Shady Dealing around Cannabis Yukon Store (Whitehorse Star coloumn 19 Oct. 2018)

Shady Dealing around Cannabis Yukon Store (Whitehorse Star coloumn 19 Oct. 2018)

And where, pray tell, were the ribbon-cutting politicians?

The windows are actually shaded into complete darkness, save for bare light bulbs — in fairness LED ones. 

There is more sinister architecture and demonizing design throughout, that are not retail business like at all. 

Walls, countertops, displays are matter-of-fact and with purity, no flower or anything to be humanly at ease with.

Bunker atmosphere, fittingly prison-like, perhaps, bus depot wash room with a hint of museum at best. Nothing of the dignified ambience quality one expects in a winery or deli store. 

Politely but forcefully, the observer or customer is guided in her judgement to observe a real-life, somewhat gangsterish operation, defined in its control obsession and security overkill.

A couple dozen, or so, staff included more or less half a dozen athletic, uniform-clad out-of-house security guards.

Only a fraction of those are actual cashier and sales staff. People are herded along with inch precision by hip-high fences and frequent barrier stops, manned by strategically placed guards that display a jovial front.

Didn’t see any barbed wire, guns or guard dogs, probably because they were not at hand.

Weirdly, as if out of nowhere, the Company of Adventurers comes to mind, which is what the HBC was called in the 1600s. 

Now here is a bit of technicolour historical vision to lighten up the drab and dreary scene. 

I thought of one particularly striking finding Peter C. Newman had dug up in the HBC archives in years before they were moved from Winnipeg back to their original starting point of corporate cartel colonialism, London, England.

In comparison, the French government, not the colonists per se, had been less trade and more pre-modern industry-oriented. 

Both seemed more honest about who they were and what they did, held side-by-side to the deceptive traits in the current neoliberal management of colonial affairs.

Time to pick up again and conclude my anecdote of recalling and contextualizing history, as to how I balanced the sensory impact of the schizoid 21st century Yukon Cannabis installation. 

The archived letters, orders in the operations manual info of the Bay, which at that point operated namely Hudson Bay shore operations, spells out to leave the trading room, small with big counter across, unheated and drafty at all times throughout winter.

The purpose was to manipulate fur prices to the disadvantage of the First Nation trappers by ushering them along in a frozen assembly line, and be rid of them quickly.

Emotional freeze out is what the Cannabis Yukon supply building achieves in hosting abusive interior design and repulsive, harm promoting labels that violate, in French and English, the most basic, undisputed in peer reviews, science.

“Up to 1 in 2 people who use cannabis daily will become addicted.” 

Total bunk. there literally is, world-wide, not one person on the record that died from cannabis use; a lethal dosage does not exist. 

It is how confused substance users come to distrust information and end up opiate-overdosed in morgues. That is where I owe to my own parents, who didn’t use junk science for the purpose of intimidation, and did not lie to us children.

U.S. president Richard Nixon’s Drug War continues in cannabis regulation of feds and YTG with new and up to 14-year-long and frivolous penitentiary sentences, simply for being human, for what might not constitute a minor misdemeanor, say in relation to smoking or drinking.

Yes, Nixon’s globalized Gulag attack on people continues in the Cannabis Act Bill C-45 from June 2018, along its provincial and territorial implementations and extensions. 

Not yet finished reading it, but clearly Bill-C-45 is permeated with a notion of demonizing non white people in order to dump over-policing and super-enforcement on them, toward mass incarceration. 

Far disproportionally, First Nations individuals count not as house owners, but dominate in renter and also homeless statistics. Now, in the Yukon, public cannabis consumption is forbidden, and most landlords say no to smoking, including the occasional marihuana joint.

If somebody explicitly designed a racialized entrapment framework to further increase mass incarceration of First Nations, they could not have done a better job.

This comes on top of an existing notorious over-policing paired with a mass incarceration that is already around tenfold for Indigenous people in Canada, over the general population.

Nobody dies from cannabis. 

Yes, it can be habit-forming badly, even to the extend of behaviours such as bull s****ting or even watching TV.  

What counts is this: cannabis continues to be consistently on the record as 100% non-addictive. 

Physical withdrawal effects, the definition of addiction, are non existent.

You see, the shivering in the physical cold is what once made the Bay factors and directors less deceptive colonizers than the current neoliberal herders. 

The latter might have planned along impressions from the typically warm surroundings of familiar tax havens, such as Panama and Bermuda. 

Drug war, gangster and bankster as well as prison industry money hold up these as brick and mortar structure. 

Which then comes available to smaller but vane entrepreneurs with elitist ambitions, such as senior management or executive individuals from neofeudal/neoliberal governments (Panama Papers).

Well, the political leadership was altogether invisible and unheard of on this momentous and first Weed Wednesday, including Sandy Silver, Stacey Hassard, Doris Bill, Dan Curtis, Liz Hanson and Larry Bagnell, or any of their colleagues. Suffice it to say no proper ceremony such as ribbon cutting took place.

It signals certainly feds and YTG continue with a very clear message of zero accountability. 

As already touched upon, the drug war continues in and outside of Canada.

The Cannabis Act aligns with the Trudeau government’s signing of the Sept 2018 “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem”, which was rejected by a strong majority of United Nations.

The Trudeau government’s signing of the pledge, drafted by the Trump Whitehouse to renew Nixon’s criminal, globalized and highly racialized Gulag attack on people, further casts a shadow into the future that signals caution.

It should be advisable to leave no long-lasting electronic charge tracks and pay for cannabis in cash only. Think of the despicable, extra-legal no-fly list process in which our government serves up innocent Canadians as cannon fodder for U.S. repression.

Persecution logic worded around substance nomenclature was introduced as core of Nixon’s white supremacist Southern Strategy that Bill Clinton came to love and double down on in achieving a worldwide unmatched U.S. incarceration level of her citizens. 

In the drumbeat of newspeak, the new Jim Crow it is glossed over and referred to as the War on Drugs.

Compliant to Prime Minister Trudeau’s and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s ring-kissing of President Donald Trump, racist class justice without accountability will continue.

Grief and honour were withheld on this first and important Weed Wednesday, from millions of dead and living casualties, after half a century of state-sponsored, globalized drug war crimes.

In the overstaffed, over-managed setting there was one hero who would have earned his pay on opening day — except that he wasn’t paid.

In the parking lot to the lined-up queue of people who waiting for to be let inside, a veteran Yukon musician and arts person (Eric Epstein) sang beautifully and played the guitar as self launched ceremonial volunteer.

After some venting I should also point out that history is full of surprises, and might come to understand Weed Wednesday as eventually constructive initiative for a turn-around.

And before that happens bona fide quality cannabis will surely, as before in Holland and Portugal, become a boost to the Canadian tourism industry.

Peter Becker, Whitehorse,  

(Donations welcome, just paste into URL window: paypal.me/yukonblogger )