ANYONE know? Marijuana is but one product sold as an illegal pharaceutical/recreational drug, and often adulterated due to the lack of oversight and control over such underground products.
sue-kennedysays
In fairness, nobody knows for sure. “Illegal” means that hard data are hard to come by. However, we do know that there are anywhere from 25 million to 60 million U.S. consumers (depending on how likely survey respondents are to tell the whole truth), and at an average cost of $5 per cigarette, factoring in one per day for each user, total spending on marijuana may add up to $45 billion to $110 billion a year.
How Much Does Marijuana Prohibition Cost The U.S. Annually?
Increased marijuana enforcement is associated with greater fiscal and social costs. State and local justice costs for marijuana arrests are now estimated to be $7.6 billion, approximately $10,400 per arrest. Of this total, annual police costs are $3.7 billion, judicial/legal costs are $853 million, and correctional costs are $3.1 billion. In both California and New York, state fiscal costs dedicated to criminal marijuana law enforcement annually total over $1 billion for each state.
The worst thing about marijuana is that it makes people sit around and do nothing. Lately I think we have laws that just promote behavior that’s good for society, and we need people to work more. That’s why we have laws against drugs.
Is having the highest incarceration level of any industrialized nation evidence that Americans are lazy (if the majority of those incarcerated were incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses) or are Americans lazy due to a conspiracy to sell them drugs? Which came first? And if the war against drugs has not worked, would taxing the hell out of drugs work better? Would cleaner, regulated drugs that were highly taxed be less dangerous then cheap, untaxed, dirty and contaminated drugs used anyway? Would legal taxed drugs be less glamorous & enticing to rebellious yourth then illegal drugs now are?
seascrapersays
but there are reasons we have laws against drugs even if they don’t have the material effect you think would logically make them ineffective.
centralmassdadsays
is that J. Edgar Hoover’s boys needed something to do after booze ceased being illegal.
Continuing to devote resources in any amount to law enforcement with respect to marijuana is a waste of time and money, and an invitation to government interference in private affairs.
HR's Kevinsays
that the stated reasons for passing laws don’t always match the real ones, and that the rationales stated or otherwise often don’t match or actually contradict scientific evidence. Laws are all too often passed for misguided reasons. I am sure you can think of examples. So we need to get passed the argument that any given substance is bad because it is illegal, not the other way around.
Ryansays
Otherwise, what you said is merely a stereotype with no basis in truth.
At least among those I know, there is no discernible difference between productivity of pot smokers, former pot smokers and people who’ve never smoked pot in their entire life. If anything, one of the people I know who still smokes pot on a regular basis has some of the most difficult and stressful work out of all of my friends — part of me thinks his occasional ‘pot nights’ keeps him sane.
Based on the people I know, playing World of Warcraft could be more dangerous to one’s productivity than smoking pot…
seascrapersays
There’s no link, I thought it up myself. Every great insight has to come from somewhere. I expect people to link to me.
I hear this argument all the time — legalize it and tax it. I find this strange for two reasons:
1. There are certainly harmful side effects of smoking pot. I’m not talking about going crazy or lazy or getting into car crashes high. I’m talking about damage to the lungs. I’ve not seen any evidence that directly inhaling hot smoke is anything but bad for the lungs. Given our society’s efforts to reduce the use of cigarettes by making their use illegal in some circumstances (indoors, etc), we seem to be arguing to do the opposite with respect to pot. As far as public health goes, does not compute.
2. The tax argument. Have you ever tried to grow tobacco? It’s hard. Tobacco can be grown in lots of places (CT down to GA at least), but it’s not easy. My understanding is that marijuana is called “weed” for a reason — it’s relatively easy to grow in personal use quantities. If that’s the case, then it strikes me that the tax level is limited — if the tax is too high, folks will do an awful lot more of growing their own. We don’t see much of this for cigarettes because it’s *hard*, and we don’t see much of it for booze because the alcohol tax is quite low. Exactly how much could we tax pot before it simply becomes a garden hobby for large swaths of America? Has there been any economic studies on the ability to tax pot and the revenue streams which would come if it were legal?
3. Age of use: 18? 21? Something else? If a man can die for his country… you know the rest. The flip side: lots of high school kids know 18 year olds. You legalize it at 18, you’ll see an increase in high school consumption of pot because a whole bunch of kids will know someone who can obtain it at the gas station. At 21, it’s quite a bit tougher for high school kids to get their older siblings or older friends. So — at what age?
4. Who regulates? FDA? Is it like cigarettes or something else? Advertisement restrictions?
Ryansays
smoking pot is a serious health risk. If anything, the potential risks to one’s health is significantly less than the potential risks of other, legal and actually physically addictive drugs, like cigarettes and alcohol. If those are legal in any capacity, so should pot be.
On your next point (#2), I think this comment is equally silly:
2. The tax argument. Have you ever tried to grow tobacco? It’s hard. Tobacco can be grown in lots of places (CT down to GA at least), but it’s not easy. My understanding is that marijuana is called “weed” for a reason — it’s relatively easy to grow in personal use quantities. If that’s the case, then it strikes me that the tax level is limited — if the tax is too high, folks will do an awful lot more of growing their own.
Growing tomatoes are easy and quite likely a lot cheaper than buying them at the store, certainly buying organic tomatoes that would be nearly as good as the ones you’d get from your own garden. We human beings don’t like to put in a lot of work to make things.
Certainly, some people would grow pot for themselves, and some even do that today. Should pot be legalized, and people decide to grow it on their own, I don’t see how it would be anymore detrimental than people deciding to grow their own tomatoes. But if it is, and we decide it should be strictly regulated, at least we could create some kind of licensing system to regulate it, and better employ our police resources as a result.
At the end of the day, whether people decide to go get their pot (and possibly even smoke it) at a cannibis store, as you’d see in Amsterdam, or if they get a “pot license” for personal use at home, at least it’s keeping people in their houses or in some pot cafe rather than smoking pot out on the road… one of the more common places people do that sort of thing today. Any sort of tax revenue, increased safety in the pot itself (since it couldn’t be mixed with other, illicit things) or ability to better focus police and state resources is just a bonus.
On #3 — that’s a separate question than if it should be legal, and doesn’t have to be answered immediately. As the law would be debated, we could just go with 18, like cigarettes, to start off, or start at 21, or something in between… and just change things as needed.
As for worrying about pot becoming more accessible… there’s so much of it out there already that I doubt it will make much of a difference, and personally, I don’t think it matters. There are plenty of worse things than some 17 who’s already probably smoking pot, smoking some more pot. If you’re really worried about that, though, don’t let it be sold at the gas station, make it be sold at cannabis stores — stores that can be more strictly regulated. Better that some 18 year old is buying it there than from a shady drug dealer, and all the implications that prevails (from increased gang violence, to the ongoing not-much-talked-about “drug war” in Mexico, to putting kids at danger from getting involved with dealers — dealers who would have access to other, far more dangerous things, as well).
On your point #4, that’s also a question that can be determined once (or more likely, as) the decision to legalize pot is made. It really has no importance to whether or not pot should be legalized, only on what to do after the decision is made to legalize it.
Ryansays
Well, this is one of those comments I *really* wish I read out loud to myself before pushing “publish.” For some reason, even though we’re supposed to be able to edit comments on this new platform, it never lets me do it. Oh, well.
Let’s pretend I could edit the above to include “year old” after 17 — so, 17 year old — on my 7th paragraph, and let’s pretend I wrote “entails” instead of “prevails” in the fourth sentence (I think) of the second to last paragraph, just before I wrote in parenthesis.
There’s other mistakes in there, as well, but those were the important and/or embarrassing ones :p
On 1: Rye, use your head. It’s unfiltered smoke. Have you even looked for a study, or did you just bang out “I’ve never seen one” without looking? I ask because I searched on “marijuana risk lung cancer” and found oodles of hits for studies, some showing “yes” some “no” and some “maybe” results. So if you do the search, you’ll have to revise your (1) immediately. Alternatively, I’ll claim that marijuana causes some people to jerk their knees, and you’ll be my evidence 🙂
2. Tomatoes aren’t taxed. Therefore, the full grocery store price is the cost of labor, materials, transportation, and profit margin. If you put a value on your time at minimum wage [and maybe on your land, but not even that], it’s almost impossible to grow tomatoes at total prices below the grocery store – -after all, there are economies of scale and of climate that you’re not capturing. To bring that price down, you’ve got to grow so many tomatoes that you’re no longer growing them for personal use…
The amount of the retail price which is captured as tax is where the incentive to “grow your own” comes in to play. If the tax is high, folks can arbitrage by paying more to grow it but paying $0 on the tax.
I’m not opposed to people growing their own (fill in the blank) instead of buying it at the grocer or the farmers market. My question is simply this: the “legalize it and tax it” phrase gets thrown around all the time, but has anybody tried to figure out how much tax revenue we’re really talking about here? How high can you add the tax before it’s substantially eroded by “grow your own?”
3. This is not a small matter, and just waving your hands doesn’t resolve the issue. Legalizing pot will make it more prevalent and available, which means it will be easier for high school kids to obtain. In that respect, there’s a huge difference between 18 and 21.
SomervilleTomsays
When I was a teenager, eons ago in the prehistoric sixties, none of us drank alcohol because we preferred the buzz we got from weed, weed was easier to get, none of us got hurt, and weed was much cheaper. Besides, our tunes sounded better with weed than alcohol.
It was Ronald Reagan who, looking for cheap publicity to fulfill campaign foolishness about drugs, started busting pot dealers. They were an easy and photogenic mark — a few kilos of MaryJane looks like an ENORMOUS quantity of pot on the 15 second evening news shot and the kids moving it weren’t likely to be armed and dangerous. The effect was to drive the street price of marijuana up to be competitive with cocaine, so that suburban teenagers were suddenly doing business with full-service gang/mafia dealers rather than buddies coming home on leave.
During the six years (1964-1970) I was in secondary schools in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, none of my classmates was killed or injured in an alcohol-related car crash. That’s in two high schools with about 2,000 kids spread across three grades each. How many Massachusetts teens can make that claim today?
Our teenagers who want to put on a buzz will do so. I’m making the rash statement that they are safer doing so with weed than with alcohol. That’s my conclusion, based on the anecdotal evidence of myself and my five children (my youngest is now 15).
I actually think that if we really want to protect ourselves and our teenagers, we would lower the drinking (and pot-smoking) age to 16 and raise the driving age to 18 or 21 — together with imposing draconian and rigidly enforced DUI regulations on every driver.
Drunk driving by teenagers is already a far larger problem than pot smoking is ever going to be.
SomervilleTomsays
We learned the hard way that attempting to make alcohol illegal only enriched organized crime.
It seems to me that however we choose to rationalize our laws, it is insane to make marijuana illegal while alcohol and tobacco are allowed and, yes, encouraged. Whatever harm comes from consuming marijuana is, in my view, far less profound than the known consequences of alcohol and tobacco. I have never, in my entire life, known of even one situation where somebody tokes up and then chooses to see how fast they can drive their car. I have quit smoking marijuana and quit smoking cigarettes. I can tell you, from my first-hand knowledge, that a nicotine addiction is far far more intense than any marijuana habit.
Meanwhile, our society is paying a horrible price to sustain these absurd marijuana laws. The overwhelming majority of the claimed costs of the “marijuana problem” are, in fact, the result of its illegality.
During the eighties, proponents of marijuana legalization pointed out that the value of the California marijuana cash crop ranked California alone at something like thirteenth largest GDP in the world.
Marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and — yes — taxed.
jconwaysays
My only opposition to decriminalization is that it didn’t go far enough to legalization. On the one hand we are saving a ton of money from revenue going out wasted on incarceration and enforcement, but we are still losing out on bringing revenue in. The fines are completely unenforceable, as opposed to taxes and regulations which would generate revenue.
As for the lazy card, really weak argument. I was just as likely as my pot-smoking roommate to waste an entire weekend on our couch eating deep dish pizza and watching the Simpsons.
That study doesn’t seem to take into account the liklihod of non-direct-medical harm in the following sense: drunk driving, house burned down from falling asleep cigarette in mouth, jumping off of a building while on LSD.
In none of the three cases did the drug damage the body — it was the actions of the user (likely) related to the drug use.
I’m not arguing for or against moving any particular drug up or down the chart because of that, but my bet is that these indirect deaths are far more common with PCP or alcohol than with tobacco, for example.
SomervilleTomsays
“Careless disposal of smoking materials” is the cause of a significant number of residential fires and fire deaths. I think you’re certainly correct that alcohol is responsible for a significant number of indirect deaths — this would move it even more right-ward on the chart.
In any case, it seems to me that the chart implies that “Cannabis” is inappropriately illegal, given the legal status of tobacco and alcohol. I’m not totally sure I buy the positioning of “Cannabis” in the chart, I suppose I’ll have to actually read the Lancet study. 🙂
roarkarchitectsays
By decriminalizing pot in Massachusetts but not legalizing the sale & distribution, a large demand is created, that only criminals can satisfy.
Ryansays
I’ve read nothing that indicates whether pot use has risen or fallen since we’ve decriminalized it. Furthermore, the costs of putting people in actual prison, both to the system and to personal lives, is far greater than any increase in consumption I could envision.
It’s also important to note that while pot was decriminalized for personal use, it was not decriminalized in terms of dealing. If dealers get caught with large quantities of pot, or other drugs, they can still be arrested.
HR's Kevinsays
and is well worth investigating further. The law of supply and demand would suggest that removing some barriers to demand will increase incentives for suppliers. Perhaps it is not a big enough difference to matter, but it could.
Christophersays
However, we should legalize/decriminalize on an ad hoc basis. I do have some concerns about marijuana being a gateway drug and ultimately voted against the ballot measure last time because I realized penalties were already reasonable. The more harmful stuff should still be banned. As for any “war on drugs” I don’t see the point in locking up people who really need treatment, but I still want to throw the book at the cartels, drug runners, and those who push them on kids.
At the end of the day, drug use correlates with availability. If your house has a lot of drinkers, but no smokers, chances are your kids are going to try your liquor — or vice versa. If you’re in a neighborhood where there’s tons of pot for sale, or your friends smoke lots of pot, there’s going to be an increased likelihood of that person smoking pot. If someone’s in an environment where there’s lots of hard drugs being used, then that’s what’s going to happen. However, the notion/belief that cigarettes leads to pot, which leads to other bad things, has absolutely no basis in fact and has been refuted in mainstream studies. Most people who smoke pot don’t go off and smoke things that are a lot worse than pot.
One further comment on this point:
As for any “war on drugs” I don’t see the point in locking up people who really need treatment, but I still want to throw the book at the cartels, drug runners, and those who push them on kids.
We’ve been “throwing the book at them” for decades, but they keep getting more powerful and more dangerous, not less. What ends up happening is poor people with little opportunity available to them get “recruited” into the cartels to go sell the drugs, etc., and a great many of them eventually get arrested. But there’s always more poor people to recruit from, so to the cartels, that doesn’t really matter. The only way to truly hurt them is to take away their business, pot being their #1 seller. The ONLY way we can put a real dent into their business, and have a chance at really reducing the amount of violence and destruction they’re able to cause, is by taking away this #1 best seller from them. And then, once we do that, we can focus all our attentions on a significantly smaller cartel peddling the truly and horrifically dangerous stuff, like heroin.
Mark L. Bailsays
is a logical fallacy called post hoc propter hoc, i.e. because hard drug users started with marijuana and ended up on crack, heroin, or crystal meth, one caused the other. The same argument could be applied to cigarettes and liquor. The implication is that if we make marijuana inaccessible, then people won’t use harder drugs.
The ‘gateway’ claim is a myth. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug so it is very likely that people who use less commonly-used drugs will have also tried marijuana. That does not mean marijuana led to hard drug use. The research indicates most marijuana users do not go onto use hard drugs; marijuana is more properly viewed as a strainer that catches most illicit drug users and they go no further. The numbers bear out these findings: According to the federal government 76.3 million people have tried marijuana, while only 2.78 million have ever tried heroin in their lifetimes and only 5.3 million have ever tried cocaine in their lives. The figures for monthly use are similar: 10.7 million Americans admit to being regular marijuana users, yet only 1.2 million admit to using cocaine each month – 1 for every 9 marijuana users – and 130,000 people use heroin monthly, or 1 for every 80 regular marijuana users.
JimCsays
Reluctantly, I support legalization. Mainly to keep people I know out of jail.
Mark L. Bailsays
Being a drug prude. Venture into prigginess or Puritanism and it’d be a different story.
There are a lot of pro-choice abortion prudes out there.
The only drug I use is caffeine (and I do mean “use”). Otherwise, I don’t really like altering my state of consciousness.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment 14, Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Searching people for substances that they want to put in their own body is totally UNREASONABLE.
If we had the right judges, not only would there be no drug prohibition, but all drug convicts in prison would be freed and their records cleansed.
When they prohibited alchohol, they amended the US Constitution to do it.
Alchohol prohibition was supported by self-righteous busy-bodies, tin-pot tyrants, and KU KLUX KLAN SCUM.
These filthy elements and their evil laws were good… for Al Capone.
Today, innocent people rot in prison here in the US because of drug charges, and people are getting murdered in Mexico because the drug gangs are fighting.
When’s the last time you heard of liquor store owners shooting each other in the street? EXACTLY.
Although, with the drug war, instead of amending the Constitution, they are construing its liberties much too narrowly.
Just as Prohibition was supported by KKK bigots, a lot of drug warriors hate major minorities.
ANYONE know? Marijuana is but one product sold as an illegal pharaceutical/recreational drug, and often adulterated due to the lack of oversight and control over such underground products.
Comes from a great debate in Boomberg Businessweek (2005) here: http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2009/03/legalize_mariju.html
Then add the cost of investigating, arresting, prosecuting and detaining potheads. (2003 statistics) –
http://www.doctordeluca.com/Library/WOD/CrimesOfIndiscretion-NORML05.htm
Finally the cost to peoples lives who are locked does not appear to be in balance with what the current law is attempting to protect them from.
The worst thing about marijuana is that it makes people sit around and do nothing. Lately I think we have laws that just promote behavior that’s good for society, and we need people to work more. That’s why we have laws against drugs.
Is having the highest incarceration level of any industrialized nation evidence that Americans are lazy (if the majority of those incarcerated were incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses) or are Americans lazy due to a conspiracy to sell them drugs? Which came first? And if the war against drugs has not worked, would taxing the hell out of drugs work better? Would cleaner, regulated drugs that were highly taxed be less dangerous then cheap, untaxed, dirty and contaminated drugs used anyway? Would legal taxed drugs be less glamorous & enticing to rebellious yourth then illegal drugs now are?
but there are reasons we have laws against drugs even if they don’t have the material effect you think would logically make them ineffective.
is that J. Edgar Hoover’s boys needed something to do after booze ceased being illegal.
Continuing to devote resources in any amount to law enforcement with respect to marijuana is a waste of time and money, and an invitation to government interference in private affairs.
that the stated reasons for passing laws don’t always match the real ones, and that the rationales stated or otherwise often don’t match or actually contradict scientific evidence. Laws are all too often passed for misguided reasons. I am sure you can think of examples. So we need to get passed the argument that any given substance is bad because it is illegal, not the other way around.
Otherwise, what you said is merely a stereotype with no basis in truth.
At least among those I know, there is no discernible difference between productivity of pot smokers, former pot smokers and people who’ve never smoked pot in their entire life. If anything, one of the people I know who still smokes pot on a regular basis has some of the most difficult and stressful work out of all of my friends — part of me thinks his occasional ‘pot nights’ keeps him sane.
Based on the people I know, playing World of Warcraft could be more dangerous to one’s productivity than smoking pot…
There’s no link, I thought it up myself. Every great insight has to come from somewhere. I expect people to link to me.
I hear this argument all the time — legalize it and tax it. I find this strange for two reasons:
1. There are certainly harmful side effects of smoking pot. I’m not talking about going crazy or lazy or getting into car crashes high. I’m talking about damage to the lungs. I’ve not seen any evidence that directly inhaling hot smoke is anything but bad for the lungs. Given our society’s efforts to reduce the use of cigarettes by making their use illegal in some circumstances (indoors, etc), we seem to be arguing to do the opposite with respect to pot. As far as public health goes, does not compute.
2. The tax argument. Have you ever tried to grow tobacco? It’s hard. Tobacco can be grown in lots of places (CT down to GA at least), but it’s not easy. My understanding is that marijuana is called “weed” for a reason — it’s relatively easy to grow in personal use quantities. If that’s the case, then it strikes me that the tax level is limited — if the tax is too high, folks will do an awful lot more of growing their own. We don’t see much of this for cigarettes because it’s *hard*, and we don’t see much of it for booze because the alcohol tax is quite low. Exactly how much could we tax pot before it simply becomes a garden hobby for large swaths of America? Has there been any economic studies on the ability to tax pot and the revenue streams which would come if it were legal?
3. Age of use: 18? 21? Something else? If a man can die for his country… you know the rest. The flip side: lots of high school kids know 18 year olds. You legalize it at 18, you’ll see an increase in high school consumption of pot because a whole bunch of kids will know someone who can obtain it at the gas station. At 21, it’s quite a bit tougher for high school kids to get their older siblings or older friends. So — at what age?
4. Who regulates? FDA? Is it like cigarettes or something else? Advertisement restrictions?
smoking pot is a serious health risk. If anything, the potential risks to one’s health is significantly less than the potential risks of other, legal and actually physically addictive drugs, like cigarettes and alcohol. If those are legal in any capacity, so should pot be.
On your next point (#2), I think this comment is equally silly:
Growing tomatoes are easy and quite likely a lot cheaper than buying them at the store, certainly buying organic tomatoes that would be nearly as good as the ones you’d get from your own garden. We human beings don’t like to put in a lot of work to make things.
Certainly, some people would grow pot for themselves, and some even do that today. Should pot be legalized, and people decide to grow it on their own, I don’t see how it would be anymore detrimental than people deciding to grow their own tomatoes. But if it is, and we decide it should be strictly regulated, at least we could create some kind of licensing system to regulate it, and better employ our police resources as a result.
At the end of the day, whether people decide to go get their pot (and possibly even smoke it) at a cannibis store, as you’d see in Amsterdam, or if they get a “pot license” for personal use at home, at least it’s keeping people in their houses or in some pot cafe rather than smoking pot out on the road… one of the more common places people do that sort of thing today. Any sort of tax revenue, increased safety in the pot itself (since it couldn’t be mixed with other, illicit things) or ability to better focus police and state resources is just a bonus.
On #3 — that’s a separate question than if it should be legal, and doesn’t have to be answered immediately. As the law would be debated, we could just go with 18, like cigarettes, to start off, or start at 21, or something in between… and just change things as needed.
As for worrying about pot becoming more accessible… there’s so much of it out there already that I doubt it will make much of a difference, and personally, I don’t think it matters. There are plenty of worse things than some 17 who’s already probably smoking pot, smoking some more pot. If you’re really worried about that, though, don’t let it be sold at the gas station, make it be sold at cannabis stores — stores that can be more strictly regulated. Better that some 18 year old is buying it there than from a shady drug dealer, and all the implications that prevails (from increased gang violence, to the ongoing not-much-talked-about “drug war” in Mexico, to putting kids at danger from getting involved with dealers — dealers who would have access to other, far more dangerous things, as well).
On your point #4, that’s also a question that can be determined once (or more likely, as) the decision to legalize pot is made. It really has no importance to whether or not pot should be legalized, only on what to do after the decision is made to legalize it.
Well, this is one of those comments I *really* wish I read out loud to myself before pushing “publish.” For some reason, even though we’re supposed to be able to edit comments on this new platform, it never lets me do it. Oh, well.
Let’s pretend I could edit the above to include “year old” after 17 — so, 17 year old — on my 7th paragraph, and let’s pretend I wrote “entails” instead of “prevails” in the fourth sentence (I think) of the second to last paragraph, just before I wrote in parenthesis.
There’s other mistakes in there, as well, but those were the important and/or embarrassing ones :p
Eventually, but it is not here yet.
On 1: Rye, use your head. It’s unfiltered smoke. Have you even looked for a study, or did you just bang out “I’ve never seen one” without looking? I ask because I searched on “marijuana risk lung cancer” and found oodles of hits for studies, some showing “yes” some “no” and some “maybe” results. So if you do the search, you’ll have to revise your (1) immediately. Alternatively, I’ll claim that marijuana causes some people to jerk their knees, and you’ll be my evidence 🙂
2. Tomatoes aren’t taxed. Therefore, the full grocery store price is the cost of labor, materials, transportation, and profit margin. If you put a value on your time at minimum wage [and maybe on your land, but not even that], it’s almost impossible to grow tomatoes at total prices below the grocery store – -after all, there are economies of scale and of climate that you’re not capturing. To bring that price down, you’ve got to grow so many tomatoes that you’re no longer growing them for personal use…
The amount of the retail price which is captured as tax is where the incentive to “grow your own” comes in to play. If the tax is high, folks can arbitrage by paying more to grow it but paying $0 on the tax.
I’m not opposed to people growing their own (fill in the blank) instead of buying it at the grocer or the farmers market. My question is simply this: the “legalize it and tax it” phrase gets thrown around all the time, but has anybody tried to figure out how much tax revenue we’re really talking about here? How high can you add the tax before it’s substantially eroded by “grow your own?”
3. This is not a small matter, and just waving your hands doesn’t resolve the issue. Legalizing pot will make it more prevalent and available, which means it will be easier for high school kids to obtain. In that respect, there’s a huge difference between 18 and 21.
When I was a teenager, eons ago in the prehistoric sixties, none of us drank alcohol because we preferred the buzz we got from weed, weed was easier to get, none of us got hurt, and weed was much cheaper. Besides, our tunes sounded better with weed than alcohol.
It was Ronald Reagan who, looking for cheap publicity to fulfill campaign foolishness about drugs, started busting pot dealers. They were an easy and photogenic mark — a few kilos of MaryJane looks like an ENORMOUS quantity of pot on the 15 second evening news shot and the kids moving it weren’t likely to be armed and dangerous. The effect was to drive the street price of marijuana up to be competitive with cocaine, so that suburban teenagers were suddenly doing business with full-service gang/mafia dealers rather than buddies coming home on leave.
During the six years (1964-1970) I was in secondary schools in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, none of my classmates was killed or injured in an alcohol-related car crash. That’s in two high schools with about 2,000 kids spread across three grades each. How many Massachusetts teens can make that claim today?
Our teenagers who want to put on a buzz will do so. I’m making the rash statement that they are safer doing so with weed than with alcohol. That’s my conclusion, based on the anecdotal evidence of myself and my five children (my youngest is now 15).
I actually think that if we really want to protect ourselves and our teenagers, we would lower the drinking (and pot-smoking) age to 16 and raise the driving age to 18 or 21 — together with imposing draconian and rigidly enforced DUI regulations on every driver.
Drunk driving by teenagers is already a far larger problem than pot smoking is ever going to be.
We learned the hard way that attempting to make alcohol illegal only enriched organized crime.
It seems to me that however we choose to rationalize our laws, it is insane to make marijuana illegal while alcohol and tobacco are allowed and, yes, encouraged. Whatever harm comes from consuming marijuana is, in my view, far less profound than the known consequences of alcohol and tobacco. I have never, in my entire life, known of even one situation where somebody tokes up and then chooses to see how fast they can drive their car. I have quit smoking marijuana and quit smoking cigarettes. I can tell you, from my first-hand knowledge, that a nicotine addiction is far far more intense than any marijuana habit.
Meanwhile, our society is paying a horrible price to sustain these absurd marijuana laws. The overwhelming majority of the claimed costs of the “marijuana problem” are, in fact, the result of its illegality.
During the eighties, proponents of marijuana legalization pointed out that the value of the California marijuana cash crop ranked California alone at something like thirteenth largest GDP in the world.
Marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and — yes — taxed.
My only opposition to decriminalization is that it didn’t go far enough to legalization. On the one hand we are saving a ton of money from revenue going out wasted on incarceration and enforcement, but we are still losing out on bringing revenue in. The fines are completely unenforceable, as opposed to taxes and regulations which would generate revenue.
As for the lazy card, really weak argument. I was just as likely as my pot-smoking roommate to waste an entire weekend on our couch eating deep dish pizza and watching the Simpsons.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16393904/How-Bad-Are-Illegal-Drugs-Lancet-Study
The findings can be summarized in this chart:
As you can see legality of drugs doesn’t have much rational basis.
That study doesn’t seem to take into account the liklihod of non-direct-medical harm in the following sense: drunk driving, house burned down from falling asleep cigarette in mouth, jumping off of a building while on LSD.
In none of the three cases did the drug damage the body — it was the actions of the user (likely) related to the drug use.
I’m not arguing for or against moving any particular drug up or down the chart because of that, but my bet is that these indirect deaths are far more common with PCP or alcohol than with tobacco, for example.
“Careless disposal of smoking materials” is the cause of a significant number of residential fires and fire deaths. I think you’re certainly correct that alcohol is responsible for a significant number of indirect deaths — this would move it even more right-ward on the chart.
In any case, it seems to me that the chart implies that “Cannabis” is inappropriately illegal, given the legal status of tobacco and alcohol. I’m not totally sure I buy the positioning of “Cannabis” in the chart, I suppose I’ll have to actually read the Lancet study. 🙂
By decriminalizing pot in Massachusetts but not legalizing the sale & distribution, a large demand is created, that only criminals can satisfy.
I’ve read nothing that indicates whether pot use has risen or fallen since we’ve decriminalized it. Furthermore, the costs of putting people in actual prison, both to the system and to personal lives, is far greater than any increase in consumption I could envision.
It’s also important to note that while pot was decriminalized for personal use, it was not decriminalized in terms of dealing. If dealers get caught with large quantities of pot, or other drugs, they can still be arrested.
and is well worth investigating further. The law of supply and demand would suggest that removing some barriers to demand will increase incentives for suppliers. Perhaps it is not a big enough difference to matter, but it could.
However, we should legalize/decriminalize on an ad hoc basis. I do have some concerns about marijuana being a gateway drug and ultimately voted against the ballot measure last time because I realized penalties were already reasonable. The more harmful stuff should still be banned. As for any “war on drugs” I don’t see the point in locking up people who really need treatment, but I still want to throw the book at the cartels, drug runners, and those who push them on kids.
Here’s a report from one university study, and here’s report from another study congress itself initiated.
At the end of the day, drug use correlates with availability. If your house has a lot of drinkers, but no smokers, chances are your kids are going to try your liquor — or vice versa. If you’re in a neighborhood where there’s tons of pot for sale, or your friends smoke lots of pot, there’s going to be an increased likelihood of that person smoking pot. If someone’s in an environment where there’s lots of hard drugs being used, then that’s what’s going to happen. However, the notion/belief that cigarettes leads to pot, which leads to other bad things, has absolutely no basis in fact and has been refuted in mainstream studies. Most people who smoke pot don’t go off and smoke things that are a lot worse than pot.
One further comment on this point:
We’ve been “throwing the book at them” for decades, but they keep getting more powerful and more dangerous, not less. What ends up happening is poor people with little opportunity available to them get “recruited” into the cartels to go sell the drugs, etc., and a great many of them eventually get arrested. But there’s always more poor people to recruit from, so to the cartels, that doesn’t really matter. The only way to truly hurt them is to take away their business, pot being their #1 seller. The ONLY way we can put a real dent into their business, and have a chance at really reducing the amount of violence and destruction they’re able to cause, is by taking away this #1 best seller from them. And then, once we do that, we can focus all our attentions on a significantly smaller cartel peddling the truly and horrifically dangerous stuff, like heroin.
is a logical fallacy called post hoc propter hoc, i.e. because hard drug users started with marijuana and ended up on crack, heroin, or crystal meth, one caused the other. The same argument could be applied to cigarettes and liquor. The implication is that if we make marijuana inaccessible, then people won’t use harder drugs.
It would be almost impossible to prove empirically that marijuana use causes hard drug use. It is, however, relatively easy to prove the opposite:
Reluctantly, I support legalization. Mainly to keep people I know out of jail.
Being a drug prude. Venture into prigginess or Puritanism and it’d be a different story.
There are a lot of pro-choice abortion prudes out there.
The only drug I use is caffeine (and I do mean “use”). Otherwise, I don’t really like altering my state of consciousness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rFaAeNR-kI
Readings from the US Constitution:
Amendment 4:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment 14, Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Searching people for substances that they want to put in their own body is totally UNREASONABLE.
If we had the right judges, not only would there be no drug prohibition, but all drug convicts in prison would be freed and their records cleansed.
When they prohibited alchohol, they amended the US Constitution to do it.
Alchohol prohibition was supported by self-righteous busy-bodies, tin-pot tyrants, and KU KLUX KLAN SCUM.
These filthy elements and their evil laws were good… for Al Capone.
Today, innocent people rot in prison here in the US because of drug charges, and people are getting murdered in Mexico because the drug gangs are fighting.
When’s the last time you heard of liquor store owners shooting each other in the street? EXACTLY.
Although, with the drug war, instead of amending the Constitution, they are construing its liberties much too narrowly.
Just as Prohibition was supported by KKK bigots, a lot of drug warriors hate major minorities.