It may seem un-American when a state such as Florida puts restrictions in place that effectively wipe out a seedling industry, specifically head shops that sell bongs, pipes and other smoking materials to an underground culture created by anti-drug laws. We’re supposed to be a free people. This kind of Big Brother-ism is something one would expect to find in a place that holds liberty in a much lower regard… Like Canada.
Municipal Clampdown
Last fall, the city of Winnipeg voted unanimously to restrict the sales of bongs and pipes by subjecting existing and future retailers to apply for a license to sell their products and to make them face a public hearing process. The law does not explicitly ban the sales of bongs, pipes, papers or other materials associated with marijuana use. The city council expressed that this was just a way to keep head shops from proliferating in the suburbs and acting as “harbingers of decay”.
Law Enforcements Role
In London-Ontario, the sale of bongs and pipes is outlawed, because lawmakers there don’t want to promote behavior that is outside of “normal human culture”. Yet the police there seem to have better things to do; head shops are said to be sprouting up on every corner. On the other end of the spectrum, in 2006, Ontario police staged a well-publicized raid on a “smoke cafe” that was regarded as one of the city’s centers of activism. The brutish behavior of authorities raised alarm among civil libertarians.
The question that nobody asks is why there is such growth in the sales of bongs and pipes, and why so many entrepreneurs, in Canada and in the United States, are willing to stake their reputations and their financial futures on something that lawmakers describe as unsavory. It’s called a market. Government stands athwart economic progress for reasons that can no longer be articulated in a sensible manner.