Bipartisanship and Pot

I appreciate this pissing match keeping the topic on page 1, but I sure wish people with comments about the issue would post.
 
Johnny,

I think what Hpslugga and I are discussing is getting at the heart of the issue, which is how a government justifies itself, or whether it is justified at all, in pronouncing on issues like marijuana.

But I'll play along: Do you think that legalizing marijuana would reduce cost?

I'm not sure that it would. We would still be involved in fighting drug trafficking with other drugs, such as cocaine and heroin and meth. These drugs would still be huge money-makers for criminal gangs both inside and outside the United States.

Nor is it clear to me that these gangs would be shut out of the marijuana industry, since they would be able to avoid the FDA entirely and thereby undercut the legal suppliers. They wouldn't be subject to whatever THC limitations were imposed. The legal suppliers would be subject to all these rules, and they would produce a product that was probably safer, but which had also now lost its subversive force. In other words, don't be shocked when the kids start to refer to the illegally produced marijuana as the "good stuff".

What we would succeed in doing, were we to legalize marijuana, is to push the threshold of subversive activity into ever greater degrees of depravity and perversion. I'd rather keep it where it is now.

The other thing we would accomplish, in terms of cost, is to create a new arm of bureaucracy dedicated to the management of the drug for public consumption. This new bureaucracy would incur cost that could not be offset by fines and court fees at the local level.
 
In addition, the legalization of marijuana brings up the specter of traffickers using their tried and true methods of intimidation and terror to deal with their new competitors. Or let's think of it this way: If Walgreens succeeded in cutting into the Zetas profit margin to any substantial degree, do you think the Zetas would treat them any differently than they treat operatives of the Sinaloa Cartel?
 
Rex - We're capable of talking about more than one thing at a time. If the government is in the business of doing something it shouldn't be doing, AND it's costing us money, why wouldn't you want that to end?

Coel - You're fabricating a lot of things, I don't even know where to start. Does the legislation include FDA regs and THC limitations, or did you just throw them in to muddy the waters? Have you ever seen "good" marijuana next to "bad" marijuana? Do you really think that smuggled, old, degraded drug-cartel product that you have to buy from a drug dealer could compete with safe, fresh product that you can buy in a store? Did you think the same thing when alcohol was making a legalization push - that people would skip the "regulated" alcohol and stick to the hooch? How did that work out?
 
I really have no idea, especially since the legislation wouldn't "legalize" the substance, but merely leave the decision to the states.

If the FDA were to regulate it, that would come with costs. I would guess that those costs would not be nearly as much as the cost of federal marijuana prohibition. Further, my analysis of what my government should and shouldn't do does not rest merely on what's cheapest...but it's nice when what is right (ending federal prohibition) is also cheaper.

Care to actually answer any of my questions?
 
Rex - I hear your point and I don't think this is the most important issue of the day, but I just didn't really want to start another thread to deal with the same crap over and over again. I was interested to see what people thought about this. You think this is a waste of time, fine.
 
If you are for anarchy that's wonderful for you, but it's not how the USA is run. We set up a system of government with a federal gov't and local gov'ts. This question is related to the powers of the federal gov't under OUR system, not under your theoretical anarchist system. I understand that in your anarchist view, no level of government has any place in the regulation of substances. Again, that's fine, but it's not how the USA is set up.

BUT, if that's the path you want to go down, you ought to be for ending federal prohibition because then you can work on that at the state and local levels using your same argument. You can't get there at all if you leave federal prohibition in place though.
 
One of the biggest reasons that people were against the CA Prop that would have legalized marijuana was because it was against federal law. Remove federal prohibition and the road clears a bit. Big changes like you want are never going to happen overnight in one sweeping piece of legislation, and you can hold your breath and stomp your feet all you want but it won't change that fact.
 
And soft-drink companies like Coca-Cola helped lead the crusade to prohibit alcohol.

In any case, I don't argue that no one used hemp, or even recreational marijuana, in times past. I do argue that the mainstream use of recreational marijuana was fractional compared to the use of alcohol and tobacco.
 
For anyone who's interested to know, studies have shown that alcohol consumption actually went up during prohibition.
 
Apparently it is not legal to grow. But it is legal to import at approved THC levels, which is probably how we should leave it.
 
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