Success Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line doesn’t argue about weed so much as it indicts the state’s habit of laundering control through “freedom.” The opening move, “Only one thing is certain,” is a rhetorical power play: she narrows a messy policy debate into a single, grim inevitability. Legalization, in her framing, isn’t liberalization; it’s reclassification. What was informal, community-governed, and partially opaque becomes legible to institutions that tax it, license it, police it, and harvest data from it.

The key subtext sits in her use of “authorities,” a deliberately blunt plural that bundles politicians, regulators, police, and corporate partners into one apparatus. Greer’s activist suspicion is that the state doesn’t merely permit behavior; it standardizes it. “For our benefit” is bait: she anticipates the public-health and criminal-justice arguments for legalization and waves them off as cover stories for a more durable outcome - expanded administrative reach.

“To lose control of it” lands with double meaning. Control can mean personal autonomy (how and why people use substances) but also collective, cultural control: who grows it, who sells it, which communities profit, which are still surveilled. In the late-20th-century feminist and radical milieu Greer emerged from, this is a familiar pattern: the mainstream absorbs a subculture, then rewrites it as a regulated market. Legalization becomes a velvet glove over the same fist - fewer arrests, perhaps, but more gatekeeping, pricing power, and state-defined “responsible” use. The provocation is not anti-legalization so much as anti-naivete about who ends up holding the clipboard.