Canada's great pump-and-dump legal marijuana scam

That's my conspiracy theory for the day.

Think about it.

In my many years building ships for the Royal Canadian Navy, building transformers for General Electric, fabbing the structural steel for 7 World Trade Center at Frankel Steel, or doing maintenance work in sawmills on Vancouver Island, I didn't meet many folks who couldn't find themselves a bag of weed if they wanted one.

When I wasn't on the welding gig, I was taking university courses or working in education. Just like on the shop floor, I didn't meet many folks who couldn't have found a baggie if they wanted one.

Weed was actually a fairly stable market. Barriers to entry into the business were virtually non-existent. Those who worked hard and networked effectively survived and even thrived. The only downside was that your lifestyle, and sometimes your life, was at constant risk, simply because the stuff was illegal.

It's been more than obvious for decades that this idiocy needs to end. Everybody knew it. The career political operators behind Justin Trudeau certainly knew it. They made legalized weed the centrepiece of their election run.

When they won, they immediately threw the entire industry to Bay Street. The Globe and Mail was fully complicit in this, and continue to milk this rapidly shrivelling teat as hard as they can. It's shrivelling because the vast majority of the populace are in no hurry to pay more for an inferior product.

Meanwhile, multiple former high-level police officials, after spending their careers ruining the lives of anyone affiliated with the formerly illegal pot biz, were suddenly in demand as movers and shakers in the burgeoning legal Bay Street pot scene.

Bay Street sharpies walked away with millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, convincing a gullible Globe-reading public that legal pot stocks were the next Amazon or Apple.

As those investors are finding out, that wasn't the case.


Sounds like a classic pump-and-dump to me.

Pot-addled hillbilly comes up with fool-proof plan for retirement income

The best job I ever had was when a pot grower of my acquaintance hired me to prune buds one October many years ago. Ten bucks an hour, cash. Me and half a dozen other "employees" sat there with scissors all day, cutting the buds off the stacks of plants piled up throughout his rented farmhouse, and at the end of the day I had a really good buzz, plus a hundred bucks, plus whatever amount of bud happened to fall into my pockets in the course of the day, plus the cannabis resin I was able to scrape off the soles of my shoes when I got home.

Best job I ever had. Too bad it only lasted one day.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I'm sitting at the Teviotdale Truck Stop this a.m. having the Teviotdale Breakfast Special (three eggs easy over, two generous slabs of peameal bacon, a nice thick slice of ham, a couple of sausages, and a generous serving of stove-top fried potatoes, all for twelve bucks) and getting caught up with my old pal Kipling.

We're both at an age where sooner or later you gotta talk about retirement.

So I share my plan with Kipling. I've got a pickle jar half full of pot seeds, I tell him. I've also got a hundred acres off the beaten path. What could go wrong?

Well, he says, if those pot seeds are more than two or three years old, they're no good.

Huh?

That's kinda bad news for me. I've been counting on that seed stash as a supplement to my retirement income. So I mention this story to him.

If scientists can resurrect a 32,000 year old Silene Stenophylla seed discovered in the wilds of the Siberian tundra, a jar of pot seeds that's been in my pantry for twenty years should be a piece of cake!

Kipling isn't buying it. He's way better informed about weed science than I am, so I tend to defer to his expertise. Then he tells me that the seeds he had the best luck with last year were seeds he bought over the internet for $18.

Each...

He paid eighteen dollars PER SEED!

WTF?!?!

Needless to say, a lightbulb went off in my head.

People pay eighteen bucks a seed over the internet? I bet I've got 20-30 thousand seeds in that jar!

I'll maybe undercut the established seed purveyors by a couple bucks per seed, just to get the jump on them. And maybe institute a twenty seed maximum for any seed order, mainly because nobody's gonna bother driving all the way up here to demand their money back if they're only out a couple hundred bucks.

If the seeds germinate, I'm golden!

But if they don't, I'm still golden!

It's a classic win-win!


One way or the other, I figure there's enough cash in that pickle jar to put a decent Grady-White on the water!

So this is how it ends...

2018, that is.

The Farm Manager and our one kid who couldn't come up with a better plan for New Years Eve are watching a doc about the life of Polish artist and all-round wack job Stanislaw Szukalski.

I'm on the internet, boat shopping.

Almost bought one this year. A '92 Doral with under 500 hours on the Merc big block. I was pumped till I figured out it was gonna run five hundred bucks to fill the gas tank. No matter how good the deal appears to be, that's not something I can justify when I've got kids paying off student loans.

Maybe 2019 will be the year of the boat.

Around the home hearth it was a good year. Aside from our dear Lucy, everyone came through with good health. In fact, the fourteen year old dog and the twenty year old cat are perkier than they were a year ago. Amazing what they're doing in vet medicine!

And thanks to an Arab immigrant and our lovely public health care system, I can see like I've never seen before!

Hope it was a good year for you too.

The outside world is a little fucked, though. Mainstream media throughout the Western World has become a 24/7 Trump reality show. If they hate the guy as much as they claim to, why do they keep on with the free publicity? As near as I can tell, this president has one accomplishment to his credit. He gave America's one percenters a nice tax break.

Here in Canada we're celebrating the legalization of the weed 'o wisdom... and what a shit-show that's been. PM Fluffy managed to hand the entire industry to the Bay Street greedbags instead of the folks who have been successfully cultivating the stuff forever. Nice job, Justin!

How sadly ironic that guys like former Toronto police boss Bill Blair have jumped into the business, when guys he put behind bars are still... behind bars, and in some cases will be for years to come.

It's a fucked up world...


Anyway, my reminiscences were interrupted by a call from my old pal Kipling. Like me, he's at once pleased and befuddled by the fact that guys like us are still here, guys once voted as most likely to die before 30 in the high school yearbook. He's spending the New Years Eve working on his VW van out in his shop. It's a mere ninety thousand clicks shy of turning three million kilometres on the odometer. You need to spend a lot of time in your shop to make that happen.

We're gonna have breakfast at the Teviotdale Truck Stop next year. Like on Wednesday.

Continuity is good...

Top cops launch medical marijuana biz

You'd think that with his pension for 23 years as a Toronto police officer, his pensions from three different cities where he served as chief of police, his pension from his stint as OPP commish, his MP pension, and his OAS and CPP pensions, veteran crime-fighter Julian Fantino would be spending his golden years under a beach umbrella making origami sculptures with his financial statements.

You'd be wrong!

Fantino has joined fellow top cop Raf Souccar, former Deputy Commissioner at the RCMP, in opening up a medical marijuana joint in Vaughn, north of Toronto.

As the CBC story points out, this is the same guy who once equated the legalization of pot with the legalization of murder.

I for one am glad that "science and the real world" have caused these gentlemen to reconsider the error of their Reefer Madness-inspired vendetta against pot smokers over the past fifty years.

The folks Julian and Raf put behind bars for their pot-related indiscretions will surely appreciate the irony of this story too!