Marajuana Legalization

[Amelia G]

Do you think marajuana and hashish should be legalized? Taxed just like other products? Given special extra taxes?

[Forestghost]

If they were legalized, some serious social problems may be resolved. We should legalize pot, and place the same age restrictions as we place on alcohol and tobacco. The rules should be the same as alcohol regarding consumption in school and the workplace. If you are caught intoxicated with marijuana at work, you should be repremanded or fired, just as with alcohol.

Legalization would also provide an increase in jobs (people would need to grow, harvest, manufacture, treat and sell the drug) which is greatly needed in Canada and the US. The taxes obtained from the sale of pot could be used for important improvements to society, like health care and schools.

Legalization would also help decrease a "criminal" population. There would be less money to be made by "illegally" growing and selling pot, since the government sanctioned stuff would probably be slightly more expensive but legal.

*shrugs* I don't smoke marijuana, but from what I understand, the intoxication provides paranoia at worst, and sillyness/relaxation at best. It would probably cause less fights than alcohol, and probably causes less intoxication. I must point out though, that there should also be laws about smoking pot and driving, it should be like alcohol. Testing should be done to determine the amount of pot needed for the intoxication, and a limit should be set as to how much you can have in your system before getting into a car.

yeah...that's what I think....

[ForrestBlack]

In my opinion, so long as you smoke in private (as defined by not inflicting smoke on people without their consent), I don't think there is any reason to outlaw such things. I do have issues with sin taxes, but I could see the viability of potentially taxing such things.

[karyn]

just what we need, more dumbed down losers with no ambition. still agree that it should be legal. more taxes are never good.

[Morning Glory]

legalise it and I will advertise it.

not not really. but It's not even really an issue, it just shows what a fuckin joke this country is. There's just no excuse for not allowing people to put substances into thier own body, and then claiming to be a free society. You should be allowed to do whatever the fuck you want in the privacy of your own home. If you wanna shoot heroin you're an idiot, but that's your perogative. When you go out and interact with other people in society, then that's another story, and that's always been my problem with drug use, and as far as how to deal with that I think forest ghost pretty much said what needs to be said about it.

I just shows this ridiculous anitqueted notion of morality, that has no logical basis since the majority of the people don't even feel that way. the statistics are like 2 out of 3 people will do pot at some time in thier life. the bottom line is that it's been proven time and again that they is an almost 0% rate of crimes commited as a result of marijuana, other than the crime of marijuana itself. today I heard some cop talking about how they send in undercover officers to pose as drug dealers, and they'll smoke pot with people and then arrest them for it. So in other words it's ok for cops to break the law in order to arrest people for doing the same things that they do. how does that make any fucking sense? when asked this question if it's immoral for a police officer to sell drugs he said no, because they just get the drugs from someone else who was allready selling them and thus committing a crime, so that person is guilty, and not the police officer. what a fucking joke.

[Morning Glory]

the real reason they don't illegalise it is because for one it would outsell alchohol and tobbaco and the big corporations would lose too much money, so they don't want that to happen. the second reason is because the government couldn't tax it. they'd want to, but if they legalised it, then no one would buy it from them, cuz there would be nothing to stop people from easily growing it in thier own backyards. It's much easier and profitbale for them to tax us to get rid of it, even though it is useless and doesn't work, but it fills thier pockets, and puts a scare into a few members of the public, so they don't care.

[LrdSatanas]

if it where legalized street value would go down. dealers would be put out of buessness. and the goverment would control all taxes and sale of it after some time like beer. even if they tax it the value wouldn't be what it is now. so yes they should legalize it. at least its not crack.

[Forestghost]

The same laws that tell people that they can't have alcohol stills or grow tobacco would say that people could NOT grow it. People would do it, but why risk breaking the law when you can just buy it in the stores?

[Morning Glory]

it's not illegal to make alchohol. only certain types like whisky stills that have a potential making lethal chemicals and gases, and so are very unsafe. p0lus it's a lot easier to grow weed than it is to make booze in your bathtub. oh yeah and it's legal to grow tobbaco, it's even legal to give it to kids (but not legal for them to smoke it), you just can't sell it. the only reason that people don't grow it is cuz it's really fuckin hard, it's one of the most difficult crops to grow.

[shev]

The War on Drugs wasn't amended to the Constitution, so technically, drugs were never really illegalized anyway. Just a minor note, since noone in America really cares.

The US should legalize marijuana and psilocybin, at the very least. I'm of the mind that America should also start printing $500 bills again, and there's a complex reason for that which ties in to the legalization of drugs.

Basically, the drug market deals almost exclusively in cash. Before recently, the American dollar was the undisputed master of the world-wide black market, but the Euro has crept up on it. The Euro is roughly the same value as the dollar, but they print 500 Euro bills, which means they have to have less cash on-hand for big deals - because of this, the Euro is becoming more popular, and therefore more valuable. The Oil Dollar is another big factor, but not one relevant to this discussion.

The best way to get the Drug Dollar back is to legalize drugs that people buy, which increases the amount of drug-trade centered around the United States. We should also compete with the Euro by printing 500s again. Maybe even 1000s, to one-up them. The US would have to do it when the dollar depreciates in value enough anyway, so why should they wait? Do it NOW.

As it stands, half of the marijuana consumed in the world is produced in the US. Now imagine if it were legalized - it would be quite the cash crop! See, the corn fields in Iowa are a great place to grow hemp, so many Iowan farmers already grow marijuana among their fields in secret, for the extra cash.

If we legalized hemp, the only conceivable problem would be that farmers might start growing too much of that and too little corn, and market forces fix that over enough time anyway. Also, ethanol subsidies wouldn't be necessary to buy the Iowa vote anymore. Hemp is really an easy crop to grow, too, so it wouldn't require much initial investment on anyone's part.

Now psilocybin poses some minor problems for producers - for example, it can be tricky to grow a good patch, as creating sterile conditions for it so you grow only the right mushrooms is difficult. Really, though, that would only increase the price of the drugs.

Another problem for producers of shrooms is packaging them - in most cases, they'd probably be dried, which decreases their potency. Of course, my solution for that would be to invest in a series of stores that grow shrooms right there within them, so people can get fresh, quality shrooms if they don't like the dried-and-packaged kind.

I also don't see any problem with letting people buy spores and grow their own 'shrooms, or with growing their own weed for that matter. I simply don't think most people WOULD if they knew they could get the same thing legally at a decent price.

In terms of other stuff (driving while intoxicated, public intoxication, etc.), aren't those done on a county-by-county basis anyway?

Oh, and I'd be all for a law against putting additives in joints to make them more addictive (just not a federal one - there are very few federal laws I'd support).

The taxes obtained from the sale of pot could be used for important improvements to society, like health care and schools.

We need to come up with a plan to pay the national debt and increase efficiency in the federal bureaucracy before we talk about implementing new social programs. I'm of the mind that if people are forced into paying for something under threat of imprisonment if they don't, they better damn well get the optimum use of their taxes. We're wasting too much on interest for our debts, and the current bureau is way too inefficient.

There would be less money to be made by "illegally" growing and selling pot, since the government sanctioned stuff would probably be slightly more expensive but legal.

I think people should be able to grow their own, but they'd probably still rather buy it as a matter of convenience and assurance of safety.

[aXa]

i used to be all for its legalization. but then i experienced firsthand the effects of being addicted to it for any years. i spent a long time struggling to quit it and finally did so after getting profesional help for it. now im not sure where i stand. i know that what i experienced was probably not what your typical user goes thro. i think that if any change were to be made to marijuana laws in the us, that the first step is decriminalizing it for personal use. i think it should still be regulated in some way, like alcohol or tobacco. i think it can be just as destructive to a person as alcohol or any other drug. i hope that the push to "legalize it" leads to more nonbiased research being done on it. i see it as being different from some other illegal drugs in that it has proven medical uses. im definately in favour of "medicinal use." god, i wish i could have shared some with my mom when she was having chemo for breast cancer. and another thing, as it is now, pot is a "street drug". you never know exactly whats in it in terms of other "additives" or potency. if it was regulated then i expect that its production gets regulated as well(im thinking here about what occurred with the alcoholic drink absinthe back in the 19th century). id love to be able to know exactly what im buying.

[Morning Glory]

your argument makes very little sense shev, that we should print 500 dollar bills to buy drugs with to compete with the euro. although drug cartels do make millions of dollars, the majority of thier sales are in small scale ammounts, so most of there money is in small bills which they need to get laundered to change ( since if you go to the bank and try and exchange a million dollars in small used bills, you'll have the IRS right up your ass).. the point is that that although the US does print $100 dollar bills, they are in fact rarelly used as drug money, so it's not very feasible to print 500 dollar bills. in fact the US does print out $500 and even $1,000 bills, but they do it on a very limited production because it's pointless to mass produce currency that hardly anyone will use. that and the fact that they are running out of money and gold at fort knox so it would cripple the economy and the value of the dollar to mass produce bills in huge denominations.

[shev]

Morning Glory: The distribution of drugs works in one of two ways. People with a lot of money to invest in drugs can buy a large amount at once and get agents of theirs to sell it in smaller mounts at a profit margin, and give a percentage of the proceeds to their higher-up who paid the original expense of procuring the drug. They can also sell it all off in increments at an increased profit to independent dealers lower in the chain, who in turn sell those drugs in smaller amounts at increased profit margins, and so on until they reach the consumers. The former happens frequently enough on small scales, but the drug market is massive.

Large sales are the preferred method of international distribution for one simple reason: risk. If a cartel takes it all over the border at once, there's less of a chance of their agents getting caught with them. Then they unload it as quickly as possible, which means striking big deals and letting the drugs (hopefully) work their way down the pyramid untraceably. If they work for the cartel directly, they give a percentage of the sales to their boss as outlined above. Otherwise, they search for another big supply.

Haven't you heard those stories about how some huge number of kilos of cocaine were found on a crate-truck full of watermelons coming in from Mexico? Or how a boat coming in at some port was full of opium and a sting operation caught it? The dealers don't have to linger and try to sell all that off in individual-sized packages themselves, so they just try to find the biggest buyer possible so they can take the next big deal back over the border as quickly as possible. Even at a lower profit margin, more money can be made more quickly that way.

Since the cartels unload that stuff quickly, they want the biggest deal that still has a good profit margin. Ideally, of course, they'd sell it all off in the small increments that consumers typically buy, because that maximizes profit. In the black market that isn't a reasonable mode of operation.

Overall, the people higher on the pyramid are happy to do it this way because they get their drugs out in the market at minimal risk - in an illegal market, you want to get it all done while dealing with as few people as possible, because that decreases the chance of getting caught. The people lower on the pyramid are also happy with this because they get an opportunity to buy in bulk and make money selling smaller packages.

Finally, I'll acknowledge the point that laundering money is a problem to some extent, but you need to consider that I'm talking about international drug-dealings, and that not all countries are as willing to arrest drug-lords as ours (to put it lightly). It's an easy enough matter to find a bank in some country that will respect your privacy, or to simply bribe the right politicians into looking the other way.

So can you see how a bigger denomination of currency would help keep the American dollar a strong presence on the black market? The deals that get drugs into the hands of consumers are a matter of small-scale currency, but that's not all there is to the market.

As for the use of the $500 bill? Well, the European Union's economy is similar to America's, and they have a use for the 500 Euro, so I'm sure that will all be fine.

Finally, on your point about inflation... It doesn't really apply to what I meant, but I can see why you said it. I'm not talking about printing a lot of money arbitrarily, I'm talking about putting them into circulation. Even as a worst case, I don't think this would take less than ten years, but once the Euro becomes the preferred currency it would be difficult to usurp. That can't be good for the dollar any way we look at it.

Of course, I still don't know whose face to put on it. I'm thinking Thomas Jefferson; he kinda got shafted with the two-dollar bill.

[Morning Glory]

that is certainly true. by the way nice use of details to illistrate your point. I guess it may just be the american mentality that we'd rather have more even if it's the same, as demonstarted in what seems to me the average person prefering several small bills to large ones. it's certainly an experiment worth a try. personally I prefer to do all my transactions ( umm not drug realted, haha) electronically and like not having to carry around cash. although on another note I could see why conspiracy nuts and people who engage in, shall we say, less than legal business would prefer to deal in good old fashion impersonal green backs.

[Nightingale]

There are many other drugs which aree legal in the western world which have a far worse effect on their users than hash. Legalize it, and restrict those other drugs, I say.

[Tequila Zaire]

I hope so...their is a killing to be made from this.

[karyn]

your argument makes very little sense shev, that we should print 500 dollar bills to buy drugs with to compete with the euro. although drug cartels do make millions of dollars, the majority of thier sales are in small scale ammounts, so most of there money is in small bills which they need to get laundered to change ( since if you go to the bank and try and exchange a million dollars in small used bills, you'll have the IRS right up your ass).. the point is that that although the US does print $100 dollar bills, they are in fact rarelly used as drug money, so it's not very feasible to print 500 dollar bills. in fact the US does print out $500 and even $1,000 bills, but they do it on a very limited production because it's pointless to mass produce currency that hardly anyone will use. that and the fact that they are running out of money and gold at fort knox so it would cripple the economy and the value of the dollar to mass produce bills in huge denominations.

most hundred dollar bills have traces of cocaine on them. they are obviously being used for drugs more often than smaller bills.

the USA abandoned the gold standard in 1971

[bre.star]

im not a smoker, but i believe it should be legalized. it causes less problems than alchohol! i would rather people be driving stoned than drunk!

[BrightStar]

Do you think marajuana and hashish should be legalized? Taxed just like other products? Given special extra taxes?

Yes, Maybe, and No.

[hewhoisagod]

I don't do weed, but I still think it should be legalized. Tax it too, it'd cut a nice hole in our multi-trillion dollar deficit.......

[BrightStar]

I don't do weed, but I still think it should be legalized. Tax it too, it'd cut a nice hole in our multi-trillion dollar deficit.......

Exactly!

[Morning Glory]

that thing about coke on 100 dollar bills is a myth. first of all that doesn't even make any sense. since when is a paper bill some kind of super conductor? I wasn't aware that a molecule of cocaine attaches permantly to such a material, as would be neccesary to be able to read such a trace amount of chemical on a bill which is probbily the most used, abused and handled thing that there is. not to mention be able to ascertain that trace out of a thousand other stimuli that a dollar has touched in it's circulation, cuz apparently anything that touches a bill retains that trace chemical, remember.
but ok, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that coke does stick to a bill...where do you think they get this analysis from? some guy on the street, excuse me, sir can I borrow your franklin? No, they'd get it from a large cash sum that a client deposited in the bank. so think about the kind of people who have a bunch of cash that they don't want to carry around on them, yeah drug dealers are these such people, so in that scenario it's likely that the bills will contain traces of a drug, and a good percent of large cash deposits are probibly drug related. but even if this is true.. it still doesn't prove that 100 dollar bills are prominant in the drug mareket, especially for the typical 'drug user' if such a thing was tried and true, I'd challenge you to test the small bills for drug traces, and you may or may not get the same results. if not the only thing that you've proven is that there are less 100 dollar bills printed than small bills, and thus less 100's used in the drug trade.

[shev]

I actually looked the cocaine thing up yesterday and found out a little more about it. The summary is this: yes, there are trace amounts of cocaine on large amounts of American bills (roughly 80% of them), and no, trace amounts of cocaine don't mean the money was used in drug trades or to snort cocaine.

Basically, cocaine is a very, very fine powder, so if any cocaine gets on ANY bill, they'll get cocaine on all the other bills in your wallet at the very least. If you deposit that contaminated bill in an automatic cash machine, the money will get on the rollers in the cash machine and end up rubbed off on any other money people put through there for some time. The same goes for counting machines in casinos, or machines that exchange dollars into quarters at laundromats and arcades, for that matter.

So a single bill used to snort a line of cocaine can contaminate a lot more money with trace amounts of it. The significant thing here is that the amount of cocaine on any given bill is very low, with an average of 16 micrograms per bill, and it takes only one directly-contaminated bill to contaminate hundreds or thousands of others with that amount.

[OliX]

Leave it illegal.

[morbid_lady]

here in ontario it was decriminalized for awhile, because some one didnt write the law out properly.

i personally think it should be legalized the way it is in Holland, along with prostitution.

weed is much better than booze in many aspects, including long-term health (physical and mental), ppl are GENERALLY less inclined to violence when high than when wasted. it is less addictive than nicotine, and accually alot healthier. it is cheaper than most anti-depressants and pain-killers, legalizing it would definately bring down the jail populations (taking out ppl who are there for possession), help cut down the amount of ppl going to court and in need of lawyers ( i am currently doing co-op in a law office and most of the criminal case that are being done have to do with possession charges), and if it is taxed it would help bring down the deficiet...there are many other things that can support it.

[Morning Glory]

I don't think prostitution should be legal because all it does is promote degradation toward people. If you can't see why, then you're fucked up, I don't even need to explain that.

[Kidthorazine]

I don't think prostitution should be legal because all it does is promote degradation toward people. If you can't see why, then you're fucked up, I don't even need to explain that.

i see where you are coming from but there is a big difference between the way street prostitution works and legalized government regulated prostitution it is much less degrading and alot of the people who do it do it because they want to. Go nevada where prostitution is legal and ask some of the professional prostitutes there what they think of it.

[Morning Glory]

yeah, I guess but I don't think people really would want that either, I imagine a lot of men would prefer to do it anonamously and I don't see how that could happen with the government controlling it, basically because word get's around and it's pretty easy for "legitamate" people to deny things on the basis of thier illegitamacy, if you get what i'm saying.

[morbid_lady]

countries that have legalized prostitution have seen vast decreases in sex related crimes. as well it helps to control STD's, through licenses which make certain that the prostitutes dont have them to start with and by supplying protection. it also keeps down underage prostitution.

aswell it does help to employ people. being good in bed is a skill that some people have and some dont and is always in high demand. some people really dont have any other skills.

[Mr Karl]

the only problem with legalizing the product is the result of possible licensing of the user

I can see it now, toking without a license, 90 days

haaah like we'll let that happen, I'd rather see whoever make the money than the 'man'

power to the people not the government!!!!!

[TheQuietPlace]

Short and Sweet:
Legalization with taxation.