I’m sure this board has met its quota for cannabis banter, but a more focused question is:
Why don’t you think marijuana will be legalized or at least decriminalized? What do you think the main inhibitor is for legalization? Is it the posed health risk, marijuana’s negative connotation (immigrants, hippies, blacks), or the government’s stubbornness to admit another substance?
IMO opinion I think it’s because it would be more difficult to regulate than alcohol or tobacco; therefore, they can’t tax it as easily as they can other substances.
There is nothing about Marijuana that makes it inherently more difficult to regulate. It’s a plant. You grow it, harvest it, package it, sell it.
What makes it difficult is that it hasn’t been a huge US industry for centuries, and in that time, people have become accustomed to getting it somewhere other than the corner convenience store.
My point is that anyone can grow marijuana and sell it/use it. Why would they buy it overpriced from the government when they can grow it themself? Alcohol, if not properly prepared, can kill you or make you blind. From what I have heard, homegrown tobacco sucks so people wouldn’t grow it themselves. That’s why it’s easier to regulate alcohol and tobacco.
The main inhibitor is political opinion. If candidates could win elections by promising to legalize pot, they’d do it, but instead they’re branded “soft on crime”.
I think it’s a typical result of people wanting to solve symptoms, not the root causes of those problems. They see drugs linked to crime, addiction, overdose, and perhaps even terrorism, they want an easy quick fix for those problems, and so they go after the drugs. They’re unwilling to admit that the attitude this country has had toward drugs has been wrong all along, or that what seems like an obvious solution only makes things worse.
They’re also unwilling to commit to long-term policies that would prevent the problems they associate with drugs, because those policies don’t have obvious results or immediate payoffs. Headlines like “100 Drug Dealers Arrested This Month” get your attention and make you think the War On Drugs is making progress. “100 Drug Users Obtain Cheap, Legal Drugs Without Robbing Anyone” doesn’t. Neither does “Improved Education and State-Run Stores Eliminate Need for Drug Dealers”.
I don’t think the difficulty of regulation has anything to do with it. Most people don’t brew their own beer or distill their own liquor; why would they grow their own pot? They want to buy a sack and get high now, not buy a carload of tools and dirt and get high in two months.
“Overpriced” is relative. The state could charge $20 for a pack of joints (around four times as much as tobacco), and that’d still be 90% cheaper than buying pot on the black market today. Folks might be able to save a few bucks by growing it themselves, but they’d be giving up convenience and predictable quality.
It will not be legalized anytime in the near future simply because The United States has become increasingly conservative in its political nature. We’re living in the 21st century but religion currently has a strong position in our society (Thanks, W). Conservative leaders are currently leading our nation and pot doesn’t fit in well with their 1950s style fear tactics and ideals. This is on many topics including but not limited to gay marriage (for the first time in history a Constitutional ammendment is in the works that would hold back rights from a minority rather than giving them rights) and mass media content (that whole second and a half of Jackson’s tit resulted in a massive federal investigation and sweeping changes in media content laws, as well as the scarring of an entire generation of children watching that VIOLENT game :dubious:).
Since 9/11/01 American society has become afraid of anything “unamerican” in nature and marijuana sale was portrayed as being a leading cause of terrorism.It will not be legalized anytime in the near future simply because The United States has become increasingly conservative. We’re living in the 21st century but religion currently has a strong position in our society (Thanks, W). Anything slightly deviant in our society is barred (that second and a half of nudity scarred an entire generation of kids watching a violent game). Pot doesn’t fit in with the “American as apple pie” 1950s ideal and since 9/11/01 American society has become afraid of anything “unamerican” in nature (mildly ironic considering the Declaration of Independence is written on Dutch hemp paper) and as we all know from those commercials after 9/11… Marijuana is a big fund raiser for those terrorists :dubious:.
Welcome to 1954.
Sigh
When moving sentences around I should cut, not copy.
In the second paragraph “We’re living in the 21st century but religion currently has a strong position in our society (Thanks, W). Anything slightly deviant in our society is barred (that second and a half of nudity scarred an entire generation of kids watching a violent game).” shouldn’t be there.
My guess is that the tobacco and lumber industry continually works towards keeping pot illegal. Although only just recently tobacco companies are starting to recognize the potential cash cow of selling marijuana legally, it still carries a strong public perception of somehow being “wrong” to use. The influx of anti-drug commercials and stereotyping of drug users only contributes to this school of thought.
I’m from Canada so we’ve been seeing a lot of political debate over the legalization / decriminilization of marijuana, and I honestly think that in my lifetime it will be made legal. Due to a strong anti-tobacco sentiment shared in our society nowadays, people are beginning to explore alternative solutions.
Sadly, I don’t see the United States initiating a pro-legalization stance on Marijuana anytime soon. Thankfully I dont live there 
The 'War On Drugs" in a massive money maker for the CIA, and whoose profits are used to fund illegal or black operations that are performed without congressional oversight. Since Iran/Contra, it has been established that there is lots of money to be made off drugs, and the CIA is smart enough to take advantage of it. The Taliban banned opium cultivation is Afghanistan, now it’s back in full force. Who do you think is moving the drugs and making a profit from it?
Akrako1, 20 years ago the CIA briefly formed an unholy alliance with cocaine smugglers to help fund the Contras. Most marijuana smoked in the US is grown in the US by the pot equivalent of moonshiners. Nothing to do with the CIA.
Social reason: It’s political suicide. The government has been spending so much time telling everyone that Drugs Are Bad, so any effort by a politician to turn around and say marijuana is acceptable would be fodder for his opponents.
Financial reason: It’s competition for the tobacco industry. Why bring in more players if you don’t have to?
The lumber industry?
Hemp fiber can be used to make paper, which would make inroads into the lumber industry to some extent.
And don’t forget about the cotton industry. They could lose a significant chunk of their market, as well.
It is glaringly obvious to me that the government will never legalize weed because:
(1) You can’t clone a pot leaf so that it has a pharmaceutical label on it. Safe, cheap, effective drugs like weed don’t make money. Clinically proven as dangerous, expensive as sin, do the opposite of what they tell you it does drugs like ritalin do.
(2) They don’t have enough reasons to arrest people who don’t agree with them. Thus, breaking a consensual law like smoking a joint or having BDSM sex, while “hurting” noone but yourself, is nevertheless grounds to throw the book at you, particularly if you’re one of those embarrassing colors that the US would rather keep out of sight in jail.
(3) The “War on Drugs” is just too profitable. Think of the paychecks and fines that the US would be shorted. Poor government would dry up.
For exactly these reasons, I predict that the future shall see MORE, not fewer, substances be criminalized, along with any other activity that doesn’t fit in lockstep with the emerging ChristiaNazi theocracy.
Hemp will produce about 2-4 times the pulp over wood from the same acreage with the same season. Renewable yearly, and fairly soft on soil depletion.
The use of hemp fibre in paper and laminate manufacturing would put a HUGE dent in lumger sales, and you don’t have to own a thousand (or lease a million) acres to make it worth harvesting. It grows just about anywhere, and produces stronger per-fibre products than pulpwood and cotton.
It just makes more sense to use hemp for hundreds of industrial products, but again, anyone can grow it, so it poses a threat for large scale fibre production industries.
It was made illegal largely through lobbying by the lumber barons in the early twentieth century, through ridiculous films like Reefer Madness.
Don’t even get me started on the medicinal threat to many synthetic drug manufactureres out there…
…or the ridiculous comparisons between cannabis and alcohol. Clinically, alcohol is vastly more damaging to motor skills, thought process, organ damage, risk of accidental death, whereas occasional or minimal pot use is roughly equivalent to occasional or minimal tobacco use.
You can’t make booze as easily as you can make pot, however, so booze remains a huge tax revenue whereas pot could never be institutionalized and taxed in the same way IMHO. I suspect the root cause of reluctance to face the medical and social facts are financial.
lumber*. manufacturer*, etc.
I wouldn’t know concerning the US, but I’m pretty certain that here, marijuana is still forbidden because it has bad press, and a government would lost more votes than it would gain by legalizing it, especially since people who have an issue with majijuana (your average middle-age guy with some children he’s worried about) are more likely to vote than people who consume it (your average student who’s possibly not even registered to vote) . I would suspect that the same issue plays a significant part in the US too (though there are certainly politicians in both countries genuinely convinced that it should stay forbidden).
Now, the situation is quite different here, since though in theory, the sentences for being in possession of marijuana could be heavy , in practice, you don’t risk much as long as you aren"t trafficking it (typically the stuff will be confiscated and you’ll be told you’re a bad boy). Nevertheless, France is harsher on drugs than most other european countries.
I’m not convinced by this argument. Tobacco companies could sell pot too. It would be a bussiness very similar to the one they’re already running (growing the stuff, packaging it, etc…), so they could easily make money with marijuana.
Homegrow tobacco sucks except when it’s your job to grow it. Homegrown pot sucks too when it’s not your job to grow it. It’s generally recognized that there’ s an enormous difference in quality between the stuff which is cultivated by professionals carefully selecting the seeds, knowing how to take care of the plants, etc…in Netherlands, and whatever you’ll be trying to grow yourself.
Besides, if they could legaly buy weed, most people would do so, even if the quality wasn’t better, just to avoid the hassle of having to grow it. You can grow vegetables as good or better than the vegetables you buy at the supermarket, but very few people will do so (and at least, with tomatoes, you can it them immediatly when they’re ripe, while you have to dry your tobbaco leaves, cut them, etc…which is going to be extremely time-consuming for a product with a very low market value)