Posted on 01/03/2009 6:54:45 PM PST by Bill Dupray
I’m perfectly calm. I’m also not using ad-hominem as the core of my rationale. Nor making uneducated assumptions about you. Being the boorish one in this exchange I have to wonder why you’re posting if you don’t like it. ???
I seriously wish that the US would get off its enormous backside and give us the ability to grow hemp again. The clothing made from it is far better than cotton, stronger than cotton, and the threads can be used for just about everything.
There is no better rope than a hemp rope. Hemp was Missouri’s biggest cash crop back in the day. Farmers could reap large rewards as hemp doesn’t take much in the way of fertilizer or care. You can harvest it fast as well.
And you didn’t bother to respond to any of my points. you’re right, this thread is putting me to sleep.
I did respond to your points. Which were few and demonstrably false. Most of what you have posted are ad-hominem character assaults. Those are not intellectual points of debate. I think I was being too generous when I suggested you had a knife. You seem to be unarmed for a battle of wits.
“Most of what you have posted are ad-hominem character assaults.”
Just responding in kind to yours. Let it be or go smoke another joint. I’m done with angry potheads.
Since you started that I don't think you have a point.
go ahead and toke that fat pillow-bone.
You're trying to hard man...
The agents are in prison for lying about the shooting
” The agents are in prison for lying about the shooting”
They are in jail because of an overzealous prosecutor who wants to make a name for himself. But you missed the point.
But the LEO's just got through wiping out most of the wild hemp in Missouri. Well except for North West Missouri. Why would they spend tax dollars wiping out hemp plants you ask? Because the tax dollars were there for the picking.
(I support our LEO's for the most part.)
I would rather the gummint tax these activities than tax my income or consumption.
So what. Nebraska has decriminalized pot for about 30 years. The sky hasn’t fallen there.
Wow, there are still people who believe the gateway drug nonsense? Amazing!
Peter Lewis, founder of Progressive Insurance is a pothead. I believe he is worth billions.
Just because you don’t know any productive pot users out there doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
When asked on surveys most people do not think that people ought to go to jail or get criminal records for marijuana possession. The majority are still against legalization, but I wouldn't be surprised to see decriminalization laws like this pass in most states that have ballot initiatives.
I think that many folks mistakenly think that the marijuana being smoked today is just like the weed they all smoked back in the day.”
People do lace tobacco with other drugs, certainly with PCP and embalming fluid. The same people who would buy pot dipped in these substances buy tobacco cigarettes laced with these substances too. Some even mix pot into their tobacco. That's the standard way to smoke it in many countries. Most pot smokers don't want it mixed with anything though, at least in the U.S.
As for pot not being the same as it used to be, all I can say is there was plenty of good pot in the seventies too. People were getting high back then too, really high if that's what they wanted to do. I smoked plenty of pot back then. It may be stronger on average now, but that just means you don't have to smoke as much to reach the desired result. Most people still smoke cheaper stuff, like the Mexican brick weed that Mexican drug trafficking organizations are making $8.6 billion a year selling to Americans, according to the ONDCP. That stuff isn't that strong. The really strong indoor grown stuff you hear about is super expensive. Most can't afford it, and those that do buy it tend to try to make it last as long as they can. If you see someone hollowing out a cigar and filling it with pot they're probably doing that with dirt cheap Mexican or similar low grade pot. If they have the super expensive stuff, they're a lot more likely to be putting a little bit in a pipe and putting it out after each puff so hardly any of it just burns up into the air and is wasted. And most aren't going to smoke a lot more than they need to smoke because they don't want to have to come up with another $120 for a quarter ounce or $75 an eighth or whatever it is they are paying for it. (In my area Mexican sells for $20 a quarter, $60 an ounce, and the indoor stuff is $100 a quarter or more.) That, and you can only get so stoned and certainly not everyone likes to be really stoned anyway. The more potent stuff is probably healthier for people, because they don't smoke as much of it. You can get just as stoned smoking 6% THC Mexican as you can smoking 15% hydro weed, you just have to smoke more of the Mexican.
How would decriminalizing simple possession help with crime or gun control or the problem of militarized police? If sales are still illegal the drugs would still be super expensive and there would still be dealing and stealing by addicts so they could get their dope. There would still be billions and billions of dollars for organized crime to make selling drug to people who want them. The police would still go after these people, and they'd still complain that they are occasionally out-gunned and therefor need all the military gear and tactics. Gun grabbers would still be out talking about how gangbangers wouldn't have guns if guns were illegal.
Decriminalizing does nothing to stop crime, or the militarization of our police or the gun grabbers. Legalization of production, sales, and possession might very well cut down on a lot of those problems, but do we really want to legalize drugs like meth and cocaine and heroin? I personally think that would cause us even more problems.
Most of the drug activity centers around marijuana. More people use that drug than all other illegal drugs combined. Really only a very tiny minority use drugs like cocaine, heroin or meth. Organized crime as a whole make most of their money from marijuana. The ONDCP estimated last year that Mexican drug trafficking organizations make about $13.8 billion a year selling drugs to Americans, about $8.6 billion of that from marijuana, about $2.9 billion from cocaine, about a billion from meth, and about $400 million from heroin. The lion's share of what they are bringing in comes from marijuana, cocaine is a distant second and they are just the middlemen for cocaine. They buy it in South America and smuggle it to Mexico before they smuggle it into the states. They're actually producing the marijuana they sell right there in Mexico and increasingly here on our own soil.
Decriminalizing simple possession of all drugs to some extent probably wouldn't cause us many new problems, but it wouldn't really fix anything either. It might save law enforcement some time they'd spend making arrests and showing up at court and all that, and it would save us some prison costs, but it wouldn't solve the problems you were talking about. Legalizing marijuana wouldn't solve all those problems either, but it would dramatically shrink the black market for drugs and the money there is to be made in the black market. I think it would make the problem of illegal drugs much more manageable. It would save us a fortune, free up prison space and give officers a little more time to spend on more pressing issues, and we'd actually make money from taxes and excises on marijuana as well as from income taxes and property taxes and sales taxes and so on that would be coming in from all the people employed in the legal industry. I'm all for that, and I wouldn't be opposed to decriminalizing possession of other drugs to some extent, at least making it such that a first offense simple possession of a drug like cocaine or whatever is not a felony, but I would be strongly opposed to legalizing the hard stuff and making it available relatively cheap at nice clean shops. I think that would be a really bad idea bound to cause us a lot of problems.
“Not only does it make better paper that lasts far longer than wood pulp paper, but it would slash the price of lumber, which could be put to far better use on other things than chip.
And since hemp will cross pollinate with marijuana, it will slash its potency. It will still be a drug, just not as potent a drug.”
If we legalize marijuana I bet what we'll see is the development of dual purpose plants. They'll make relatively high THC hemp so they can use the fibers and/or the seeds for all of the various things they can be used for in food production, textiles, paper, etc., and the resin could be collected and blended and pressed into hash to be sold from “pot shops.” That way they could grow huge fields and mechanically harvest them, and they'd have better control over the final product they sell to consumers from the shops allowed to sell marijuana. They could blend resin from various strains to reach the desired levels of THC and other compounds found in marijuana and to achieve the right taste and so on, and they'd probably mix in some stabilizer of some sort and preservatives to give it all a uniform texture and an incredibly long shelf life, and they'd end up with a uniform mass produced product they could sell to the masses like Bud Light or Marlboro Lights. Hand picked manicured buds would be a luxury item for those willing to pay the premium price.
That's true, but probably more important than the capital is all the connections they'll have. They have customers who like to party, some who are into other drugs too and others who might like to try a little of something else, and they have the people they get their pot from who can probably get other drugs to through the same channels where they get their pot. And often it doesn't take any capital. Drug dealers selling to people who sell drugs will often “front” the stuff to regular reliable customers they trust, give it to them on credit. They'll say something like, “If you think you can move a quarter ounce of coke I'll front one and you bring me the money next week. I'll sell it to you cheap enough that you can take a couple of grams for yourself, add in a couple of grams of cut to the rest, and you'll still make a little extra money if you get ‘x’ per gram.” It will work something like that, or they'll just start picking up a gram or two here and there for their pot customers and that will grow into a thriving coke business for them. It's all the same black market basically.
If we legalized pot we'd dramatically shrink that black market and the number of participants in it who are all potentially going to help distribute the drugs. It's almost like Mary Kay cosmetics or any of those other multilevel network marketing companies that recruit from their customer base. Remove a huge portion of their customer base and they lose sales and huge portion of those they would have recruited to make more sales. Take marijuana out of the black market and make it a legal product that is produced like other legal products and goes through legal distribution chains and it would rob the large drug trafficking organizations of most of their revenue and an awful lot of the people they would recruit to sell the hard stuff, and it takes a lot of the end consumers out of the loop for the hard stuff too because licensed “pot shops” aren't going to be any more likely than liquor stores to sell drugs like meth or cocaine or heroin. Young people, “party people,” will be less likely to have the opportunity to use these drugs. I bet people take on a much less charitable view toward illegal drugs and illegal drug users after that because most of them won't just be people who occasionally smoke a little weed. They'll mostly be hard drug users. The number of illegal drug users would instantly shrink dramatically simply because the illegal drug that is used more than all other illegal drugs combined would no longer be illegal. The few “illegal drug users” that remain would be using drugs that most people, including most pot smokers, take a dim view of to begin with.
There is no doubt in my mind that legalizing marijuana would be devastating for the huge multi-drug trafficking organizations which are mostly run by Mexicans now, and I think it is quite possible that it would lead to a fairly substantial reduction in the number of people who use the hard stuff.
So what? Hash is unavailable in most parts of the country most of the time these days. It used to be quite common, but it wasn't all that strong. The biggest hash producer in the world is Morocco. Europe buys most of their product, and it is not nearly as strong on average as the indoor grown hydro weed. Reports I've seen put average potency of seized hash not much higher than the cheapo Mexican pot seized here. It can be made from expensive hydro weed, but it's only done on a very small scale because they only get a couple of grams of hash per ounce of pot so it makes no sense for indoor growers to go into commercial hash production when they can make a lot more money just selling buds. They'll get several hundred dollars for an ounce of primo indoor grown pot. They wouldn't get anywhere close to that from the couple of grams of hash they could make with the same ounce of buds. This is a non issue. Hash is nothing but compressed marijuana resin, and it's something most pot smokers today will never see.
“And they are considering making salvia, another plant, illegal. When the cop stops you, you confess to pot possession, not salvia possession, and to save lab fees to tell the difference, you pay $100 with no record.”
If a cop can't tell the difference between salvia and pot he's a sorry excuse for a cop. Most cops will have a field test kit with them so they can see what drug they have, and I've never seen salvia in person but from the pictures I've seen it's just leaves that don't look anything like pot leaves, and hardly anyone is going to be carrying pot leaves anyway. People smoke the buds, not the leaves. You sound just like these whining cops and prosecutors in Massachusetts bringing up non issue after non issue.
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