Actually, brewing beer and making your own wine rather easy now. I can make 6 gallons of wine with under $50 in equipment, 2-3 hrs of labor and about 2 weeks start to finish.
People happily pay for convenience and more so for convenience + standard quality. Just look in the supermarket. Carrots already peeled and cut into handy sizes. Melons and strawberries washed and cut up. Cookie dough frozen into cookie sized balls, just needing baking.
Probably lots of people would grow their own at first, but eventually, many of them would decide that it was worth the tax to be able to drive to the store and buy their weed, already processed for them.
I magine that the same kinds of public restrictions on cigarette smoking could still apply (or be amended to apply) to pot smoking. I also don’t think the numbers of people doing it in public would ever be anywhere near as ubiquitous as for cigarettes.
Unless the taxes on pot were very very high I don’t think that many people would grow their own as a way of avoiding taxes. Look at the home brew market. It is relatively easy to make really good beer with very little investment. The home brewers don’t make any significant dent in the amount of purchased beer.
Ever seen a full blown alcoholic? Not just a slacker, but a shell of a human…You are less likely to see this with a pot smoker. I’m involved with people who are alcoholics, and with people who smoke pot, I’ll tell you the latter is much easier to live with. I’ve seen alcohol destroy lives. I’ve never seen a pot smoker destroy much of anything, except maybe a batch of warm cookies. I’m not trying to be funny, the truth of the matter is alcohol and pot can cause serious health risks…but in my humble opinion pot causes much less physical harm, and mental termoil over the long haul.
Absolutely - and I’d say the same thing, for example, if you were asking the same question about their property taxes. We all derive tremendous benefits from having a literate, educated population - educated citizens are less vulnerable to demagoguery (though not immune to it), better able to find stable jobs, likelier to know how to keep themselves healthy, the list goes on and on and on. This isn’t to say that education is a magic bullet for society’s ills, but the lack of it tends to have very, very unpleasant consequences for a democratic state. (There are exceptions, of course - Benin’s literacy rate hovers around 50%, but they’ve got a solid multi-party democracy running.)
My point is that since we all live in society, we need that society to keep running smoothly. That means we need schools, and schools need money. Since not everyone can afford private school, and it is imperative that everybody (or nearly so) does go to school, that means we need to pay taxes to foot the bill.
The beauty of legalization would be that you wouldn’t need UV lamps, you could just grow outdoors.
Maybe there would be lots of people trusting large corporations with their weed and buying packs of 20 joints from Marlboro or whatever, but I wouldn’t be one of them. If I couldn’t grow my own, or didn’t want to wait, I’d buy locally.
Phlosphr is right - there are plenty of people who are lazy and smoke too much pot, but I know just as many who aren’t. I know a whole generation of early-20s, motivated, highly-driven programmers and engineering students who also smoke their weight in pot each day. I firmly believe that if you’re already a responsible person, pot isn’t going to make you fail.
I knew that particular example would come back to bite me in the ass. Just imagine I said something else. A football stadium, for instance. I can’t stand paying for those damn things because I don’t like sports.
If marijuana were legalized, crime would be substantially reduced.
If both marijuana and cocaine were legalized, crime would be non-existant.
Where I live, the illicit drugs mostly dealt here is weed and crack with a smattering of MDMA, cocaine, and heroin, but the latter three are more of a suburban thing than the media would like you to believe. Drugs are the engine that drives gang violence and urban decay. If marijuana was legal and crack was freely available, gangs would be superfluous. The prison population would fall, easing the burden on the State to fund more important things like investing in businesses and education.
Legalise them all. We spend billions on interdiction and jailing. The problem has not gone away, only the money. There are some laws that cause more damage than good.
Same thing as a bootlegger. Liquor is legal, personal distilleries are not. I’m in the “tax it, but not heavily” crowd. There has to be some governmental control. Tax it just enough to make smuggling unprofitable.
But you can make your own beer & wine. I’d say that model is closer to pot than the “moonshine” model. Which is more like the “meth lab” model.
I grow herbs well & would love to try my luck with the herb. I’d be glad to buy duly-taxed “boutique” pot for special occasions. Or a bit of el cheapo, for occasional convenience.
Houston has serious anti-smoke laws. Restaurants are fully smoke-free & bars are next. Nearly all work places are smoke-free.
I’d bet there might be heavier restrictions against pot smokers. What about the liddle kiddies wandering around on the restaurant patio? (Yeah, the ciggie smoke is so good for them.) And how many jobs will allow pot-smoking breaks? (The same ones that already do, in fact.)
I hate tobacco smoke & would endeavor to protect the tender-lunged from my own vices. And I’d like to avoid these questions:
(1) “Can I have a hit?” (From a creep you don’t know or wish you didn’t know.)
very interesting…there was virtually no debate on the merits of legalization. lots of input about taxation, a few comments suggsting some of you would be more ‘affected’ (ahem) by leagalization or at least decriminalization, but no real arguments for our current laws. how is it possible that here in the year 2007 when most educated citizens know fully well how astutely wrong the demonization of marijuana was, ie ‘reefer madness’, and how less harmful the substance is than alcohol—yet the average citizen when asked thinks pot wil not be legalized in the near future.
it seems like there are two black and white sides to this issue, no grey at all.
A large part of that is a result of where you chose to post the discussion. The SDMB has very noticable libertarian leanings. In addition, most of the members who are opposed have likely stated their case in prior threads on the same subject. (I haven’t checked to be sure, but that would be my suspicion.)
That’s an assumption, not a fact. I’m more inclined to think they would start with what it costs now and tax it from there. Then every year there would be a measure on the ballot to raise the taxes on the evil, lazy, society-burdening weed-fiends. And every year it would pass because the Joe Pothead does not vote.
That would depend on the way the law ended up being worded.
I’m sure that some people would take up growing their own pot, but the vast majority wouldn’t bother. Even heavily taxed, it would be much cheaper than current prices, and you’d have to smoke a whole lot of weed to spend enough money that it would be a major cost-saving measure to grow your own.