- Supposed “safety concerns” from Health Canada are extremely dubious
- Mainstream media coverage has been excessive and grossly slanted
- Canadians are still forced to consume 100’s of thousands of kilograms of black market (unlicensed) pot because of provincial failures to open more legal cannabis stores
If this was a football game, the referee would have already called a “piling on” penalty.
If any cannabis investor missed the news (despite it being splashed all over the mainstream media), CannTrust Holdings (CAN: TRST / US: CTST) was found to have been growing some of its cannabis in unlicensed growrooms at its licensed Vaughan, Ontario cultivation facility.
First, there is the over-reaction by Health Canada and the federal government. Heath Canada isn’t content with merely penalizing CannTrust, it’s threatening to revoke its cultivation license.
Supposedly, Health Canada is deeply concerned with the “safety issues” of Canadians consuming unlicensed cannabis. This concern might be somewhat touching if it were remotely true. It’s not.
If Health Canada and the federal government were really concerned about the “safety issues” surrounding consuming unlicensed cannabis, then cannabis Prohibition would have been ended about a hundred years sooner.
So let’s stop all the phony theatrics.
If Health Canada was really concerned about Canadian’s safety today, it would be applying much more pressure on delinquent provinces to open up legal cannabis commerce. Example: Ontario.
As The Seed Investor has already noted, if Canada’s largest province had rolled out legal cannabis stores quickly and efficiently, the province could have already sold another 50,000 kilograms of legal weed. Instead, Ontario pot consumers were forced to continue buying that (unlicensed) weed from the black market.
Health Canada has removed 5,200 kilograms of CannTrust cannabis from the supply chain. Where is the bigger “safety issue”? Is it the 5,200 kilograms of CannTrust cannabis? Or, is it the extra 50,000 kilograms of black market weed that Ontario residents purchased because of the failure of the Ontario government?
Then we have the hypocrisy of the mainstream media.
According to these unbiased(?) sources, CannTrust’s failure is a crime parallel to stealing the Crown Jewels. Supposedly, confidence in the entire Canadian cannabis industry is now shaken. The saturation coverage by the mainstream media can only be described as “overkill”.
What we’re supposed to believe is that the mainstream media is deeply concerned by a public company breaking the rules. This concern might be somewhat touching if it were remotely true. It’s not.
Wall Street banks are regularly caught laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for the illegal drug cartels. They are never threatened with the loss of their banking license, no matter how many times each bank is caught committing this crime. They are given “a free pass”.
Why hasn’t “confidence” been shaken in the U.S. banking system? It might be because each time these banks are caught committing another crime, the mainstream media simply shrugs its shoulders and treats these serial mega-crimes as business-as-usual.
But if a cannabis company is caught in violation of a cultivation regulation, suddenly the mainstream media can’t issue enough sanctimonious lectures.
Maybe Health Canada should spend more of its time regarding cannabis “public safety” applying public pressure to provincial governments to be more responsible about opening up legal cannabis stores (and reducing black market consumption)?
As The Seed Investor has already noted, opening up legalized cannabis reduces teenage consumption of pot. But apparently Health Canada is much more concerned with putting the screws to a publicly listed cannabis company than protecting Canadian children.
Maybe the mainstream media should spend more of its time condemning real crimes (and real criminals)? But after pumping out 100 years of cannabis Fake News, perhaps we should expect no better from these large corporations.
One thing that is certain is this. The over-reaction by both media and government to CannTrust’s regulatory lapse is much ado about nothing.
For 100 years, both government and the mainstream media saw nothing wrong with forcing people to consume non-toxic/non-addictive cannabis from unlicensed, black market sources. But when there is the opportunity to bash a publicly listed cannabis company, suddenly these entities are born-again “safety hawks”.
Stop pretending.