By Jon Hiltz

 

A recent study done by a group of academics and a prominent Canadian criminologist has found that organized crime’s involvement in the illegal Canadian marijuana trade, has been overblown by authorities.  This ‘duh no kidding’ moment that most pot lovers in Canada have known for many years shows that law-abiding citizens run the majority of illegal grow-ops across the nation.

The findings were presented to the federal legalization task force as they continue to understand the nature of marijuana in Canada, and how best to bring it to the public by spring of next year.

The paper cited government data which shows that over an eight-year period, only five percent of criminal marijuana cases had links to organized crime or street gangs.  The intentions of this study were to point out that if the government continues to overestimate the black market, the new legal market will be too restrictive and therefore have the opposite effect of perpetuating illegal cannabis products.

The Canadian Government has been hanging its hat on the idea that if they make weed legal, organized crime will be taken out of the equation.  This was one of the biggest points in Trudeau’s reasoning for the idea.  But the study shows that if you fear the boogeyman too much, you may just be running away from shadows.

Neil Boyd is the criminologist who co-authored the study, and he is also the Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University.  He had this to say in Globe & Mail:  “A lot of this comes down to your definition of organized crime. If you think three people acting together and potentially making some kind of profit necessarily means that these are organized criminals, then, of course, everybody in the cannabis industry is an organized criminal.  But if you think along the lines of the Justice Canada website, where the focus is on corruption [and]the use of force or violence, you’ll find very few people in the marijuana industry are properly defined as organized criminals.”

Boyd went on to add that the study further shows the government should allow small-scale cannabis businesses such as dispensaries to operate under the law and not restrict cannabis to the LP’s and big business retail corporations.

Professor Boyd did not deny that gangs and organized crime certainly have a role in the illicit marijuana business, but he argued that the RCMP has never proven the of extent their involvement.

The Cannabis Trade Alliance of Canada recommended that the Trudeau Government create licensing and security requirements for a range of cannabis-related businesses including seed and clone nurseries, commercial growers, extract and oil producers and of course our beloved dispensaries.

What this basically means is, if Trudeau really wants to achieve his goal of stamping out organized crime’s limited role in marijuana, the cannabis landscape has to include every product available on the free market. And what’s so bad about that?