After selling pot for 25 years, Thomas Clarke wants to see it legalized

A St. John's man who illegally sold marijuana for 25 years thinks making the drug legal would solve a lot of problems in the province.

Thomas Clarke went from casually smoking weed to eventually selling it for a living, but now he's sharing his experience in the hopes it will change people's minds about the legalization issue.

"If Newfoundland and Labrador could be on the forefront of legalizing marijuana in Canada, it could have so many benefits," he told CBC's CrossTalk.

A healthy, happy society is a society with marijuana users.- Thomas Clarke 

Clarke said while he no longer sells or smokes pot, his inside look at the industry has him convinced that many of the province's problems could be solved if the drug was no longer illegal.

"The violence that's associated with the marijuana industry would go away," he said.

"The revenue we would make from taxing the marijuana could help our health system, and our justice system."

Clarke started smoking weed when he was just 13, when he used to buy it off people on the street in the late 1980's.

That kicked off a long pot-smoking habit, which eventually turned into a way to make money.

Dangerous business

After years of selling it to his friends in St. John's, he joined some other fellow Newfoundlanders and went to British Columbia to work at a grow operation.

"We thought it was great, we were keeping to ourselves," he said.

However it wasn't long before the dark side of the business showed itself, when a local biker gang came to them and demanded they leave and hand everything over to the gang.

"We all had to pack up our things and get out of our houses," said Clarke.

"Our only option was to fight the bikers, and that's not something we were prepared to do."

In another incident back home, he had a gun pointed at his head. All of those examples have brought Clarke to the conclusion that marijuana's illegal status actually creates more crime than it prevents.

"Legalization could put a damper on that," he said.

"Almost all pot we get here in Newfoundland comes down the line from a bike gang or someone on the mainland."

Taking money away from the criminals

Clarke also thinks the government is missing out on a huge cash cow by not embracing legalization.

"There is hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent on marijuana," he said.

"If you could take that money out of the hands of criminals and put it in the hands of the community and society, you could use the revenue from that to open drug rehab centres or to put more money into the justice system."

Clarke thinks a big barrier to getting pot decriminalized is false stereotypes about the kinds of people who smoke it.

"Most people who don't smoke marijuana don't realize that every type of person in society is a marijuana smoker, from judges and lawyers and doctors to radio hosts and teenagers," he said.

"A healthy, happy society is a society with marijuana users."