What the hell are you people smoking? This is obviously a Great Debates thread.
Reefer is illegal because anybody can grow it at home. If it were legalized, then current legitimate stoner businesses like tobacco and alcohol would suffer financially because people wouldn’t buy booze or tobacco because they could grow more than enough for their own purposes.
For reference, I have never used it and never will because it is disgusting. But by comparison to alcohol or tobacco the only harm it causes is to profits.
OK, plural of anecdote and all that, but I’m neither a medical person nor a hard partier and I can think of at least one marijuana-related ER visit (not my own) off the top of my head. And this site lists 242,000 + such visits in 2005: http://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/advisories/0703135521.aspx I’m not denying the much higher numbers of visits related to alcohol (over 7 million annually, see 10 Tips for Cutting Back on Drinking) but alcohol is more widely used and there would be an understandable tendency not to mention or record illegal use of marijuana. How sure were you that all those drunks were just drunk?
And why do so many of you have so little faith in capitalism’s ability to make money off of marijuana? I bet the pharma and tobacco companies have case studies in the vault on how to make money from legalization, should it occur.
The main reason why pot is illegal and other drugs are not is purely cultural.
Almost every culture has its drugs which are verboten and those which are acceptable or normal, having in some cases only tangental relationship to harms. Though this changes over time - look at the worsening position of tobacco.
“Pot” entered the North American lexicon as a drug of the underclass and, later, the hippie or social rebel. Thus, its use was always somewhat frowned upon, though not actually illegal until the 20th century.
I trust you feel the same about alcohol?
Pretty much anybody can grow tobacco at home, and home brewing is pretty popular. I think the reason is more just that once something is illegal, it’s hard to legalize.
Prohibition?
I know comparing other countries is often pointless BUT, look at The Netherlands.
It’s semi-legal there, and the Dutch have the lowest amount of “regular pot users” in all of Europe.
Why can’t the states adopt, say, a law in which buying/selling pot is illegal, but smoking at home is legal?
Again, the Dutch law states that soft drug use is “illegal, but not punishable”, hence the development of coffee shops.
Alaska has a state law that allows pot smoking in your own house. You are even allowed to grow some trees in your own home. No big complaints about pot has come out of Alaska…
The Interstate Commerce Clause. See Gonzales v Raich. Prior, see Wickard v Fliburn (wheat grown for personal consumption can still be regulated by the Federal government under the Commerce Clause) See, also US v. Lopez:
“Congress is empowered to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though the threat may come only from intrastate activities”
But I’m sure you knew that.
You got a cite that supports that statement, or are you just playing into the “only the coasts are civilized” garbage that gets thrown around so much?
The two theories I’ve seen about why it was made illegal were:
[ol]
[li] With the end of Prohibition, a federal bureaucracy needed a new illegal thing to keep working[/li][li]Williams Hearst had huge timber holdings, and needed to eliminate hemp, a competitive source of paper. [/li][/ol]
I don’t drink or use any drugs - or drive. But I know I’d rather ride in a car driven by someone high on pot than a drunk.
Really? I didn’t notice that when I was in college. In fact consumption of them seemed to be linked.
They were growing up there long before the medical marijuana initiative passed. They’d be growing if it got repealed.
In fact I mentioned fields full of it around here, connected to the Mexican Mafia. And every so often enforcement of the rules need to be tightened - I believe I recall a story about Jerry Brown (now our AG) talking about that. Given the incentives to cheat when something legal in a limited circumstance is illegal and desired more broadly, it seems to be going very well.
I know a lot of people who do home brewing. For the most part, yuck. I’ve grown tobacco for science projects, and you couldn’t keep a serious smoker content with a 100 square foot plot, and I suspect, yuck. Nicotine addicts smoke quite a bit. As for marijuana, a 100 square foot plot would keep any doper stoned enough not to care whether it was any good.
Well, this here is a government of the People so the root question is, Why haven’t we, via our elected lawmakers, legalized marijuana?
It is obvious to me and many others that the stupid stupid War on Drugs is Stupid.
But a politician who comes out in favor of making currently illegal drugs legal will lose more votes than are gained by that position.
Legalizing drugs–even marijuana–is not high on the list of Reasons the Public Will Vote for that Guy Above All Else, partly because most folks aren’t out there using them. Plus things like the guy who runs on a Legalize Marijuana platform is going to be suspected to be a pothead, and there is a difference between allowing potheads to buzz up at home and allowing them to pilot the ship of state.
That means the issue has no traction. The best pot users have to look forward to is a slow diminution in the aggressiveness with which anti-marijuana laws are prosecuted.
The reason that tobacco is falling on hard times is incontrovertible evidence that it is bad for the smoker’s health, plus it’s bad for the health of everyone around the smoker. Otherwise there is no cultural shift in terms of preference; AFAIK nobody in the last 40 years has made a mainstream argument against tobacco on the grounds that it’s immoral because it’s a drug, or that it’s bad because it’s addictive. It’s all about lung cancer.
I think the biggest obstacle to marijuana legalization is the apathy of the stoner community. If every pot smoker donated even 1% of the money they spent on weed toward marijuana legalization advocacy groups, it could easily be legalized.
Think about it. In California alone, the value of marijuana plants seized by the authorities is 6.7 Billion. cite. Imagine how many plants go undetected!
Even going by an extremely conservative estimate of 10 billion a year for the national marijuana market, 1% of that is 100 million. You could run a nationwide ad campaign with the same exposure as the Presidential Candidates with that kind of money!
I understand your points and they are true in many ways. However, there are compelling reasons to re-think this issue:
20 million Americans smoke marijuna. Many more have tried at least once.
Not to mention the amount of money that is wasted by putting people in jail for marijuna offenses.
We can also talk about constitutional rights, but let’s not.
Like you say, the main “problem” here is that it is not an issue of high priority. Most people don’t really care if others smoke marijuana even if they themselves don’t smoke it. Bu to voice your opinion on an issue that has so many legal penalties attached to it is simply not worth it, considering that many more issues are more important.
However this is one of those cases in which laws are oh-so-unfair (and dumb, quite frankly), that a gradual transition towards legalisation **might **be a good thing.
The government can make so much money by making it legal and taxing it. Not to mention all the paraphanelia associated with marijuana that can also be taxed.
The government could also place restricitions on the amount people can posses legally. For example, no more than 2 plants on your own property or no more than 6 grams being carried around by one person. If people exceed these limits, which is quite likely, they can also be fined.
A step like this might actually help an economy in troubled times…
I must mention, however, that I used the word “might” on purpose. I highly doubt that the government would like people to cosume ZERO illicit substances, marijuna included, because they do make a decent amount of money out of penalties and fines.
Drug laws are so harsh and absurd that government can confiscate any property suspected to be purchased/used in any involvement with any drugs. There have been cases in which people having as little as a quarter once, roughly 6 grams, have had there cars confiscated.
So one would have to asses how much money is made by keeping marijuana illegal. I still suspect that making it legal would make much more money.
But then we bump into the whole “slippery slope” fallacy in which many people think that once marijuana is legalzied, cocaine, heroin and meth will follow.
Oh well…
At least we have the Netherlands.
It’s not totally political suicide, just like being gay is not totally political suicide. In fact, you can be gay and pro-decriminalization and still get into congress, if you are in the right place. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough right places.
Well it’s a goverment study that says "involved in,‘’ that doesn’t mean much to me.
Do you have any data on hospital admission that are primarily or secondarily caused by marijuana?
http://www.times-standard.com/ci_10461558?source=most_viewed
This is an interesting article. The government, it is ruled, violated the 10th Amendment by interfering in state activities related to medical marijuana
Yeah. The one Bork said pretty much doesn’t mean anything. Apparently, feds pressuring a state violates it. Who knew?