnewsnetwork wrote: Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

However, this month Uruguayan pharmacies, which are allowed to sell marijuana in limited amounts, discovered that U.S. banking system is more powerful than the Uruguay's legislature. As reported by the New York Times, the Patriot Act prohibits financial institutions from engaging in businesses that profit from controlled substances such as marijuana. The purpose was to prohibit money laundering and drug trafficking.

New York is so dominant in commercial banking that even if you were a Uruguayan bank, you're going to have to move money through New York, and through the Federal Reserve system, and the SWIFT system, and that means that we do have unusual leverage as the United States.

Now, to their credit, the banking regulators and prosecutors in the United States, in the context of states like Colorado that have taken steps in legalization, have indicated that they're not going to prosecute banks because they provide loans, or deposit accounts, or checking accounts to legal businesses that, under Colorado law, are lawfully selling marijuana, for example.

Uruguay is the global leader in actually legalizing at the national level. Canada may well follow.

Trump's Attorney General completely demonizes marijuana despite all the scientific evidence, despite the fact that it does substantially less harm than alcohol. He presumably would oppose it.

I first heard Bill Black during his vital explanations of the 2008 WallStreet crash. Whenever he talks, I listen.

by **Hobb** Fri 1 Sep 2017 - 14:38

The US experiments in state legalization are under attack

thecannabist.co wrote:Governors from Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, the first four states to legalize recreational marijuana, each sent letters to the attorney general defending their respective regulatory regimes. This was in response to a nonprofit group opposed to marijuana legalization that announced it had sent a report to Attorney General Sessions.

Their report says that Colorado, Oregon and Washington have failed to comply with seven of the eight guidelines of the Cole Memo (Obama's policy guideline about marijauna) which include preventing access to minors, flow to other states, drugged driving and growing of the plant on federal lands:

“States with legal marijuana are seeing an increase in drugged driving crashes and youth marijuana use. States that have legalized marijuana are also failing to shore up state budget shortfalls with marijuana taxes, continuing to see a thriving illegal black market and are experiencing an unabated sales of alcohol… State regulatory frameworks established post-legalization have failed to meet each of the specific DOJ requirements on controlling recreational marijuana production, distribution, and use.”

http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/08/30/smart-approaches-marijuana-sessions-laws/87003/

The “Cole Memo” — and what has been described a “fragile truce” between Washington and pot-tolerant states — are only as good as the political support behind it.

Trump's Attorney General is a total Southern reactionary

In April Sessions told a congressional hearing, “We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized,” he also condemned legalization in Colorado.

In a May Sessions personally asked congressional leaders to repeal an amendment that prevented the Justice Department from prosecuting providers of medical marijuana.

Like Stevie Harper, Jeff hates marijuana on a deep personal level. Back in the 1980s, a congressional hearing heard testimony from a prosecutor who said that Sessions had told him he had thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK with him - until I found out they smoked pot.”

Canada is bound by UN treaties

global wrote:Since a July 1 deadline to start withdrawing from three UN narcotics treaties has passed, the federal government is now left with fewer, and much more awkward, ways of legalizing marijuana by July of 2018 without breaking international law.

Heavily censored documents released to Global News under access-to-information laws, and the fact that the deadline has passed, seem to indicate that Ottawa is looking at legalizing pot, staying within the treaties, and just living with the inconsistency.

A briefing note prepared for then-foreign minister Stéphane Dion last year makes references to Uruguay, which legalized recreational pot in 2013 without leaving the treaties. While the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board disapproved, nothing much else happened.

http://globalnews.ca/news/3606927/after-blowing-july-1-deadline-canada-seems-likely-to-legalize-pot-while-ignoring-un-treaties/

Can Canada go Legally Green?