It was by choice of the voter.
Be that as it may, I think government doesn't have a particularly good track record of competing with the marketplace. Here's the difficulty. Many of these suggestions may be all well and good if we were starting with a tabula rasa, if we were at a clean slate talking about something that had never been done before and never been seen before. But we have an existing massive industry in cannabis in this country, and the government monopoly is going to compete with that industry. It can either compete on price and customer service and attractiveness, which is going to require some advertising, something that the government may not want to do; or it can compete using the police forces to try to enforce its monopoly, which is something that is going to offend the charter and I think should offend anybody who believes in a free and democratic society. Many of these suggestions might make sense in a vacuum, but they don't make sense on the ground as we sit here and stand here today.
It's sort of like talking about the treaties. Canada has been in technical non-compliance with these treaties since it began to sell marijuana by not collecting it through private enterprise since at least 2005. We're already in violation of all these treaties. These treaties are also responsible for creating a paradigm of prohibition that's led to the international black markets in all these drugs, and devastation, destruction, and death across the world, including the opioid epidemic that's ongoing everywhere in this world and in particular in this country and in the United States.
We're not starting from a blank slate. We're starting from trying to claw our way back from a failed system that does a tremendous amount of damage today, and a system that—