Posted on 04/20/2007 5:56:08 AM PDT by tang0r
Jeffery A. Miron finds that by decriminalizing cannabis, the federal government would generate $2.4 billion in federal tax revenue annually, and that an additional $7.7 billion would be saved as the cost of incarceration, policing, and processing offenders. Now, that's too much money to for the human brain to fully conceptualize, given the air quality around April 20th, so your friends at the Prometheus Institute have provided this handy quantitive index in order show exactly how much the U.S. can earn each year from cannabis decriminalization. The math: $2.4 billion per year + $7.7 billion per year = $10.1 billion gained in total per year. You're welcome.
The $10.1 billion dollars could, for those who are interested, do any of the following:
• Subsidize a school voucher system for half of the U.S., for good reason • Build three nuclear reactors, because Greenpeace will be high and won't notice • Extend health insurance to one million uninsured Americans, and doesn't that make everyone happy? • Purchase eight Stealth Bombers, or 2 Minitz class aircraft carriers, because we can
(Excerpt) Read more at prometheusinstitute.net ...
anyone who claims it is harmful and dangerous is an idiot.
End the war on drugs and retain criminalization - in other words, if you use it and make a nuisance of yourself, expect jail. But no random searches, no raids, no property seizures, no spending billions of dollars in corrupt third-world nations on the drug war.
The important issue is not the drugs, it is the expansion of government power. Sure, get rid of the welfare state that would in effect subsidize drug abuse (Medicaid, etc) if drugs were decriminalized, and then we can talk about decriminalization. But for now, the socialists have forced society into directly paying through taxes for the poor choices of individuals. We cannot have both freedom from personal responsibility (socialism, the welfare state) and unfettered liberties. Crush the socialism, crush the welfare-state, and it will be much harder to justify the police and the nanny-state.
why would the average person grow their own. No need to much time to get from seed to weed. 90% or more of current MJ smokers would buy it directly from whoever is selling it. besides the people who are smoking now don’t grow it why would they when it becomes legal
I have to disagree with you. It’s surely addictive. Why are all the pot smokers so hot under the collar about it being illegal? I grew up being the only kid I knew who didn’t smoke it. All my friends did. We’re 45 now. They’re STILL smoking it regulary. Even though they have families. They CAN’T quit. It’s like any addiction where the addict says “I can quit anytime I want”. That’s an excuse.
And to those who say it’s nobody else’s business, the moment you step outside your house while under the influence, JUST like alcohol, it becomes OUR business.
What is all the fuss over smoking stuff that makes a person STUPID for a while anyhow?
LOL
That’s true.
I have a feeling that the pharmaceutical behemoth has been behind attacking the legalization of medical marijuana. Marijuana has been proven to aleviate macular degeneration, among other things. This takes away from the pharm industry’s profits.
The income generated by legalizing marijuana is a goldmine, but ‘the powers that be’ would rather stay in business busting people.
Correction: Anyone who USES it is an idiot.
Consider the source, Losertarian philosophical insanity.
So are cigarettes, cigars and alcohol. In many cases these legal substances are more dangerous than marijuana. But if we make cigarettes, cigars and alcohol illegal, that should solve the problem of people getting hurt or killed by using them, right?
And so it should be illegal because of that? Heck... people do stupid things with cars every day of the week and no one is calling for them to be banned.
The problems associated with drug use (or any kind of inebriating behavior) can be managed outside of the realm of government. Companies which need workers to be sober can do tests on employees in life-critical jobs and sanction those who fail. There is no need for government to get involved in this at all.
Consider the source, Conservative, Christian, Family man, non-smoker who knows better.
So now all of your friends who still smoke, are they all big loser stoners, or are the gainfully employeed raising families and such, or are they like Otis the town drunk?
I'm sure it's no more harmful than cigarettes.
The federal government also does supply estimates. The last time they did a supply estimate they estimated that between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons of marijuana are available on the market in a given year, after law enforcement seize what they are going to seize. That is of course several times as high as their consumption estimate of not much more than a 1000 metric tons. I don’t know how much marijuana ends up being sold to end consumers in this country every year, but my bet is that the government’s supply estimate is a lot closer to reality than their consumption estimate, simply because I cannot believe they are seizing more than a small percentage of what is available on the market. That, and I’m sure that people lie about use and underreport use on the drug use surveys, and I think it’s crazy that for their consumption estimates they leave out millions of users who say they’ve used marijuana in the past year but not in the past month.
These estimates on how much Americans spend on drugs every year are all set out on a chart you’ll see floating around on the Net. I think they estimate that American’s spend something like 65 billion on drugs a year. It’s all based on consumption estimates. The odd thing is that they use different methodology to come up with consumption estimates for things like cocaine and heroin than they do for marijuana. They don’t trust the NSDUH or the old NHSDA for consumption estimates for cocaine or heroin. In the materials where they describe how they came up with the numbers they say that those numbers are too low. So, they use all kinds of others sources along with the NHSDA numbers, jacking the amount way up beyond what they’d get if they relied strictly on the NHSDA (or NSDUH). I wonder why they don’t do that for marijuana? I can’t help but suspect that there is something sneaky going on behind the scenes. Do folks in the ONDCP want to try to cover up what Americans really spend on marijuana because the tax and regulate argument gets better and better the higher the potential revenues are?
ping
No, it may be a weed, but pot growers put an awful lot of effort into producing it, especially the pricey stuff. It’s still relatively cheap, and it will be a whole lot cheaper before taxes and excises when the risk of arrest/seizures goes away and they start mass producing it with modern agricultural methods. There will be favorite brands with brand loyalty. Consumers will demand better taste, aroma, less harsh smoke, etc. Homegrown crap that Joe Blow grows in his backyard will be far less appealing when consumers can go into a nice clean store and select from a wide variety of product. Homegrown product will take a portion of the market probably not much bigger than that for homegrown tobacco and home brewed beer.
As for decriminalization, that might save police and the courts some time and effort, but it won’t create legitimate jobs. It won’t bring us tax revenues. It won’t separate marijuana from the really bad stuff like meth and heroin so that marijuana smokers no longer buy their product from the people who sell these other drugs and so that smoking marijuana no longer makes people “fellow illegal drugs users” to those who use the hard stuff who today don’t really have to worry about breaking that stuff out in front of marijuana users because marijuana smokers are already fellow law breakers. And, it won’t be a major blow to organized crime like just regulating and taxing it would be. Marijuana is the backbone of the illegal drugs industry. More people use marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined, several times over. It generates billions and billions of dollars on the black market. It is the illegal drug most in demand and all others ride on it’s coat tails through the same smuggling routes, distribution networks, etc. The marijuana trade is where the sellers of the hard stuff recruit people to transport, sell, and purchase their far more harmful product. We need to take marijuana completely out of that realm. Take the billions from organized crime and create a legal industry with law abiding tax paying people taking all the jobs it will create. The benefits of outright legalization, regulating and taxing a legal marijuana industry, would be huge compared to the benefits of decriminalization, and if there is a downside to either the difference in that between decriminalization and legalization would be minuscule.
Some states, including Texas, passed laws that levied taxes on drugs including marijuana and created steep fees for legal licenses which are legally required in order to have the substances in your possession.
The idea was that if you create a high fee and a license, failure to pay the tax and fee for the license would be another way to drop a load of punishment on users.
I thought of buying a license just for the hell of it and displaying it on my wall. What a conversation piece! A legal license for possession, issued by the State of Texas.
It wasn’t the steep fee that stopped me—it was the certainty that one night some ‘peace’ officers would come breaking down my doors to look for any legally licensed pot I might have.
Some of these guys can’t take a joke and I don’t want to get shot.
This nation already has that other vice. Marijuana is here and it is here to stay. Despite decades of monumental efforts to put a stop to the marijuana trade and marijuana use, marijuana is everywhere in this country. It’s widely available to anyone who wants it, especially young people. That’s the way this kind of black market works. Young people are the ones who have the highest demand for the product so their the ones who are always going to have friends and acquaintances who smoke it that they can get it from. For the most part it’s dirt cheap in this country too. Unless people buy the super expensive stuff it’s cheaper to smoke marijuana than it is to drink alcohol. Millions and millions of Americans use it, and I doubt very seriously there are many left who really want to use it who won’t simply because it’s illegal. Americans consume more marijuana than any other people in the world. On a pot smokers per capita basis, we’re always right up there with the biggest pot smoking nations in the world, if not at the top of the list. Americans smoke pot more than the Dutch do and the Dutch sell the stuff out in the open at coffeeshops where it’s on the menu and prominently displayed for customers and law enforcement to see. If you don’t think this vice is already here and here in a big way, you’ve got your head buried in the sand.
My thought also...I see no costs associated with this. It’s like tolerating illegal immigration for ‘cheaper’ veggies and factoring in the unintended consequences.
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