Tax and Regulate, Then Pay the Price

I hardly think that legalizing pot has anything to do with profiting off of people's addiction. Almost half of the United States has tried pot at least at one point during their lives, and out of all those people I guarantee that less than 1% of them are actually addicted physically to cannabis.

Even though pot is illegal, it's still very much accessible for anyone who wants to acquire it. It is a plant after all. So someone's already profiting from a person's "addiction"... criminals.

So the cost of drug use was $180 billion in 2002? Was that for ALL drugs? How much of that was for cannabis specifically? This figure is being lumped together with all kinds of different hard and/or soft drugs (the names of which are not listed here), when the cost of cannabis use alone is a small, or even negligible figure.

The government spends about $10-40 billion every year on the Drug War, and drug use is still rampant everywhere in the US. To me, and most sensible human beings, that is an unacceptable use of taxpayer money.

THE sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana, and to history as hashish. It is a narcotic used in the form of cigarettes, comparatively new to the United States and as dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake. How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries, and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can be only conjectured. The sweeping march of its addiction has been so insidious that, in numerous communities, it thrives almost unmolested, largely because of official ignorance of its effects. Here indeed is the unknown quantity among narcotics. No one can predict its effect. No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer. That youth has been selected by the peddlers of this poison as an especially fertile field makes it a problem of serious concern to every man and woman in America.
 
THERE was the young girl, for instance, who leaped to her death. Her story is typical. Some time before, this girl, like others of her age who attend our high schools, had heard the whispering of a secret which has gone the rounds of American youth. It promised a new thrill, the smoking of a type of cigarette which contained a “real kick.” According to the whispers, this cigarette could accomplish wonderful reactions and with no harmful aftereffects. So the adventurous girl and a group of her friends gathered in an apartment, thrilled with the idea of doing “something different” in which there was “no harm.”Then a friend produced a few cigarettes of the loosely rolled “homemade” type. They were passed from one to another of the young people, each taking a few puffs. The results were weird. Some of the party went into paroxysms of laughter; every remark, no matter how silly, seemed excruciatingly funny. Others of mediocre musical ability became almost expert; the piano dinned constantly. Still others found themselves discussing weighty problems of youth with remarkable clarity. As one youngster expressed it, he “could see through stone walls.” The girl danced without fatigue, and the night of unexplainable exhilaration seemed to stretch out as though it were a year long. Time, conscience, or consequences became too trivial for consideration. Other parties followed, in which inhibitions vanished, conventional barriers departed, all at the command of this strange cigarette with its ropy, resinous odor. Finally there came a gathering at a time when the girl was behind in her studies and greatly worried. With every puff of the smoke the feeling of despondency lessened. Everything was going to be all right — at last. The girl was “floating” now, a term given to marijuana intoxication. Suddenly, in the midst of laughter and dancing she thought of her school problems. Instantly they were solved. Without hesitancy she walked to a window and leaped to her death.
 
Thus can marijuana “solve” one’s difficulties. The cigarettes may have been sold by a hot tamale vendor or by a street peddler, or in a dance hall or over a lunch counter, or even from sources much nearer to the customer. The police of a Midwestern city recently accused a school janitor of having conspired with four other men, not only to peddle cigarettes to children, but even to furnish apartments where smoking parties might be held. A Chicago mother, watching her daughter die as an indirect result of marijuana addiction, told officers that at least fifty of the girl’s young friends were slaves to the narcotic. This means fifty unpredictables. They may cease its use; that is not so difficult as with some narcotics. They may continue addiction until they deteriorate mentally and become insane. Or they may turn to violent forms of crime, to suicide or to murder. Marijuana gives few warnings of what it intends to do to the human brain.

These are all rather weak arguments for continuing what has been such an obvious public policy failure. You cite the risks of tobacco and alcohol use as reasons for continued cannabis prohibition (for reasons unknown, since cannabis does not carry the same risks as tobacco and alcohol), yet these risks are obviously not enough for you to call for alcohol or tobacco prohibition. Why is that? It makes no sense.

How has prohibition made anyone safer? It hasn't curved demand. It is unable to seriously effect supply. It leaves the market unregulated, thus a more potentially dangerous product for the consumer. It has left the market open to abuse by those of all ages. And it benefits criminal elements that have only become more wealthy and dangerous since the inception of this failed war on drugs. Your way and your weak excuses have had 40 years to work; and the problem has only gotten worse. We simply refuse to back a policy that has overseen 4 decades of decline. Prohibition has been completely ineffective on every level of the drug problem. It was time for a new direction 20 years ago. Regulations may not be perfect, but realistically we can't do any worse than what we are doing right now.

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/california-legalize-po...

Dear Calvina and DFAF, This is the United States of America. We are a country of free people, with the right to choose. Folks who like Cannabis already use it, folks who don't like it, don't use it. That is NOT going to change. The difference is that no one will go to prison for it. "By regulating and taxing marijuana, California would have to agree that it’s acceptable for their state to profit from a person’s addiction." What an inane, incorrect and downright insulting comment to make about Californians. Profiting from a person's addiction? Seriously? What is wrong with you people? Do you understand the difference between use and abuse? We (sensible adults) bring this up on your website all the time. Its very simple. I smoked pot last week almost every evening to relax. I got on a plane and headed out of town to visit my family. I had no Cannabis for the entire week I was away. What happened? Nothing! I was fine! I didn't crave it! I didn't have headaches! Funny the CNBC correspondent mentions coffee. I'm sure you can appreciate how painful caffeine withdrawal symptoms are. The AMA and an independent series of clinical studies recently published, as well as a NIDA report all point to the very mild and transient addictive properties of cannabis. Look, if you want to get in a citation war, why don't you make a forum specifically for evidence-based discussion. I know for a fact you will lose horribly. I know I'm not posting links here, but mainly because I've posted them before and asked you  to comment but they never have. The fact is you do not understand science or else they deliberately ignore it. Please, post some links or citations that prove how cannabis is addicting and I will come back with evidence to the contrary!

Binging on cheesecake and Ding Dongs can make you chunky - and turn you into a junkie.

A new study found that delicious, fatty foods are as addictive as cocaine and heroin.

Florida scientists looking into the causes of obesity let lab rats gorge round-the-clock on cake frosting and sweet treats, as well as bacon and sausage, and discovered that it triggered addiction-like responses in their brains.

To maintain their food-induced highs, the rats consumed more and more fatty treats - and got obese in the process.

Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researcher Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute said he suspects the same chemical changes that happen to rats when they devour unhealthy foods might also be happening in humans.

"People know intuitively that there's more to [overeating] than just will power," he says. "There's a system in the brain that's been turned on or overactivated, and that's driving it at some subconscious level."

"Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating," he wrote.

And like heroin addicts hungry for the needle, food-addicted rats are not deterred by the threat of excruciating pain, the researchers found.

When they zapped the rats' feet with electric shocks, they only paused from their gnawing.

"Their attention was solely focused on consuming food," Kenny said.

In previous studies, rats hooked on heroin or cocaine exhibited similar brain changes - and also didn't appear to care about the consequences.

The findings of the Scripps scientist came as no surprise to Dr.Gene-Jack Wang at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"We make our food very similar to cocaine now," he told Health.com. "We purify our food. Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."

Two-thirds of American adults and one-third of children are believed to be obese or overweight, causing a health care plague that costs the country an estimated $150 billion each year, the feds estimate

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2010/03/29/2010-03-29_fatty_foods_m...

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2010/03/29/2010-03-29_fatty_foods_m...

"Clearly, smoking marijuana is as dangerous to your health as smoking tobacco."

By what warped logic do you come to this conclusion? Multiple studies have concluded cannabis use does not increase the risk of developing cancer. Cannabis use doesn't seriously effect mortality at all. The same can't be said for alcohol and tobacco. If the only answer to the risks of cannabis use is criminalization; why are you not promoting that same remedy for the well known risks of alcohol and tobacco use?

You use numbers from tobacco, alcohol, even all drugs lumped together. This is because you know the numbers associated with cannabis use alone are very unconvincing for your side. We aren't talking about tobacco or alcohol. We aren't talking about "drugs". We're talking about marijuana. It's time to learn the distinction. You are losing this battle because people are recognizing they have been fed a lot of dishonesty over the past four decades, and they are beginning to look deeper and see the whole picture of how prohibition has only made the issue of drugs worse. If you can't persuade people without using dishonesty the right thing to do would be to give it up.