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Comment by stareblinkstare | Hacker News Reader

> not funding drug lords. I avoid illegal drugs for this reason.

I hate to break it to you...

[Edit: it's best if I expand this comment. The people who currently sell "legal" weed whitewashed illegal operations and coordinated it with lawmakers to put them at the top. Chinese, oddly enough, play a big part at this, since we're on an anti-China bend right now it might be useful to know. This whole legal drug thing... no, it doesn't exist. Anyone thinking otherwise needs to get a wake up call. You're supporting massive drug lords that wear suits and work alongside law enforcement.]

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This is an incredibly ignorant, racist, presumably US-centric comment.

Lots of areas (like here in Canada) have well regulated, legal Cannabis businesses. The product even goes through thorough testing procedures [1]. As far as I can tell, it's a very similar setup to alcohol related businesses.

I would love to see a source on this supposed Chinese involvement. This sounds like some early 1900's opium den stereotyping to me.

[1]: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021PSSG0050-001115

You seem to be defining "drug lord" to be including even those that legally grow weed, then using that naming to say they're bad?

Can you expand on this a bit more? I've never heard about this. Are you saying when I go down to my local dispensary that it's owned by China? Or that the local bud is not actually local?

It all depends. I knew a grower in Oregon. They got into growing to provide for chronic pain sufferers (frequently fibromyalgia) since it is more difficult to get prescription pain medication in the US than marijuana.

A large portion of the grow ops are owned by Chinese groups. This is "common knowledge" in circles where people want to grow weed as a business, at scale, and scope out their competitors. This is their competition. The small local growers are not a competition anymore than your mom and pop business is competition to Amazon.

People find this surprising, but they've never stopped to ask themselves where did all that weed and infrastructure to grow it suddenly spring up from the moment it was legalized.

What are your thoughts on TikTok having more web traffic in 2021 than Google or Facebook?

What's wrong with a large portion of the grow ops being owned by Chinese people in the US?

In Canada it's not so much how that works especially Ontario where I am at. Yes some illegal sales got rolled up into the legal market, but very little. It's very strict to be legit here. All the illegal money for rolled up into real estate instead looks like. :)

"You're supporting massive drug lords that wear suits and work alongside law enforcement."

So Heineken, big tobacco, folks behind the opioid crisis, Wells Fargo, etc?

I hate to break it to you, but OP could be in Canada, where weed is legal and has developed grow ops where cannabis grown and sold locally...

[citation needed]

And the people who work at the farms are exploited pretty terribly as well.

Same with the meat packers, the fruit pickers. Same with the people working in all of the factories and shipping plants and driving the trucks. The invisible labor we are all surrounded by every day that touches literally everything I can see right now, aside from the tree outside my window.

And all of the money I spend inevitably trickles upwards to people who are going to use it to do things I consider evil like destroying our natural world for profit.

But! That is not a problem I am going to solve over-night. I can try and tailor my consumption to products that I vet and are hopefully more ethically sourced than alternatives. Even doing this is of questionable utility.

“No ethical consumption under capitalism” and all that.

Very apt username, as that's what I've found myself doing towards your comment.

Do you have more information on this nefarious China-sponsored drug supply-chain?

There was a pretty high profile case in New Mexico of Chinese growers setting up shop on the Navajo reservation. It was a big operation too.

(you can probably search for better articles, here is one I just found)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56835897

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