Absolutely. There's no panacea to organized crime. Legalization is not a panacea; you're exactly right. Even if we legalized marijuana and we taxed it, organized criminals would find the same route as for cigarettes, and they would smuggle from low- to high-tax provinces and into and out of Canada.
The same is the case with gambling. When government started to compete with organized crime in legal gambling, the one area the organized criminal still dominated was the one area that's still generally illegal, and that's bookmaking. It's generally still illegal to be a professional bookmaker in this country for betting on sports, so the biggest gambling operations are in bookmaking. In Ontario alone, it's estimated at $1 billion a year, just in bookmaking.
If I have any one message to leave today, it's that there's no silver bullet or panacea for organized crime, and legalization certainly is not a panacea. My argument is that law enforcement is so overwhelmed right now, the playing field is so unlevel, and they have so few resources to target this massive problem that we need to start prioritizing.
Is it sound policy to be chasing around marijuana drug traffickers when we have senior citizens being robbed of their life savings by telemarketing fraud, or we are faced with the epidemic in crack cocaine or crystal meth, which has a far greater impact on society?
So you're exactly right—