What I actually suspect is that the move toward drugs legalization in places like Canada and experiments with decriminalization of cocaine and heroin are a way to normalize using electronic payments (e.g. interac) for those black market goods, which brings them into the fold of centralized economic control and removes a key use case for cash. However the liberalization is a trap intended to set the stage for CBDCs, as once cash is fully marginalized, what will you pay in when the people in the govt change their mind about legalization?
Forget drugs for a moment, what about meat, gas, ammunition, and other normal things that are being reclassified as decadent luxuries you apparently don't "need," or "deserve," according to whoever "they" are. It's not enough for them to live virtuously according to their values, they need to police you first, and fly around in private jets while they do it. Seeing the institutions behind identity, government, and payments from the inside has persuaded me that the conspiracy theorists are just people in denial of what they have discovered, because they can't face the consequences of how serious it really all is. The architects of this don't care what anyone believes, they just need for members of any potential resistance to keep doing nothing to stop it. For good men to do nothing, as they say.
Cryptocurrencies were and remain necessary beacuse they represent a limit on state power in an era of previously unimaginable total surveillance tech, and this limit makes leviathanists and technocrats apopleptic. That's also why the arguments against crypto always seem to have a shrill whinge of cant about them - as they're based on accusations of blasphemy against the pillars of offical technocratic narrative, and the arguments themselves aren't powerful or persuasive.
Not only do we need cryptocurrencies, we need to establish boundaries on the dominion of people in governments, as without those boundaries, we're in for a totalitarian hell not even fiction could prepare us for, imo.