Yes, before legalization the Canadian cannabis market was about 1/3 gangs, and 2/3 mom and pops small growers. You rarely hear about the quiet mom and pops gardens. Mostly you hear about the gang stuff. You'd know that if you watched my video.
You would also know the only reason gangs get involved in cannabis is the price. That's why gangs don't traffic in carrots.
You'd know the price is only high because of prohibition. Cannabis isn't a difficult crop to grow. I can grow it for free, as long as I've got dirt and time. Warehouse grows get their prices down below pennies per gram here (and still can't make a profit). Cannabis is a weed, and it grows wild under the sun all over the world. Only prohibition makes it expensive.
The government doesn't let on, but it actually WANTS the gangs to continue, so they can wage a continuous "war on drugs" that can never be won. They profit off both sides of this war, just like the wars in the middle East. Police departments get bigger budgets. Prisons make profits when cannabis users go to jail, and lobby government to keep cannabis illegal. Legalization doesn't threaten any of that. Gangs continue after legalization - we have a much worse problem now than ever before. The more illegal something is, the more gangs will get involved, because the price of it goes up. The higher the price, the more violence you'll see related to buying and selling it. Legalization means 14 years in prison for growing too many plants at home, instead of just 6 months when it was "illegal". And it means you can get prison time for sharing a joint with a friend, under the wrong circumstances, because they call it "trafficking". Is that legal, to you?
These are the hard lessons we learned here. You know nothing and claim "it's different this time". Your feelings are meaningless. The intention is to crack down even harder than ever before, calling it "legalization", and destroying not only the free market but the entire cannabis culture, pushing it even deeper underground than it was in the 90s.
Legalization is nothing we want, and everything we don't. You're going to be allowed to smoke a joint, that's it. And you have to buy it from the ones who profited off prohibition since 1930, for ten times the price you were paying before. Oh and let's not even start on the irradiation, which is done to legal weed for safety. It kills the bacteria, which stops the curing process, resulting in dead bud that hurts to smoke. And it also blasts off most of the trichomes and cannabinoids, so you need more just to get any effect, smoking up large amounts of legal fungicides - even in "organic" cannabis. You're in for a real treat.
RE: PGR plague in the Land of the Long White Cloud (Aotearoa/New Zealand)