Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry

Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by mikepurvis on Thursday December 03, 2020 @12:44PM (#25291837)

For another data point, cannabis became legalized in Canada in 2018 [1]. I'm not a user of it myself, but I have a number of friends who are and one who is for pain management, and according to them, the rollout of licenses for legal storefronts has been pretty disastrous.

Understandably, that's probably a transitional pain, and may be more of a bureaucratic hurdle than something germane to cannabis. But all this to say that changing these kinds of things takes a lot of careful planning; you can't just flip a switch to solve the problems of prohibition.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Canada

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Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by R0b0t1 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @12:49PM (#25291946)

This is a good point, but in Canada's case it was self inflicted. They had a strong desire to limit the number of people in the market for, I think, very opaque reasons. Assuming it's just so politician's friends can become rich by being first movers.

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Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by pmoriarty on Thursday December 03, 2020 @01:23PM (#25292463)

"the rollout of licenses for legal storefronts has been pretty disastrous"

Disastrous how?

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Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by mikepurvis on Thursday December 03, 2020 @01:59PM (#25292941)

Initially there weren't enough of them in many areas of Ontario [1], with a suspicious oversupply in others (for example in the Niagara region near the US border). Now there's a concern that the market has swung the other way and saturated in some parts of the country [2].

There's also been some weird ownership questions with former Toronto Police chief Julian Fantino who spend a decades-long career busting people for pot and opposing legalization only to have a come-to-Jesus moment about its medical benefits just in time to start a business around it and cash in.

[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cannabis/article-mapped-onta...

[2]: https://www.retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2020/06/canada...

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Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by samatman on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:22PM (#25296070)

Unironically, thanks for bringing this to my attention.

I like to collect anecdotes about the ineffectiveness of central planning compared to markets. Not a free market fundamentalist, but what they do well, they do very well.

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Re:Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry by mikepurvis on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:57PM (#25296531)

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a fail for a controlled market— there needed to be something in place to prevent it just being a giant land-grab followed by bankruptcies and consolidations everywhere as the bubble popped.

From my point of view it's less a failure in concept and more just a matter of tuning— which has been adjusted over time, though as expected, there has been some of that post-rush activity as various players have bought each other out (but probably a lot less than there would have been without the slow start).

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