This Is The Weed-Fuelled Communist Revolution Alberta Warned Us About

The year is 2025. You are sitting in a stuffy, shuttered train with dozens of strangers, breathing in an acrid cloud of marijuana smoke. You are no longer sure how long you’ve been traveling, or even where you’re going. The guard just grunted “north” when he pressed a two-gram ration of Gulag God into your palm as they frog-marched you up the platform. You guess they’re sending you up to reclaim the freshly melted permafrost as part of the Party’s latest agricultural drive, but you’re not really sure. The constant high makes it hard to concentrate. It’s impossible to keep an idea fixed in your mind for more than a moment before it spins away out of your psychic reach forever. You’re just too goddamn stoned.

Life in Canada wasn’t always like this. It was normal once, long ago. Before legalized weed ushered in the communist revolution.

If only we had listened to the one warning we had. In Alberta—the country’s only sane province—United Conservative Party MLA Ron Orr stood in the legislature and tried to tell us this would happen. He told us legal weed could lead to communism. But we mocked him, because the Cultural Marxists were already too entrenched in our media and our minds. We were so naive in 2017.

At the time, Orr’s comments seemed extremely stupid. Comparing legalized marijuana to the opium craze that devastated early 19th century China seemed particularly out of touch given that it came amidst Canada’s own deadly opioid epidemic. The idea that it was drug use alone that lead to the 1949 Communist revolution—rather than being one of many political outgrowths of the century of imperialism and war visited on China by European powers in the drug’s wake—struck most people at the time as historically illiterate. We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Well. Who’s laughing now? (Technically: you, but that’s part of the reefer madness.)

Hindsight is always 20/20. In retrospect, the plot was obvious. The Chinese government had schemed for decades about how best to take revenge on the British for the Opium Wars, and it was inevitable that the first step on their road to retribution would involve corrupting Canada, the Empire’s bastard stepchild. Canadian pundits of the day spent so much time worrying about how we could square free trade with China’s human rights record that they were blind to the more immediate threat: that Justin Trudeau was a literal Manchurian Candidate brainwashed by the Communist Party to get the kids hooked on weed in order to bring down capitalism.

It was foolproof. Once the drug was legalized, events progressed much faster than anyone could have expected for a country suddenly filled with stoners. Squares were sparking up for the first time and having their minds blown. Demand for undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religious studies was exploding. Every major news organization in Canada replaced all their other beats with in-depth investigations into the meaning of assorted Zen koans. Hockey was replaced on every network with a Twitch stream of the boys playing round after round of Blades of Steel on a pirated ROM. Gender was declared illegal and it wasn’t long before “O Canada” was replaced by a new anthem titled “Ayyyy lmao.”

But things quickly turned dark. The country’s economy went haywire after stoned stock brokers deliberately priced every stock on the TSX to $420.69. The collective population of PEI got too high to harvest potatoes, devastating domestic chip production. When the snack food riots broke out, the police and armed forces had all become too bloated from endlessly munching out to put them down. From there, all it took was a dozen straightedge grad students from the York sociology department to march on Parliament and Canada as we knew it was finished. Smoke billowed out of Ottawa’s Supreme Court as a gaggle of giggling justices, baked out of their minds, signed off on the new constitution making freedom illegal.

“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” came the first propaganda blast over the new CBC. “It’s the law.”

Did it really happen that way? It’s getting harder and harder to tell. These memories, too, start to escape you, drifting down from your head across your body, buzzing through the leaded muscles that lock you firmly to your seat. You notice that the train has come to a gentle stop. This must be the place.

The shutters on the train windows roll up abruptly with a crash, flooding the train with light. Outside the window you can see a vast field of marijuana plants stretching on for miles across the tundra. An enormous portrait of Eternal Chairwoman Rachel Notley gazes serenely over the toiling workers below. Tears in your eyes, you instinctively raise a joint to your lips and light up.

The longed-for moment of your ego death is finally here. You realize now, after all this time, that you really do love Big Mother.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.