TRASHFUTURE - An Impassioned Plea for Universal Basic Mids ft. Luke Savage

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Does your investment portfolio include cannabis? Do you want leverage on your dank nugs? On this week’s Trashfuture, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) spoke with Jacobin staff writer and now two-time guest Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) to discuss why Canada’s new weed legalisation regime is both gentrifying and rarefying cannabis. There are also a lot of really great names in here, like Mark Pupo and Roger Rogers, all sane people who are business leaders to emulate, as well as some spectacular highbrow weed review copy that we scrutinise. Please bear in mind that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously.

And now, a statement from Liberal Democrat MP, Stephen Lloyd. Ladies and gentlemen of the Liberal Democrats, I'm Paddy Ashton, who could still have any of us in a fight. As you well know, we as a party are strongly opposed to Brexit, and such is our conviction that despite being Democrats, we have overlooked the referendum result, and despite being Liberals, we have overlooked AC Grayling's haircut. It is with this in mind that I have come to the conclusion that the best way forward for Al and my principled stand against Brexit is to vote for it. Theresa May's deal may not be perfect, but I remind you that me and my stick to the age-old principles of the Liberal Democrats, a principled

pursuit of a third way in British politics, avoiding the extremes of the left and the right, enthusing about windmills and charges on plastic bags before, eventually, and with a heavy heart, tutting under our breath most riley, going along with what the Tories want because in reality, Mummy knows best. But I assure you that this setback will not weaken my resolve. Do not think for a second that I will oppose Brexit any less after voting for it. On the contrary, I am a Liberal Democrat, and I will oppose it even more. People will say, Stephen, despite your assurances that you opposed it, you voted for it. And I will say, I don't remember voting for it, but I assure you that if I did vote for Brexit,

then that must have been the best way to prevent it, because nobody opposed Brexit more than I did, certainly not Jeremy Corbyn, whom I once overheard say that Tuscany was overrated, which is untrue in exactly what someone who had never been to Tuscany would say. Soon, the fight against Brexit will be won by this strategy, or at the very least, we will reach an agreement with the newly formed YouTube Nazi party of Great Britain, led by Paul Joseph Watson and one of the right honourable gentlemen from Blazing Squad to conduct a People's Brexit, which will be more or less the same as regular Brexit, but will contain an important policy for ensuring supplies of vegan margarine are not affected. This is a compromise we can

work with. With this future success assured by some promises made to me by a man I spoke to briefly outside a UKIP conference and written down in lemon juice on the back of this crisp packet, I will be retiring from public life to spend more time distilling artisan gin and watching the rugby with my wife Jocelyn and my two dogs, FB and PE. Hey, welcome back again to TF, your free TF for the week. It's me, Riley, in the guy household with Milo Edwards. Oh, it's me, your boy. I'm looking at Riley. I'm looking at a huge couple cut out of Elon Musk with a Supreme Box logo on it. And what's up? What's up, guys? My boys. And on the phone lines, we got Luke Savage, the Canadian correspondent,

Jacob and staff writer and the host of the Michael and us podcast. How are you doing, Luke? I'm doing great. Actually, Milo took my intro because I'm also looking at a cardboard cut of Elon Musk, although I'm in my apartment, so I have nothing like your excuse. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing. If you come on Trash Future, the thing that if you come on Trash Future twice, then you get a cardboard cut out of Elon Musk. We send it to you in the mail. Thanks very, very folded. No, no, no. I mean, look, we we got cursed by that witch. So, you know, we have to keep doing it and we have to keep sending them. Yeah, it's just like that old gypsy woman said. Yeah, it all it all came very, very true.

Do you know how huge an envelope you need to send a life-sized cardboard cut out of Elon Musk? A large one. It's right. Thank goodness. Thank goodness we just met Britain's now printing all of those gigantic checks so it can spend its Brexit bonanza. They're getting them all half price from the lottery, like the ones that don't get used. I for one can't wait to win a trillion Teresa Pounds once this deal inevitably goes through. I think I'll be able to buy a loaf of bread, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. There's something about the phrase Teresa Pounds that makes me deeply uncomfortable. That's the new. That's the post-Brexit cryptocurrency.

It's a cryptocurrency that's pegged to optimism, stick to itiveness, and a buccaneering free trading spirit. It's the cryptocurrency that is always strong and stable. And you can take that to the bank. Oh, yeah. You can take that to the bank, which incidentally is now located in Frankfurt. There's a cryptocurrency that's pegged to where actually we're just getting pegged. We're not really sure how that even happened, but that's pretty much what's happening now. But today, we are not talking about Brexit, which might I add, after doing our Brexit episode with Tom Kabassi, we swore never to talk about again. Instead, we are talking about drowning. We are talking about weed. That 420, that kush, that kind bud.

Holy shit. It's 5.23 p.m. and we're talking about weed. Yes, we are talking about not just weed, but the kind of weed nerds can enjoy because we're talking about legal ass weed. Because Canada decided to federally legalize marijuana a little while ago. And then that sort of went, Luke, when did that actually come into effect? Just a couple of months ago. I mean, the Liberals won the election 2015 on this legalization promise, but it took a very long time for anything to actually happen. That's so cool of them that they came in. The Justin Trudeau had some photos taken. He called someone a person. And then he said, refugees are welcome. And then very few refugees

were actually welcome. And then eventually, weed was legalized. Yeah, that's pretty much a pretty concise summary of Canadian politics for the last three years, actually. I don't need to go back at all. I get it all from here. But now the refugees who are there can get really stoked. No one in Canada has accomplished anything for the last couple of months. But everyone seems to be watching old episodes of The Venture Brothers, is that like the property brothers, but they're into like investing? No, this is the formal, formal trash future endorsement. The Venture Brothers is probably

one of the funniest shows ever made. It basically asked the question, what if Johnny Quest grew up and became sort of like a pill-popping, misanthropic super scientist who had two moronic kids? Patrick Warburton's in it. It's incredibly good. But enough about The Venture Brothers. Milo, that lib dem that sounds suspiciously like you, he has actually come out in favor of May's deal. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to lie. I didn't do a lot of reading into this. I just write the jokes. I don't research the jokes. So there's like 12 lib dem MPs now, I think, and 10 of them are voting against the Brexit deal, which given that they're at this point

a one-issue party whose issue is we will vote against Brexit, it's kind of surprising that they couldn't get a consensus among 12 people. It would be like if two of the disciples of Jesus had come out pro-crucifixion. And even the guy who turned him into the Romans eventually came out as anti-crucifixion. Like the lib dems are literally more, I don't know, I don't know, wrong guy. Well, this was the anti-tuition fee party that had to spin it as progressive to, you know, vote with the Tories to triple tuition fees. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Oh, yeah. No. Anyway, so I have gotten slightly distracted from the core topic, which I have briefly forgotten, but now remembered again, much in keeping with the theme

is, in fact, marijuana legal legalization. So we legalized it a couple of years ago. It's come into effect. Well, we voted on legalizing it a couple of years ago. It's come into effect now. Fantastic. And what's that done to Toronto, the city where you are from and where I used to live? You know what? Remarkably, not very much. You'll read these accounts in, like, Toronto life or whatever that'll be about how, you know, now the sky reeks with cannabis and there are clouds of smoke over, you know, every neighborhood or whatever. And I don't know, I haven't really experienced that. Like, because of the way in which the legalization was carried out, it's, it was just suddenly normalized. Like, there was kind of, you know,

you know, legalized day, and then all of a sudden, you know, every, every kind of downtown neighborhood just had like a really, had a bunch of really ornate looking kind of exposed brick wood paneling stores called like Budweiser, you know, with like, without the E or whatever, you know, I see what they did. Yeah, you know, like, smoking weed makes you wise. That's right. Yeah. And you had this kind of sudden marketing of marijuana as like a lifestyle product. So using that type of language that's or like a natural health product, something like that. So I mean, the big, the big difference is now you can, now you can get marijuana served to or cannabis as it's now called, you can kind of get it served to you on a platter of, you know, upper middle

class respectability, and you don't have to go anywhere near a picture of Bob Marley or like a store that sells, you know, golden Buddha statues or busts of Elvis. Now you find it next to the yoga studio and your real estate broker. And it's got a, I don't know, this kind of garnish of like urban chic to it that before it, it didn't have, that's the only, that's only big change. Love me a weed garnish. Yeah, that that's, so what was it? There's that, that's the big change. And that and also the extremely convoluted and punitive enforcement regime that's come on top of that. Oh, cool. I was really hoping that legalization would bring with it a complicated and punitive enforcement regime. I mean, where are we all just very diss, I'm very disappointed

that they haven't put a rastafarian droopy hat on the CN tower. I also like, I thought it was interesting what you said that like marijuana or cannabis as it's now called, because actually, I was thinking about this the other day, there's like, there's just no normal way of saying weed really likes like marijuana, cannabis, the devil's lettuce. It's either, it's either like, you can say it in only two ways, one, which makes it sound like it's too, it's too clinical and you're not giving it kind of the, like a reverence that's proportionate to what it is versus, you know, it kind of sounding like you're being too ironic and you're leaning in a little too hard to this like, wink, wink, like there's no earnest way to refer to marijuana. Ganger.

See what I mean? I'm in favor of wacky back illegalization. So you said there was a, an insane and punitive enforcement regime because the last time I was in Canada, there were sort of quasi legal clinics that were sort of operating. If you wanted that, it's like being legal, but you have a hunchback. Yes, exactly. Yes, precisely like that. So there were a bunch of quasi legal clinics and there were sort of people just selling them. But that's not how it's sort of mooted to be sold now, right? Yeah. So there was this really weird period of like, you know, if before, before legalization or if like before 2015 was like the inferno after 2015, before legalization

was like the purgatorio. And that's where you had these, you know, this kind of weird legal gray zone where these, where these dispensaries could kind of operate. And I mean, they were tolerated, except they were constantly getting rated. So I mean, they sort of were tolerated, but also not tolerated. And now we've ascended to the paradisio where everything is, you know, everything is super respectable and expensive and kind of hipsterized. And if you break the law around the kind of sale or distribution of cannabis, the consequences are going to be really severe, which is I think the perfect world that we're all waiting for. Oh, of course, because we want to make sure that everyone who

was criminalized for selling cannabis before legalization stays criminalized. But we also want to make sure that someone called like, you know, Becky is able to open a dank yoga studio. And she can do budrum yoga. Canada's official policies ain't no such thing as halfway crooks. Yeah. So speaking of this, I actually did a search on Toronto Life earlier. And I noticed there were three articles really just leapt off the screen to me. Number one, the city's swankiest pot paraphernalia. Number two, I love good paraphernalia. You know, when you don't know what to get your man for Christmas, ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies, we've all been there, right? Men, what do they want? No one knows. What do they do?

They jerk off, they eat bacon. I don't know. What do they want for Christmas? They've got everything they want. They've got a car, they've got a hat. What are you going to get them? Paraphernalia. That's what they fucking love paraphernalia. It's like it's in America or places where weed isn't legal. If you want to buy your man a Christmas present, you have to get him the epic bacon whiskey from the from the from the man catalog or maybe a or or one of those man catalog is actually a very different one of those Facebook algorithmically generated t-shirts. That's like, yeah, I'm a forklift driver and I was born in July, which means I like Poinsettias.

Which means why I love paraphernalia. And I also know that if you only have one paraphernalia, it's a paraphernalia. Is that true? No. I don't know. You're the only one who actually speaks Latin around here. Actually, you know what? It probably is true. But it's Greek. It's not, it's not Latin. So it would be it would be paraphernalia on technically. Paraphernalia. That sounds like that will be a weed strain very soon. It would totally be a weed store, bro, or the very least a strain of weed. Oh, no, but that's the thing. It wouldn't be a weed store now because the weed stores now are

either called stuff like a whole earth herbal clinic, best buds or or like Budweiser, as Luke said, but like in quotes and in small font, it wouldn't be paraphernalia. And that's a 2015 era semi legal clinic name. Wait, it's Canada. How isn't there a store called? Hey, buddy. Anyway, give it a time. So so the the second the second article Toronto's most stylish head shops again does not sound like a weed store and three Toronto life critic Mark Pupo reviews 10 pot edibles. How did he get that name from his love of edibles? So that's that what I think I think what we're sort of getting at through here is that there there has been this weed legalization. But let's just say it's

it is weed legalization that has been rolled out in just the most gentrified way possible. Right. So it increasingly seems like this legal purgatory, this long kind of phony war where people were just kind of waiting for weed to be legal. What was really going on in that time was you know, all these kind of former political insiders and kind of corporate oligarchs had to get their ducks in order. They had to get their business models set up like every annoying campus conservative I knew in you know, circa 2008 2009, you know, had to get had to get their venture capital to start their cannabis startup. And that's kind of what that's kind of what was happening while people were still being arrested for simple possession. And then it was just like

overnight all of a sudden, it's just normal that it's just a normal part of kind of, I don't know, downtown Toronto, you know, Bay Street, you know, business, the sort of Bay Street business affect like you go to a you go to a screening at the Tiff Bell Lightbox or whatever, and there's just like an ad for a weed startup before, you know, your Bergman film or whatever, you know, it's a it's a weird it's a really weird thing. People people said it would be controversial when we legalized weed only for people earning more than $30,000 a year, but I say that's aspirational. It is it is fucking weird, though, how like normally when they make stuff legal, it comes with a conch a consummate kind of like forgiving of previous convictions for this. Like, I mean,

I know that when they made homosexuality legal in the UK that eventually led to like people's convictions for homosexuality being like disregarded and so on. So like, why would you not extend this to drugs? Like if you're now saying, okay, this is fine, they've mused about it. But for for years, like, I'm not sure I'm not sure what the what the status of that of that is actually. But um, but I mean, they were yeah, they were categorically ruling that out for for some time, which, you know, especially didn't make sense given that, you know, the way the liberals kind of package the legalization. Originally, it was by Justin Trudeau saying, Oh, yeah, I've smoked weed as an MP. So for for a long time, the government's position was

people should be getting criminalized for something the prime minister himself admits to having done illegally. Like it was kind of there was such a transparent double standard inherent in that it may be it may be that they may be that they fix that. But and I certainly certainly hope they do. But they're but don't worry, because they're going to be a lot of new. They're going to be a lot of new convicts created out of this. There's been the massive massive expansion of police budgets and police powers like hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to police, you know, police and also border officials to enforce the the new regime. So so don't don't worry, they'll be there'll be plenty more convicts.

So wait, how how are people getting convicted? Is it because is it from selling outside the sort of tight rope of regulations that we've got set down? Yeah, exactly. So for example, you know, one I know offhand is there's now a much harsher penalty for like selling weed to a minor. So, you know, when I was when I was 14, and I guys guys who work in mines got to get high too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, when like when I was 14, like, you know, whatever, you know, guy in grade 12 or whatever that was like selling me weed could have like he could face you could have faced years in prison if this regime had been been in place then, you know, it's like that kind of thing. So from from those articles I've cited, we don't have time to read all of them,

but I think we'd be totally remiss if we didn't cover a few of hay being remiss. Yeah, can't be remiss if we didn't cover a few of the more sort of egregious bits of what I'm calling the goofy and less important half of the weed gentrification process. Oh, and it just so happens that producer Nate has joined us. Hello, producer Nate. Hello, I've materialized from a cloud of weed smoking which gets the law in Britain and somehow it just manages to get puffed everywhere. So from from the one from the first article, 12 of shine's 24 karat gold papers have become a status symbol among celebrity tokers like Miley Cyrus in two and podcast celebrity tokens. Oh God, the sheets are crafted from edible 24 karat gold and packaged with a certificate of

authenticity. The fuck is edible gold? Like it keeps I keep hearing about it and I'm just like it's either gold or it's edible like you shouldn't be eating gold like there's no and even if you could eat gold why so this is not for eating. This sounds like one of those one of those scams to get like really dumb Silicon Valley people to spend money on things that are actually killing them like you remember you guys remember that whole raw water fad that was like ripping Silicon Valley kind of sounds like that and I love that there's a certificate of authenticity like certifying certifying what like certifying that it's this hyper exclusive thing that only dumb rich people get you know. I'm also laughing too at the idea of because I

don't know if you recall when people were talking about colloidal silver being the thing that was going to like be an antibiotic you could make yourself and like why would you smoke gold like what would you smoke a metal like I'm sure they believe there's some antibiotic or some sort of health property to it but like I'd really hope that somewhere somehow there's like you know like an oncologist who's like oh no no you're going to get cancer from that you're all going to die and that at some point this will be revealed later on down the road is that has that how gold member lost his dick. So here's what I think is actually happening right because you know how raw water was just like super rich people just deciding they needed to die because they wanted

to give themselves cholera because their lives are very empty now this is super rich people deciding to give themselves like early industrial revolution era lung diseases because they just want to they're all trying to travel back in time to like the 17 late 17th century or so and they all just want to have these sort of really ancient long cured diseases. I mean Hatter's and Furrier's got high as fuck off that mercury so how are you going to approximate that? Hatter's and Furrier's is these rich guys being like yeah I'm into business success and going for runs at 4am but really what I'd like to be is in the same lung disease Venn diagram circle as people who worked in the industrial towns of the Soviet Union. One of these days

like Elon Musk is going to tweet that uh you know every bitcoin you eat adds like a year to your life and just the entire like everyone in Silicon Valley is just going to die like in within a few hours. Some dumbass in Silicon Valley who's like no I'm going to be fine I've got a whole closet for the bitcoin and they just tell us that they're all chocolate bitcoins. No these are the same people who are going to invent like running in all black at night on the motorway to stay more motivated. Well I mean you got to have that adrenaline otherwise you know you don't know if you're actually alive. Alright I'm going to move on to the highlight from the next start oh that was a hundred dollars for a pack of 12 by the way. I'm going to move

on to the next article. Highlight am I right? So okay, Tumonto's most stylish head shop, Tokyo Smoke, Alan Gertner a former Google manager and his former Google manager and his father Lorne acquired Canada's first license to grow medical marijuana more than 20 years ago. Lorne Gertner sounds like a German guy who tends to steal garden. And we're going to take every sort of horrible horrible urban gentrification box with the rest of this paragraph. It's built inside a modified shipping container and sells premium vaporizers, LEGO's architectural icon sets, Hermes tableware, dipty candles and the perfectly pulled espresso and fancy pastries. That's right, it's the Trash Reacher studio.

Alan also sells his own men's clothing line featuring shawl collared blazers, quilted wool blend hoodies and tailored shirts. This place has a hippie quotient of zero. Man after my own heart. Play with LEGOs. I mean this is the pure sort of like society has become a very stupid daycare. There's the purest strain of that particular plant. Also that this guy is like, oh, what clothes should I wear for smoking weed? That famously incredibly smelly substance. Oh, I know, really porous materials like wool, they're really impossible to get smells out of. I know that you're going to make this comparison down the road because you've planned it out Riley, but as somebody who grew up watching

friends get hemmed up for weed and getting like serious charges over and over again because where I'm from, like they really prosecute it very strongly. Like this makes me angrier and angrier the more I look at it because on one hand I'm like, oh, sweet. Yeah, they're legalizing weed. But on the other hand, it's like, yeah, this makes me want the fucking 1930s to come back. Like you guys, this is just, it seems like it's going once. Last token, high trousers. It's just, it's a little too much. Also, I'm laughing at Tokyo Smokes. Tokyo, Japan, famously a place that's really tolerant of weed, but doesn't design massive penalties for

drugs. Yeah, what is even the pun here? Like Tokyo drip, like did they somehow get from Tokyo drift to Tokyo smoke? No, no. You guys are all missing. You know, I guess we're all missing why it's called Tokyo is because both of these people have absolutely no token. Yo, it's just operating on a whole other level. No, that's the thing. I don't think, I don't think it's, it's a pun. I don't think it's a pun at all. I think these two people have read every single issue of monocle magazine and, and like, and have sort of a curated line of like Hinoki wood tableware or whatever, because Tyler Brule constantly talks about like three cities like Tokyo, Copenhagen,

and Buenos Aires. He's always talking about some combination of those three. What a bizarre selection of like, I mean, antique shit. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So this is just like, this is like someone just rolled a joint out of an issue of monocle. Well, I mean, Riley, since you're always paying attention to the class aspect of this, it does seem like a very deliberate attempt to take away like the kind of Hesher stoner culture and make it into like, it's the exact same thing. Like dude, I'm blaze 24 seven, but rather than it being tie dye or listening to metal, it's, it's this, it's, it's scandy design and like really expensive coffee, and it seems like the implicit notion here is

like, oh no, poor stoners go to jail. Rich stoners work at startups and our friends with Jack Dorsey and used to come work at Google. Rich stoners go on the Joe Rogan experience. Oh my, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the third one now. This is one of the foods that, what's his name? Mark Pupo reviewed. Yes, that is correct, Nate. That phase is exactly correct. Yeah, I'll just, I'll just leave this one. It's fine. Don't worry. We've already handled that. Yeah. This, this, so this is popcorn, which is a type of popcorn from bubby's baked goods. Wait, is that like how people on, on the internet used to write porn like prawn? No, I think it's prawn like chronic. Yeah.

It's that dumb. It's that fucking stupid. Yeah. Like honestly, we have to ask ourselves the question. Let's, let's go around. Was weed legalization actually worth it? It just seems like the worst people with the dumbest jokes have decided. I mean, I guess when you get down to it, who's going to be like, I want to, I want to be a weed investor. Like it's going to be people who are like, well, there's no space left on the Romaniacs. Oh, don't worry guys. The type of high is described as psychedelic, but I also checked out the other types of high in Mark's poop, Mark Pupo's article because now you can be a weed connoisseur. We have the tasting notes. We have psychedelic, but we also have intransigent,

vertiginous, and fleeting, fleeting, but joyful. So what? Fleeting, but joy. This sounds like, this sounds like, this sounds like, I don't know if you guys have David's tea over there, but it's kind of like a posh like tea store. It sounds like when you get like, they're like, uh, you know, holiday Roybus Chai, like fleeting, but joyful. Oh yeah. I've just described the high as curmudgeonly. But like, those just sound like GRE words used to describe bad weed experiences like intransigent. No, more like paranoid or like fleeting, but joyful. It's not fucking strong enough to actually get you high for a very long time. It doesn't intransigent imply like a stalemate of some kind.

Like the negotiations became intransigent. Like what this was really doing, right? Is I think this might be more of a commie book club thing. I talk about, we talked about like marketing before, what it really does, is it just sort of creates, it creates your perceptions of these things, right? Like, weed is weed is weed. THC is THC is THC. It's, it's just, it's a chemical that, yeah, you can metabolize it differently, but like it's still the same chemical, but they're just like, oh no, but this one gives you was, this one gives you a high that's no, it's described as this, if we put it with popcorn, like it's just creating sort of difference in desires.

I mean, there are definitely different effects based on different strains, but like, I think the idea to try to like make it into this simile a shit is really weird and I think that it implies something like, like you just described, like this infinite variety there by infinite marketability. I mean, I definitely think that like the difference between indica and sativas is very different in terms of how it affects you, but like, I don't necessarily think that I've ever been intransigently high. What I'm saying is when you light up a blend of Justin Trudank, you know you're smoking Justin Trudank. No, no, no, no. Well, it's sort of like with wine reviews, right? Where like, obviously there's a difference between like a $10 bottle of wine and like a

$25 bottle and like, you know, like that, that kind of rule applies going up like in price, but with like increasingly diminishing returns. But then there's this like ceaseless quest by, you know, wine reviewers and kind of lifestyle magazines and marketing guys to create infinite novelty within that by just like injecting all of these adjectives into wine. I used to, I used to think wine actually had all of these, like when they say that something has like a, you know, a, you know, shirubi smoky hue or something used to think that actually meant something. And it's just, it's just total bullshit to, to make you think that, I don't know, to make you think that like one expensive bottle of red wine is like, is like substantially different

from another, even if they're the difference is like one of very small degree. As an aside, on this point, when I was at university, a mate and I used to have a radio show where we did a segment called Wine or Play where we would get a guest on and we would read them excerpts from reviews of wines and plays taken from like the Guardian and Telegraph websites. And people almost never got it right. Like you'd be like, I'd be like a fantastic and vibrant combination of flavors and different essences which lingers on the palette, a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre. But here's the thing, this is, this, that was, that was the sort of the open, the opening strains of the orchestra that Mark Pupo was prepared for us. The real,

the real shit comes. Mark Pupo plays. The actual review where he writes, this cluster of popcorn, caramel, marshmallow, peanut butter chips and chocolate gave me the weirdest dreams. Something to do with Miley running a dog daycare at my old high school. She's apparently on my mind. If it weren't so hard hitting, I'd be eating this stuff all the time. It's salty and sweet in the perfect proportion like camp food for adults. So basically this guy had a trip and is now just describing it to you. This guy is definitely that guy you knew from high school. Thank you. This guy's couch. Well, I'd also, I'd also point out that one of the things that actually kind of turned me off as somebody who was a big fan of weed and then

wasn't allowed to smoke weed for 10 years and came back to it later was that it's so much stronger now. The idea of like having this kind of stuff like based on the dosage, I mean it's put down with 250 milligrams of THC. I feel like a handful of that would probably get the average person fucked up for like 12 hours. So it makes me wonder at a certain point, like it seems like this is meant to aestheticize what's basically been previously kind of pigeonholed as like an addictive behavior and like making it into wine reviews as opposed to like someone who's enthusiastic about wine because they buy expensive bottles of wine and reads wine magazines is different than a person who's enthusiastic about wine because like they fucking drink it on the street by themselves.

In the same vein, like this is basically taken, taken weed and made it into this thing that's like, well, ultimately, it's supposed to get you high. Like that's the point. Like it doesn't matter if it fucking tastes like camp food for adults. It doesn't matter if it's like, it's, it's just a weird kind of riffing on the, on, on the obvious. And that to me like makes it so strange that I mean, I feel like a friend and I joke about this about high times, high times magazine comes out every month. It's like, how many times can you, can you write, dude, I'm so fucking high right now, you know, to make it interesting. In the same vein, it's like, this stuff's going to get you fucked up. Like you don't care if it tastes like popcorn or not. Like you care about the THC content.

Like it's just strange that it's so, it's made so rarefied, I guess. Yeah. Me next week for Vice, we gave people on the street a whole bag of weed popcorn and convinced them that Cthulhu did 9-11. You know, you know what's, you know, what's kind of a funny thing that's happened in tandem with this is like the legalization regimes or like the implementation has been a little bit different, I think, depending on which Canadian province you live in. And in Ontario, you know, the Imperial Metropolitan Center of the country, the rollout was particularly bad. And basically you had to order the stuff from like a government website, which of course immediately crashed. And you know, people were told like it's going to be months until you

actually get the stuff. I had a few friends that tried to do that. And when it, when it eventually came, like it comes in these weird kind of clinical, like they look like a, they look like a multivitamin bottles or whatever. Like it's the exact opposite of this. So like the government's not, not able to, it doesn't have the, you know, flexibility to do any of this kind of absurd marketing. So that's like the other extreme. And that's kind of the other weird aesthetic that's come out of this. Well, the odd thing is also like the way that, and now this is going to be more for the Canada heads out there, the way that Ontario markets booze, because it's, it also only a state, it will provincial seller in Ontario can sell alcohol. It's called

the LCBO or liquor control board of Ontario. But what they do is you can't buy booze in like a supermarket. No, no, it has to be. Not really. No. But isn't Toronto in Ontario? Yes. Yes. So in like, in all of Toronto, you can't, you have to go to like a state, go to government store. Basically, well actually, you know, this, this, this is actually, there's a really good analogy. Like, or there's a really good, yeah, there's a really good analogy here. Like the LCBO, which dates from prohibition, it is literally the liquor control board. There are other places, like there's the beer store, and then there's something called the wine rack. The wine rack, in particular, like it only sells, like if you go to the LCBO, you can get like, I don't know,

your French wines, Portuguese, whatever. But the wine rack is just basically stuff from like the Niagara Peninsula, like other parts of Canada. And it is, apart from the LCBO, basically the only other place you can get wine. And as I understand it, it's essentially just a sort of cartel that's run by different vineyards or whatever in, in Ontario. And so it's actually exactly like, like what's, what's happened with weed is pretty much the same thing. We have similar things in the U.S. There's some states where you have like in North Carolina, you have the ABC store, like the alcohol beverage commission store. And it's a strange thing because you can cross the state border and go into a place like from North Carolina to Georgia, where like it's free

for all. So it, but I didn't realize they did that up there. And also I'm just envisioning like what, what that equivalent of a weed store in Canada would be like, and all I can think of is like the grocery store from repo man, where everything's just like a white unmarked case, just as weed on it. That's the thing. It wouldn't because what I was, what I'm getting at also is the LCBO is branded as this really swanky lifestyle thing. Like they put out a magazine called like Gourmet, like all of their stores are very, very, very nice and very luxurious. Like there is every all of booze consumption in Ontario is branded as middle class, basically. That's how they've made it acceptable. Yeah. Luke, it's a, do you feel like they're gonna have a hard day at yoga

class? Do you feel they're going to do, do something like that with marijuana as well? Oh yeah. It's, I mean, I think it's, I think it's kind of already happened. Like that's, that's what this whole, that's what this whole kind of bungled legalization would be about. Like I think people really assumed when they heard legalization, like the sort of weed community in Canada, which was kind of out pretty hard for Justin Trudeau in 2015, or it seems to me they were, like they just assumed that legalization was going to mean like the removal of a prohibition on something. But instead what it's meant is just, you know, this convoluted sort of corporatist, like structure just kind of, you know, crushing any sort of like organic small growers or whatever

is happening out before. It's one of those things where like, I think, you know, it proves like libertarians, like sort of 30%, right? You know, like where they think that, you know, they argue that you know, the market is kind of rigged by these special interest groups that, you know, kind of capture various bits of it and, and like rig it to their own advantage. But then the trouble is they think that that can be reconciled with like more capitalism, which is absurd. This is capitalism right here at its stupidest. So now that we've kind of talked about the dumb side of weed gentrification, where it's, you know, cat cafes and yoga cafes and little kinds of popcorn that make weird food critics talk about dreams they had. This is the real gentrification, the real sort of

insidious part of this process, is that weed is now becoming this multi-billion dollar industry. In Canada alone, and Luke, you kind of foreshadowed that when you said like, in the run up to legalization, all of the, you know, bowtie dipshits we knew in, in, in university were all slowly assembling their capital and getting ready to make their plays. Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. So I've, I've looked a little bit into this as well. Canopy growth, the first weed unicorns was valued at more than a billion dollars. Mark Zekelin, the president unicorn, sounds like something else. Mark Zekelin, the president, was a senior advisor. Mark Zekelin. Zekelin, yeah. I mean, I couldn't make up these names. They

sound like names I've made out. So the names on the table are a guy named Poop and a guy named Zekelin. I just want that entered into the record. These are definitely, these are almost names I made up as Tory ministers that have resigned. You've heard of my size, you had Poop Zekelin. Right, so this guy, president of the subsidiary of Canopy Growth called Tweed, was senior advisor to Ontario finance minister Dwight Duncan and former director, Chuck Rafichi, who actually like Chuck Rafichi and our operations officer, Dick and my ass. Right. So Chuck Rafichi was the, the CFO of the federal liberal party. He's no longer involved. He's now an independent investor, but like all of these people were so connected.

There's another name coming up. I just looked in the notes. It's amazing. Riley, please continue. Okay. Organogram holdings, president Roger Rogers. Yo, this is Roger Rogers and I'm here with my man, Chuck Rafichi, holding it down on the, on the weed smoking Canadian ass podcast. On the Adam 22 show. We're smoking legal ass weed with a little Zen, who's just back from rehab. Smoking legal ass weed with illegal ass kids. Welcome to the Jeffrey Epstein cast. No, wow, that took such a dark turn. So president Roger Rogers, which in Britain is actually a almost a sentence. He was VP of Moosehead breweries, which is one of like the

biggest Canadian like brewery companies and they're deeply involved with Constellation and International Beverage Company. And like, or we have people who are ditching the tech world, like that guy who was a former big wheel at Google, who now runs the fucking monocle ass motherfucking Tokyo shit. Like all of these people are just some of the wealthiest and most connected people in Canada who have now cornered a multi-billion dollar industry like right away. You hear me in monocle wearing motherfuckers in Tokyo. I'm calling you out. Pussy ass motherfuckers. 19th century cosplay ass bitches. Right. Any case. Steampunk fucking plastic gangsters. There is going to be a steampunk

themed weed night. Oh my God, I imagine. But you're right. And they'll call it they'll say smoke punk and it's going to play electro swing. It's going to play electro swing and it's going to be held at a quote unquote secret warehouse that's widely advertised in Toronto life. I am all I can think of is just like a weed pipe that's got it's made out of anodized metal. It's got like way too many appendages to actually function as a pipe. Right. It glows somehow. But getting back on track, this this we have created a multi-billion dollar industry. And once again, like four guys seem to be actually benefiting from it. And they will have. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't know if there was like a rule like in order to have a startup or

attract capital, you had to change your name to something ridiculous. But it's kind of a chicken in the egg thing with like, I don't know, Silicon Valley and like cryptocurrency guys or whatever. Like I'm not sure like, did the ridiculous names proceed what they were doing? Or were they like, you know, like, or are they are they like a product of it? I don't know. It's a mystery that that it will remain unsolvable. But yeah, if you if you run through the list of like, you know, who has these big publicly traded companies, it's all just, yeah, like former former CEO of, you know, Jameson and like, I don't even remember what tweet is, subsidiary tweet, that's Mark Zekelin's outfit. But yeah, he was like, you know,

seeing, yeah, senior advisor to Dwight Duncan, like this is the literal top of the establishment. And honestly, people that I don't know if like, in spite of, in spite of all this attempt to kind of market this stuff to upper middle class people, I suspect a lot of the, you know, faceless kind of corporate overlord at the top will remain like too prudish to actually consume any of this stuff. I've actually found the way if your name if your if your name is Zekelin, you're not you're not smoking weed anytime soon. I've worked out how you can come up with your weed entrepreneur name. So first name you pick the last guy you heard about being named in a Trump indictment, you take his first name. And then as a surname, you can either pick the name of an over-accounted medication

or character from the Lion King. Oh, guys, I have another, I have another, another name. Duma Wenchuch. Oh, Jesus. That's not real. Is the CEO. Fuck off. Fuck off. What are you talking about? I'm at the point where you see like Canada isn't real after hearing all of this. You've been smoking that dank, right? Actually, I had a lot of popcorn. Here's here's another here's another example of just an extremely wealthy, well-connected person who is just corner to this market. Toronto based highly disruptive startup in Canada's legal cannabis industry. Highly disrupted. That's right, guys. Providence's products promise a better class of psychoactive, the first alternative to alcohol. Prior to founding province,

Mr. Wenchuch was the co-founder of a successful, well-known Colorado based cannabinoid research and consumer products company. And before ending the cannabis industry, Mr. Wenchuch was surprised, surprised co-founder and CEO of Secretargent Productions Inc. Film and video game production company and advertising agency. I was actually, I was actually in Delta Force. I was a Secretargent. Sorry about that respect. Wait, is that like secret Argent or is it like secret Argent or like Secretargent? Like it's like, like it's detergent for a secretary. I don't know. It's all, it's all bad. Well, down in our offices here, the legal weed company,

the secretaries tend to get very dirty now. We've come up with a number of methods to solve this. If we even remember in the United States, right, who is now the, the weed industry's most prominent advocate? It's John Boehner, a former Republican speaker of the House. You really adopted the dank. Oh no, no, no, it's spelled boner. It's not Bane like that. It's spelled boner for real. That's even better. I know it's, he is not exempt of the weird, weird name rule either. No, no one is. Don't look at my erection, Batman. That is not relevant. So if you guys, Milo, you and Luke, you might be familiar with, with John Boehner. John Boehner is famous former speaker of the House and guy who cries a lot and who has claimed to fame as his family owned a bar

and he can't talk about how his dad owned a bar without crying for some reason. No one knows what went on in that bar. Same. I cry a lot if I was named over across between a hard on and fucking Batman. But I do have a question though for the, for the, for the true Canada heads, because I'm just wondering with all this happening, does Canada have a similar situation to the U S where minorities are like disproportionately prosecuted for weed possession where like there, you know, people use it at the same rates, but like in America, black people are prosecuted for weed at a much, much higher rate. And I'm just wondering because. Oh, hundred, hundred percent. Yeah. Totally. I mean, like, it's the same. It's the same with anything. It's like,

you know, if you are, if you're like a white college kid and you drink beer in a park, like that's highly illegal here, but the chances that anything's like going to happen to you other than like a cop to dumping it out or telling you to put it away or take it somewhere else like very low. But I mean, that's not, that's not how that's not how policing works kind of outside of that, you know, privileged social nation. It's going to be the exact same thing with this. And I mean, emblematic of that is the fact that the guy with with ministerial responsibility for enforcing this suffocating new prohibition regime or legalization regime, I guess it's technically is that guy is literally

the former chief of Toronto police. So a literal cop is at the top of all this. That's the like it all goes back to like what capital is deemed useful either for producing returns for itself or for criminalizing and terrorizing an underclass, right? This is why these people are that the people who sold it and who still sell it now illicitly are still like rotting away in jail. And why the people who were always privileged are the ones who are getting the billions and billions of dollars that it's actually producing, right? It's it's that this is why also like it's like, oh, all of a sudden it's a lifestyle brand. It's it's not because some some dumb like, like urban fucking yuppies who read monocle too much have decided to market it

this way. They've been told that it's like this by capital and they're just sort of following. That's why the first kind of gentrification. It's goofy, but it's like it's like you're getting mad at a steam whistle when we're really we should be looking at the train. You hear me, you one-eyed motherfuckers would come in for you. It's also I think the thing too that is it you can't help but notice the disparities when you know, yoga mom who makes weed dog biscuits is getting like a glossy magazine spread, but people get life sentences in the US because they get busted on like a third a third strike for like a simple possession. You know, right? You start like you start like literally the dumbest

business ever and magazines will write about how you're a heroic disruptive entrepreneur. And you know, you're like, yeah, you're like, I don't know, just like smoking it on the street in Columbus, Ohio, and then you go to prison for like three years. It's bullshit for a friend of mine from high school got in trouble for this particularly American. He got in trouble for underage possession of alcohol and also possession of weed. And because he had a bunch of kids were smoking and drinking at a pool that was closed. They ran. He got caught. He was 18. The rest of them weren't. He was a senior in high school. The cops decided that rather than charging all these kids as juveniles, they just would hit him with all the charges they would have charged him

with otherwise because cops can do things like that in America. And so he went up facing a felony of three to five years when he was like 18 years old in two weeks. And in a situation where he got locked, he he was able to get a conditional discharge through the court system because he you pay you can if you pay you can get your charges reduced, but he had to go through like go to he had to go to NA under legal mandate. He had to go to AA under legal mandate for like two years while he was a college student. He basically had to do drug testing every month, I think. And he is absolutely, even though that's not on his record, he's not able to be to work in weed because of the fact that he was arrested and charged because he was charged. Charges were

dropped. He wasn't convicted, but he was charged. And so in some places it's literally that strict. And he's he's a white kid from the suburbs. So you can only imagine what it's like when you can't pay and you do get that felony when you're 18. And so you think about like all the ways in which the state can fuck with you in a place like America or Canada. And then you have this supposedly burgeoning industry that supposedly going to bring jobs, places that don't have jobs, and the people who would need them the most are completely locked out because they have been, they have basically been defenseless from the state for so long. And the state extracts tribute, if you will, through things like through these petty arrests.

In fact, that sort of leads me to talk about again, the single most sort of gormless and stupid paper ever to be printed, an excerpt from the New York Times talking about canopy growth a couple years ago. So this, this article is sort of about a small town in Ontario that would, I think a lot of people from like Columbus, Ohio, or from like outside Bradford or whatever would kind of recognize the story of this place, right? So for most of its recent history, I'm reading from the article now, Smith's Falls population 9000 was defined by two things, the 19th century canal that passes through its center and the chocolate scented air, the Hershey plant, which had about 800 employees at its peak was a vital part of the economy,

until a recent repainting the town's water tower featured the Hershey logo and declared Smith's Falls the chocolate capital of Ontario. That doesn't mean what I think it means. Mayor, Mayor Dennis Staples said that Hershey was without a doubt an excellent corporate citizen. They sponsored sports teams and hockey tournaments and helped underwrite a chocolate and railway festival each summer. I'm sure we all know what's happening next after we declare a giant multinational, a good corporate citizen, because the world is defined by irony. Hershey shut down its conveyor belts in 2008, but that was just the beginning of the bad news for Smith's Falls. A year later, the province of

Ontario closed a nearby home for up to 2,650 development disabled adults. Stanley Tools, an industrial company left, as did all the other American manufacturers, and the old transcontinental railway line that goes across Canada was then ripped up to save costs. All in all, about 1700 jobs vanished, which is like most of the working population. I would say it was population 9000 people. It's insane. I mean, Luke, you can weigh in on this. This is not an uncommon situation outside of Toronto, outside the Toronto Vancouver sort of Montreal corridor. Oh, yeah. I grew up in southwest Ontario, like rural southwest Ontario. Ontario used to be like so much of the American Midwest. All the towns were erected around some form of manufacturing

industry. And so many of them, almost every town has undergone the same transition in my lifetime from having factories and that more classic, I don't know, middle-sized city or town vibe, where you have a pretty vibrant downtown, and you have the local paper, and you have local businesses and that kind of thing, and people work at the plant or whatever. It's gone from that to the downtown is like this kind of Dawson City after the gold rush, just completely haul it out, and then you have big box stores and suburbs around the edge, and the people that live there are basically commuting to a lot of them are commuting to the GTA. The towns are kind of recast and reorganized as these kind of satellite settlements of the big metropolitan hub, and a handful of the

towns are able to kind of cope by if they can invent some other industry. Like where I did my first two years of high school, Stratford, you know, it was a manufacturing town, actually like Smith's Falls, there used to be like a big rail construction repair yard. That got shut down, so the town, you know, just invented the world's most famous Shakespeare festival, and it was able to hang on with that. That's like a big industry, but most towns in Ontario, yeah, are exactly like the Smith's Falls situation, and they're reduced to just groveling at the feet of these, you know, giant multinationals saying, please invest here because we need the jobs. And in fact, this is, of course, what happened. So, carrying on, at first, Hershey promised to

help the town find a new business to take over the plant, a flavored water company expressed interest but couldn't get the money together. But in 2012, Hershey then sold what was left of the plant to a holding company controlled by an ad agency called Omnicom. The new owner then inquired about demolition permits in order to just recoup their losses. But then Tweed showed up and bought the building with a consortium of private investors. And now what has happened is this is a one industry town, and at the time, Rafichi, we might recall from earlier, he was then sort of working directly with the mayor basically saying, I'm going to revitalize this place. But all of a sudden, all of the, he started, the company started being able to direct a lot of what was going on

in the town. They started like creating training programs, not just for their own future employees, but then tried to gear up the industries around the town and so on and so on, to be able to supply the sort of massively overpaid executives of this company with the services that they might want. Now, we might think on the surface of it, like without thinking about it too much, be like, oh, great, this is good. They can become a prosperous town again. But then we actually talked to one of the people who lived, or we didn't, but they actually mentioned one of the people who lived there, Andrew Brinkworth, who's 18, outside the downtown Tim Hortons, said that Tweed was talking about creating jobs and such, but it's not going to. It's not going

to do anything. A lot of people here have criminal records, and they're not going to be able to get a job at the plant if they have a record. Yeah, I think about this too, that in the U.S., there have been pushes, but only recently, to expunge criminal records of people who were convicted of crimes related to marijuana, because those people are disproportionately either minority or poor or both in the U.S. Because of this problem, because when you saw the legalization in Colorado, for example, or in Washington state, for example, these same very stringent regulations were placed on who could work in the industry, and invariably, it's all rich white stoneers and hedge fund investors, and the people who would stand to benefit from the supposed job growth are locked

out of it. And in places like California, for example, if I'm not mistaken, they actually have expunged the criminal records of people. But for the long time, the problem they were facing was part of this whole thing is the idea that you're somehow going to take an industry that's selling an illegal product and make it legal. But if the people who are good at it literally can't get the straight jobs, then why would they leave the illegal side to go to the legal side? It's far more difficult to grow weed when you're dealing with, for example, in Colorado, and I imagine they do this in Canada, too. The cops have to have a fucking VPN access to your CCTV at all times for your grow facility. The cops have to be able to literally monitor anything. Everything has to

be supply chain managed. There's so much checking that goes into it. There's so much permitting that goes into it. It's like, if you're making the kind of money you can make growing weed and say, I don't know, Humboldt County, California, why the fuck could you do this unless there was more money to be made? Got to keep an eye on those plans in case they run away. What's crazy to me about this is that in a way, what this winds up seeming like is people who want to make a lot of money in the industry basically because it's sort of like a weird genteel money laundering. I know that sounds... They're not laundering money through. They're involved in the business. But in a way, it's just, hey, we want a slice of that illegal money. How

do we make it legal? As opposed to having weed be illegal is really counterproductive and it can generate way more opportunities for people. It's a lot less hassle and a lot less state intrusion if you just fucking make it legal. I feel like the central theme of all of this is that it's kind of like the poorer you are, the more state paternalism, more state and market paternalism, there's going to be the more sort of overburdened with kind of regulations about use and consumption you're going to be. The richer you are, the more this just gives you kind of license to act like a literal baby. If you're poor and you're trying to have a grow-up or if you're just like an ordinary person who's not like a CEO or something,

you're going to have a camera staring you down at all times and the cops checking in on you. Whereas if your name is like Alan Gertner or Lauren Gertner or whatever it was, you're just going to be in like a big ornate palace surrounded by accoutrements and whatever and you're going to be able to sell products with like umlauts inexplicably added to their names and just sitting there in your shawl-colored blazers and quilted wool blend hoodies or whatever it was. What was the phrase the article used, a hippie quotient of zero? What they really mean is they really mean a working-class quotient of zero. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean that's the thing too about the kind of stoner culture is that like

a lot of it is a very, very working-class culture. I'm not a big fan of the kind of some of the excesses that I've perceived growing up with people who burned out hardcore on weed, for example. Well, I think that weed is pretty benign compared to most drugs. There are people who can't fucking deal with it, but like it is fundamentally not a, like it's not, aside from college students, it's not really like a hedge fund wine snob kind of culture and it's interesting to me that like that's, in order to make it socially acceptable, that's what they have to do. Like to their milieu to hurt them to accept it, they have to become wine. It can't just be what it is now.

Well, here's a very odd comparison, but do you know like the source of stuff like table matters? You know the source of stuff like why certain words were considered sort of swearing, swearing for a long time, inappropriate. It's because what we were actually, all of these manners came from people, people imitating what they thought were upper-class behaviors. And so these things that you could like get arrested for swearing on stage, when it really, like Lenny Bruce kept getting arrested for swearing on stage, the reason that that was so immoral, the reason that it was illegal was that it was seen as lower class. And what's happened is like, again, this stuff has just emerged from, we have emerged from

that constraint. These things are now appropriate. Now what we're doing is we're taking all the stuff we like and we're saying, well, the prohibitions on them are gone because they're no longer lower class. All the aesthetics of it are just class and all the aesthetic change is just driven by a class change. Is this where Raleigh advances his new political opinion, which is you can eat a whole roast dinner with your bare hands and that's fine. That's praxis. I'm wondering, Luke, if you can comment on this and if you don't know, it's no problem. But in the US, we'd becoming illegal was in a lot of ways tied to a kind of like race panic. And I don't know if it was similar in Canada, but weed was basically legal. It was more or less

unregulated in the US until the 1930s. And the two big sort of waves of attacking it were in the 1930s and then subsequently in the 1960s and 70s. And I think that it's gotten to the point where it's old hat now, but there's this famous quote that because of the heroin trade in like primarily poor black neighborhoods in the US and because of the popularity of weed amongst hippies in the anti-war movement, the joke was or the statement was more that under Nixon that they couldn't make being black or being like anti-war illegal, but the war on drugs was a means of specifically targeting those communities and basically using the guys of law in order to disrupt them as much as possible. And so, you know, that's why in the United States at least, I mean, the law has been

functioning as it's intended. It's been putting away minority and poor people disproportionately, whereas, you know, people who aren't, who have the money or who are protected basically could walk away with it. I mean, like weed is basically legal in New York City for white people. Absolutely, it's basically it's de facto legal for white people, but the cops still arrest black kids for it all the time at the rate of like 95% of the people who get ticketed for weed in New York City or black. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I don't know the history of that in Canada specifically, like I'm also just more familiar with the US history on it, where I guess, like, you know, after the 1930s, it had this kind of, yeah, this kind of racial connotation, as you said,

like it was associated with, you know, Mexicans and things like that. And, but I mean, I think the smart money would there would be on there being a very similar history here. And it's exactly, I mean, it's exactly what you just said, like, I mean, one of the, perhaps one of the reasons why I'm so underwhelmed by the, the quote unquote legalization regime that came into effect a couple months ago is that, yeah, marijuana has already been legal in like all of my social circles, like you've smoked it in Toronto parks and stuff, it was, it was de facto legal on my campus in my, in my, in my dorm, like in residence when I started university. So yeah, there's that exact same kind of like disproportionate enforcement regime and it's probably going to continue.

So returning from the enforcement regime, just back to what's happening in Smith's Falls, I've actually gone on to the Canopy Growth website and rightly we say, well, oh, it's going to bring jobs back to the town, but you know, this kind of reminds me of Amazon HQ. It's not bringing jobs to the people in Smith's Falls, the one, the people in Smith's Falls might be getting the ancillary jobs, they may be serving, you know, they might be washing cars or waiting tables, but they're not seeing any of this money. So for example, the Canopy Innovation Lab is in Smith's Falls, which allows the company to push product development and R&D beyond the limits of access to cannabis for medical purposes regulations. As new product type joined the

legally permissible framework, it's always helpful to have a head start, whether through in-house innovation or strategic partnerships, the Canopy Innovation Lab will play a pivotal role driving Canopy Growth's aggressive, aggressive innovation agenda. Clearly what they're doing is they're parroting in sort of like engineering graduate students from like Queens or the University of Toronto or whatever, and just basically turning Smith's Falls from a town that like working class people could live in to a town that's just full of like, you know, yeah, they're creating like a thousand jobs, but they're just parachuting them in for elsewhere, driving up property prices, and like the people of Smith's Falls are still immiserated. And I mean,

yeah, it's like it's like if it's like if Downton Abbey were run by Hank Scorpio. I mean, I look at it too, that I mean, in Colorado, obviously, you appreciate the fact that they've raised a lot of money through the taxes that the legal cannabis provides to specifically, they earmarked it from the beginning for education in the state. But what that doesn't take into consideration is that because of the weed industry, because of the money that it's generated, because of the interest it's generated, and people who want to either go to Colorado as tourists or who want to work there, like it's extremely hard to get affordable housing in Denver now. And it didn't used to be that way. Denver used to be much cheaper than other Western cities

even. And it's super expensive now. And you know, yes, Denver has an unemployment rate of like 2%, but it doesn't really do anybody any good. If it's hard to get a job, if you're already in a marginalized position, it's hard to get a job in this new industry. And this new industry is like you said, Riley, squeezing out working people. And I mean, whether that happens in Smith's Falls, who knows? But I do think that until you attack the model that basically says whatever happens, whatever doesn't matter, as long as we can attract capital to our town, it's going to keep fucking people over like this. So I think I live in Denver. You might have found it's much harder to get your man affordable housing. But you know what? That's not what men want. If you're

living in Denver, it's much easier to get your man accoutrements and paraphernalia. I must say this though. I must say this though. There are people that would share screen grabs from Denver, Craigslist. And literally, there were people who were asking for odd jobs and services around their home. And they're just like, we'll just pay you in dabs. Like you wash our dishes for us, we'll pay you in dabs or shatter, which I guess is extremely strong weed. I was imagining a guy just dabbing. No, no, no, it's like you in the floss. It's like it's like it's like a weed concentrate. It's like weed brandy or weed crack. I don't know. That's fucking guy. If you can't fucking if you could smoke a whole joint of like good weed from California and not get really high

for that tolerant at this point, then like dab and shatters, which are into a weed omniac. Whereas like if I take one puff of weed like that, I'll be high for six hours and it would be miserable. I'll be in brain prison. Something that comes to mind to me in all this is an example from Washington state where it was legalized, I guess in 2012, something like that. And the coalition of people organizing for the legalization included both libertarians and socialists. And I guess what what we're describing with Smith Falls is is kind of like the libertarian vision at work. And in Washington, when they legalized it, you know, there was this case of a guy who he became like the first person to he walked into something called the Spokane Greenleaf Dispensary

and he yelled go Washington and he purchased four grams of a strain called sour kush. And because the media filmed that, that's right. Yeah, the media the media filmed it. And, you know, it turned out that he worked for a company on and off for 12 years that had previously made him sign a document saying that he wouldn't have any THC in his system. So he was subsequently fired. And the thing is, the libertarian position on this ends up being that like, well, he's free to go and purchase as you know, an autonomous, you know, rational economic agent, he's free to go and purchase this whenever he wants. But it's also the freedom of his employer to fire him for it because, you know, corporations are people too. And so like this is this really

cuts to I think the the core of by the way, I'm taking this all from a this is a Corey Robin article called The Limits of Libertarianism from a few years ago, you know, like either either, you know, like either you have actual legalization, actual freedom where this is a thing that you can do regardless of, you know, where you are within the social caste system, you know, regardless of your income or the color of your skin, you can just do it and you're not going to be persecuted or, you know, subject to, you know, the crushing hand of the states not coming down on you, either it's that or it's just a it's just a privilege extended to a small group of people who are never going to face consequences, even when like the massive people do for doing something that's

technically legal, like that's what's at stake here. No, I actually think really I want to be fired by someone called Bertram Gunch from his company that like makes makes car makes a car deodorizers that get you fucked up. I want to do to be fired by him because I once like got looked at smoking weed in high school and CCTV. You on Fox this winter, rational agents with Ben Shapiro. I was saying it was a huge trip because I actually was in Tacoma, Washington, when they opened their first weed store legal weed store in Tacoma, they had them open in Seattle for a while, but not in Tacoma, which is a little bit to the south of the city. And it was really weird to be there because I mean, there was a line stretching all around the door to this door.

And by the time that I was able to get in, like they were only letting people in, they had like a bouncer and they're letting people in like five at a time. But somebody got in there like very few strains of weed left. But it was a weird cross section because you had people literally looking like business professionals, like like success leaders. And you had people that obviously were like working class people and you had college students, you had old people. And it was one of those things where like, this is a cross section of society that smokes weed. Like I can't imagine all these people have been sober on weed their entire life. Like I'm waiting until they open the store and then I'll smoke weed for the very first time. Like these people have smoked weed

before, but some of these people would like the weed smoking equivalent of saving it for Jesus. Yes, but I'll only smoke it the day it's legalized. I've been wearing my promise ring. They put some of those people who work in even in places like fucking fast food style arrangements, if the companies are insane, could be piss tested on the spot and their job is contingent, whereas other people who like work in finance, they'll never get drug tested. And that to me is, I think that is it like what you just said is that it basically there are there are segments of society who don't see anything wrong with that. Well, it's ultimately like a socialist vision of marijuana legalization would basically like would would would a vacate all the previous

convictions. B, yes, it would it would make sure that the the companies that were actually engaging in doing this were like at least state at least probably state run, but it would make sure that they and it would also but it would have to go beyond like weed legalization because a lot of the problems are with stuff like at will employment. It's nothing to do with or or with the fact that like there are there are towns that are dependent on a single industry that have and the fact that people have like lost jobs, they've been driven to drugs, right? Like if you look at socialist weed legalization, the actual weed legalization that you have to do is very minimal, you know, make sure that the businesses are publicly owned and make sure that you know, the convictions are

vacated, but you actually have to do is you have to attack private ownership. Yeah, and also understand that. I mean, for me at least I would much rather complications and frustrations with state ownership, the way it's being done aside. I'd much rather have that than like fucking Jeff Bezos's former hedge fund buddy opens a weed company and now all weed is like a subsidiary of Amazon. Like because that that's the thing is that who has think about a business as risky as this. Think about a business as spotally legalized in the United States. Obviously in Canada, it's very different because it's been nationally legalized. Who's going to have access to that kind of capital and willing to take the kind of risk

involved when like literally in the U.S. Banks can shut you out of your accounts because they think you're dealing with drug like dealing with weed like only insanely rich people and that's going to breed. Yeah, the National Association of lawn gardeners. All right. I think we have now 420 blazed it for quite long enough. We've cashed this bull. We've smoked it all the way down to the goddamn Roche holder. We've we've we've scraped the resin and I think that shit too. It kind of got us high. All right. So thank you very much to Luke Savage for joining us. Thanks, lads. It was fun. Oh, yeah. So remind everyone where they can find you. Find me on Twitter at Luke W. Savage or listen to my podcast and contribute

to an important cause by giving to our Patreon. That's at Michael and us. Awesome. And of course, as with us forever, you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from Lil Comrade. Maybe you can get Edie to print the weed smoking noise somehow. I'm sure she'll figure out how to screen cap that screen cap. So screen get it. Get a t-shirt with Roger Rogers. Yeah. Think of your best weed company CEO name. Get that printed on a t-shirt. Chuck shit bone or whatever. Whatever that guy was called. Come on. Also, if you're feeling hungry in the Broadway market area and you want some high quality Japanese head to Akko, I've already been basil man. I've already cashed in one of my free meals and I

am damn sure going to do it again. And then finally, we have a Patreon. You can subscribe to it. It is also $5 a month. We actually invented doing that. We were the first socialist podcast to do that. Nobody has done it before. No one has ever done it before. Luke copied us where we have a second bonus episode every week. And of course, as ever, our theme song is here we go. You can find it on Spotify. It's by ginseng. It's very good. I strongly recommend listening to it. If that's all done, it's all that's left for me to say is thank you for listening and thank you to the lads. Come find us down at our local weed store blazin squad. Yeah, come find us at the guy household. Come find us in the country that will we

legalize weed last the United Kingdom?