>>www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/news/2017/04/canada_takes_actiontolegalizeandstrictlyregulatecannabis.html
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>> The Canadian government on Thursday announced a plan to legalize recreational use of marijuana by July 2018. Canada is set to implement this plan into law nationwide.
>>Now quite a few states here it's 100% legal, and over 1/2 of the states where its legal to dome degree. I wish the federal government here would just make it legal already and get with the times.
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>Blair's quote is interesting: "It will keep cannabis out of the hands of children and youth, and stop criminals from profiting from it."
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>Re: children and youth - just like alcohol, I suppose...
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>Re: criminal profit - this means that the government (i.e. heavily regulated private producers up here) must be competitive with organized crime - provide a better product at a lower price. Just like with alcohol, our feds want it to be a cash cow so I have severe doubts on this score

Try telling that to the citizens of Mexico where they've been over-run by violent drug cartels. These guys have billions of dollars and their own damn military forces. Most of their money comes from pot. You can't have a multi-billion dollar illegal business without a huge amount of murders and violence as there is just too much money involved. You really want these types of guys to be getting all the money? I don't think so. Just take a look at the result of what happened here when they outlawed boozed - you ended up with chaps like Al Capone and it spawned the Italian mafia into a far-reaching powerful organization that ended up infiltrating a lot of other businesses and politicians. Did we learn anything from that or not? Those that think we should keep pot illegal obviously didn't learn the lessons of how that turned out.

>I do think that legalizing possession of small quantities, and taking more action on drug-impaired driving are good things. Although with the latter there's some question of how effective any new measures can be, over top of existing awareness campaigns: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-drunk-driving-death-rate-worst-among-wealthy-countries-u-s-study-finds

Right - note that Canada doesn't have random breath testing by police or nearly as stiff laws as what we have in the USA - and the USA is not far behind on the list - holding the #2 spot with only 3% less. And this is rather interesting as well - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-us-state-where-road-fatalities-have-plummeted-since-marijuana-was-legalised-10499069.html