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By God, I've never even thought about that! What a brilliant question!
For real why should weed be illegal if beer and cigarettes are legal?
By God, I've never even thought about that! What a brilliant question!
Not to mention the billions upon billions we spend on the drug war. This seems like something any responsible fiscal conservative has to prioritize as one of the biggest wastes of money on the current budget.
And even though dismantling the mechanism of drug law enforcement would put a lot of agents and prisons out of business, you'd also create a huge, regulated, taxable recreational drug industry overnight, keep more people in the economy (instead of making them leech off our taxes as prisoners for engaging in behaviors most of us exhibit when we have a beer after work), and seriously cripple violent organized crime.
We can't afford to give ourselves the luxury of fighting a fruitless war on moral grounds anymore.
"billions upon billions we spend on the drug war"
which is all revenue/make-work for law enforcement and powerful Prison Industrial Complex.
uhh it should all be legal. cigarettes booze and pot
What about hookers?
naw not hookers just weed baby
who all lobby a portion of that money back to congress to keep the status quo
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I decree Marijuana will go much cheaper once legalized. I'm planing to buy some acres of farmland to plant some weed, will it be legalized too?
I know in some European countries Marijuana is still some taboo stuff in their customs, but there are also considerable weed users there, does it mean there will be myriad more Europeans immigrating to US?
And another "fruitless" war is the war on poverty. Trillions with a capital T has been spent here, and guess what? We still have plenty of po people. Always have, always will. Yet we throw money at it hand over fist.
Do away with both these so called Wars. They accomplish nothing. They have never worked and they never will. Time to get some common sense thinking on Capital HIll.
Legalize and tax them too.
It may be that you're right, but I tend to see the war on drugs as being more of a priority, if only because it costs more money, disrupts more international commerce, endangers more people, and conflicts with more notions of individual liberty than any social program. Also, in practical terms, the legalization of drugs would almost instantly create a taxable market that was both larger and more stable than the industries it would affect injuriously (prisons, lawyers, law enforcement), while ensuring that potentially useful citizens/workers would be free to contribute to the economy.
The "war on poverty," on the other hand, while admittedly flawed and wasteful (its effectiveness is only as good as the person who is benefiting from it), is actually beneficial to the overall economy of the country in that it is an effort to usher unproductive citizens into being productive, taxable ones.
Without social programs, only a tiny fraction of the most determined poor Americans will be able to get the education necessary to claw their way into the middle class. Moreover, if the poor cannot find living-wage employment to support their families, they will necessarily tend towards criminal activity to supplement their income... which then costs tax dollars in the shape of incarceration, insurance, law enforcement, and court costs.
Just as a parting anecdote, my girlfriend was born in Iowa to two dirt-poor farmers who were forced out of work by agribusiness. They had no other skills, so they were forced to raise their three kids on welfare for several years while they took turns working and going to college (with the help of plenty of federal and private programs, of course). With their education, they were able to find employment in a less economically-devastated city and are now both successful in their respective fields (law-enforcement and business administration) and have raised kids who are themselves successful. In other words, it really does take money to make money.
Last edited by admiralsnackbar; 04-20-2010 at 01:56 PM.
everybody thinks the people that benefit from selling weed will just "oh shucks we give up". they will get their money and power by other means and probably present more danger to society.
That sounded worldly and street-smart when I first read it, but I'm no longer convinced after having thought about it.
Markets will always resist being destroyed, but you take away their revenue and they will immediately begin to weaken. If the government and polity (ie entrepreneurs) get stronger in an inverse proportion to drug runners as they would likely do, the gangstas would either escalate their crimes to higher-risk, lower-reward operations (because there is no better high-risk/high-reward business model than narcobiz) or change their ways to more sustainable business models.
For those that would choose to escalate? Easy: they would get ed. There is simply too much technology available to common people for them to record their lives, possessions, transactions and locations -- not to mention defend these things personally.
While jailing drug users is the biggest waste of ing money I can imagine, I have no compunctions about coming after people who do violence to the property and/or person of others. Moreover, widespread technology makes it easier than ever to pinch said s, so I'd project that legalizing drugs would crush large-scale criminal organizations even if it might initially generate different varieties of crime like kidnappings or bank robberies (until criminal populations realized it was a losing battle).
"criminal populations realized it was a losing battle"
It's not a battle, it's a war of attrition with very little attrition and both sides extremely invested in the revenues the war, aka "It's a Business", generates.
3M in prison x $25K month = $75B/year, 10s of $Bs more than needed to buy enough politicians to keep locking up drug users.
If you're for keeping MJ illegal, then you have the cartels on your side.
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