| I think the IRS is in charge of the war on sleep. |  |
Posted on 06/02/2005 4:40:30 AM PDT by Wolfie
Milton Friedman: Legalize It!
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - A founding father of the Reagan Revolution has put his John Hancock on a pro-pot report.
Milton Friedman leads a list of more than 500 economists from around the U.S. who today will publicly endorse a Harvard University economist's report on the costs of marijuana prohibition and the potential revenue gains from the U.S. government instead legalizing it and taxing its sale. Ending prohibition enforcement would save $7.7 billion in combined state and federal spending, the report says, while taxation would yield up to $6.2 billion a year.
The report, "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," ( available at www.prohibitioncosts.org ) was written by Jeffrey A. Miron, a professor at Harvard , and largely paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project ( MPP ), a Washington, D.C., group advocating the review and liberalization of marijuana laws.
At times the report uses some debatable assumptions: For instance, Miron assumes a single figure for every type of arrest, for example, but the average pot bust is likely cheaper than bringing in a murder or kidnapping suspect. Friedman and other economists, however, say the overall work is some of the best yet done on the costs of the war on marijuana.
At 92, Friedman is revered as one of the great champions of free-market capitalism during the years of U.S. rivalry with Communism. He is also passionate about the need to legalize marijuana, among other drugs, for both financial and moral reasons.
"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana," the economist says, "$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes."
Securing the signatures of Friedman, along with economists from Cornell, Stanford and Yale universities, among others, is a coup for the MPP, a group largely interested in widening and publicizing debate over the usefulness of laws against pot.
If the laws change, large beneficiaries might include large agricultural groups like Archer Daniels Midland and ConAgra Foods as potential growers or distributors and liquor businesses like Constellation Brands and Allied Domecq, which understand the distribution of intoxicants. Surprisingly, Home Depot and other home gardening centers would not particularly benefit, according to the report, which projects that few people would grow their own marijuana, the same way few people distill whiskey at home. Canada's large-scale domestic marijuana growing industry ( see "Inside Dope" ) suggests otherwise, however.
The report will likely not sway all minds. The White House Office of Drug Control Policy recently published an analysis of marijuana incarceration that states that "most people in prison for marijuana are violent criminals, repeat offenders, traffickers or all of the above." The office declined to comment on the marijuana economics study, however, without first analyzing the study's methodology.
Friedman's advocacy on the issue is limited--the nonagenarian prefers to write these days on the need for school choice, calling U.S. literacy levels "absolutely criminal...only sustained because of the power of the teachers' unions." Yet his thinking on legalizing drugs extends well past any MPP debate or the kind of liberalization favored by most advocates.
"I've long been in favor of legalizing all drugs," he says, but not because of the standard libertarian arguments for unrestricted personal freedom. "Look at the factual consequences: The harm done and the corruption created by these laws...the costs are one of the lesser evils."
Not that a man of his years expects reason to triumph. Any added revenues from taxing legal marijuana would almost certainly be more than spent, by this or any other Congress.
"Deficits are the only thing that keeps this Congress from spending more" says Friedman. "Republicans are no different from Democrats. Spending is the easiest way to buy votes." A sober assessment indeed.
I have no intention of letting you destroy America no matter how badly you feel the need to do that.
I wonder what the legal limit would be for DUI. And what the social costs would be of millions of people driving while stoned
There is no way to test someone to see how stoned a person is. Urinalysis only proves that you have smoked pot or eaten hash within a few days because it detects cannibinoid metabolytes(what the body throws away when it's done with the cannibis), blood tests would show the same since the life of a cannibinoid is quite short.
As for your second question, debatable. Anecdotal evidence suggests that those high on cannabis drive safely because of the high. In situations when someone has taken massive ammounts of the drug, it's a safe assumption that they'll be in for the night.
Okay, I was exaggerating. As a chronic pothead, I did "want" to smoke that much though. But like most young dopers, I was always broke.
Look, whether you have superior knowledge of the qualities of MJ than I do, you have ZIP understanding of how narcotics destroy civilizations where the people abuse them.
I have no intention of letting you destroy America no matter how badly you feel the need to do that.
"The term narcotic, derived from the Greek word for stupor, originally referred to a variety of substances that induced sleep (such state is narcosis). In the U.S. legal context, narcotic refers to opium, opium derivatives, and their semisynthetic or totally synthetic substitutes. Cocaine and coca leaves, which are classified as "narcotics" in the U.S. Controlled Substances Act (CSA), are technically not narcotics.
Because the term is often used broadly, inaccurately and/or pejoratively outside medical contexts, most medical professionals prefer the more precise term opioid for all natural, semi-synthetic and synthetic substances that behave pharmacologically like morphine, the primary constituent of natural opium."
-taken from the beginning of the wikipedia.org entry for Narcotic
Your contention that Narcotics destroy civilization can be debated in another topic. The topic here is Marijuana and laws concerning it and it's derivitives. Marijuana is not a narcotic, nor is it addictive as you claim. Legalizing it will not end civilization as we know it or harm it in any way.
Your enemy is Poppy, another plant of infamy, where opium, heroin, and morphine come from. Don't get them confused.
Poppy has pretty pink, white, and red flowers. Cannabis has thick dense resinous flowers and is not all that pretty to look at unless you want to smoke it.
You have your preferences for one thing over another. So what?
Well I have some anecdotal evidence that contradicts that. What do you think happens to an idiot's refexes and motor skills response time when he has to brake, turn, switch gears suddenly, etc.?
muawiyah - you're a blind idealogue.
I'll concede to you that narcotics are bad - extremely addictive life sucking force. What you missed entirely is that your basis for keeping cannabis illegal is your position on narcotics. That's comparing apples and oranges, so don't try it.
streetpreacher - I'd rather be in a car with a high driver than a drunk driver, and I never get in cars with drunk drivers. Am I risking my life? As much as any person is by getting into a vehicle. The great thing about driving when you're high is that you can do it or you can't. If you're so high that you'd be swerving in and out of lanes, not being able to react to any other driver on the road, you'll still be on your couch trying to figure out how to work the tv remote. Now if you're high and you can get in your car and turn it on, you're probably not all that high. You may just giggle a bit, but all in all, you'll drive rather well - maybe even more alertly than normal because of the laten paranoia involved in smoking pot.
| I think the IRS is in charge of the war on sleep. | |
If you think about it, this could work. Doing the above would start a vicious and violent war with drug smugglers who will not wish to give up their current vast illegal profits, which certainly serves the real purpose of the War On Drugs.
ROFL
So far I have yet to meet an adult potsmoker who has not also claimed to have "tried" other things.
Frequently the "other things" led to pot ~ this is the old "gateway" versus "getaway" dichotomy!
Do you guys really think anybody believes a druggy about anything? That's one of the reasons we pay all that money to do drug tests when there's valuable stock or a cash register on the line.
The number of users has nothing whatsoever to do with the quantities consumed. Those are two entirely different values.
Your comparisons are not apt or applicable.
You should try to stay awake during this discussion ~ at least be polite. This nodding off has got to stop, and put away those potato chips ~ !!!!!!!! (ROTFLMAO ~ another druggy tries to fool us).
Your answers are a smoke screen to cover up and avoid any discussion of the dependence of the drug war on living document revision of the Constitution, and to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences. They are to the point if the point is to simply get something posted to the thread that is anti-drug or anti-druggie with your name at the bottom, and perhaps provoke people into emotional responses that will turn the thread into a flame war.
Won't work.
BTW, you are entitled to your reading of the Constitution, of course, but I bet you that if needed my side could get a Constitutional amendment in place that would outlaw both drugs and druggies.
In that case your argument would be revealed to be a hollow shell designed to do nothing but mislead people from the real problems ~ and those are misuse of drugs by druggies.
Let me repeat it again, druggies are not invisible. The rest of us know what druggies are up to.
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