Posted on 06/04/2007 11:35:52 AM PDT by cryptical
At a recent backyard barbecue in Miami's Upper Eastside, a group of middle-age, middle-class folks tamely sipped berry cocktails and beers. Among them: a couple of lawyers, a couple of city administrators and an arts administrator. Somewhere between the skirt steak and the apple pie, somebody lit a joint and passed it around.
Nobody blinked. Even in mainstream, white-collar settings, smoking marijuana can be commonplace and unremarkable, like having a little wine with dinner.
Once a stamp of the arty, the marginal and the counterculture, today marijuana's popularity cuts across social boundaries. Yet several high-profile marijuana arrests have recently made headlines, highlighting the hazy double standard that exists around an illegal, potentially harmful drug that continues to encroach into the mainstream:
In March, Lawrence Korda, 59, a Broward Circuit Court judge, was charged with openly smoking marijuana in a park in Hollywood. Korda completed a drug and alcohol program to erase the misdemeanor charge, and must take monthly random drug tests for six months and perform 25 hours of community service.
Last month, Utpal Dighe, 31, a prosecutor in the Miami-Dade state attorney's office, was fired after police charged him with buying marijuana from a street dealer in Coconut Grove.
Also last month, Ricky Williams, 30, erstwhile superstar running back for the Dolphins, probably ended his Miami career by testing positive for marijuana for the fifth time.
For good or ill, people from all walks smoke weed. In fact, 40.1 percent of all Americans 12 years old and up admit having tried marijuana at least once -- and 6 percent acknowledge having used it in the past month, federal drug surveys show. The FBI says 786,500 people were arrested for it in 2005, the latest figures available.
One group at least modestly turning away from marijuana is middle- and high-schoolers, ages 12 to 17. The percentage who have used pot at least once dropped from more than 20 percent in 2000 to about 17 percent in 2005, federal researchers say.
''I don't know if more people are smoking or more people are admitting it,'' said Betsy Wise, a Miami stand-up comic. Wise recently started to freelance for a New York ad agency. She confided in a co-worker that a friend was delivering pot brownies to the office -- and told him to help himself.
''When I got to the agency, all but a few of the brownies were gone,'' Wise said. ``Pretty much everyone partook, right in the office. They all greeted me with smiles. I thought that was remarkable. I would have expected maybe one or two people would have been simpatico.''
More and more, weed is cropping up in the popular culture. It isn't just the domain of hip-hop records with parental-guidance labels. On cable-TV shows like Six Feet Under,The Sopranos,Entourage and The L Word, characters have sparked up casually, the way they might sip merlot, without their marijuana use being part of any plot development or morality tale.
And it isn't just cable. On ABC's Brothers & Sisters, Sally Field's character gets high. The kids on That '70s Show often emerged from clouds of funny smoke.
GOING UPSCALE
''I think there is more of a laissez-faire attitude these days about smoking pot,'' said Jenji Kohan, creator of Showtime's Weeds, about a mother who sells marijuana to make ends meet after her husband dies unexpectedly. 'One of the things that I find interesting is that there are boutique farms that are really into their strains. It reminds me of when wine started to become really popular and people started talking about this vine and that grape. Marijuana has become more upscale. In L.A., dealers have full menus of `unique teas.' ''
Not that marijuana use is a function of wealth.
For $20 on the street, a buyer can score one-eighth ounce of low-grade marijuana from Mexico, Belize or Jamaica -- enough for four or five cigarettes. For $800, the connoisseur can acquire an ounce of exotic, extra-potent marijuana grown from modern hybrids in hydroponic labs or special soil indoors in ''grow-houses'' from Pompano Beach to Coral Gables, said James Hall, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Substance Abuse at Nova Southeastern University.
''It's like wine; you can buy an expensive one or you can buy the jug stuff,'' Hall said.
The truth is, for all of the marijuana possession arrests, police often look the other way, or let smokers go with friendly warnings.
At a Snoop Dogg concert at a Fort Lauderdale club a while back, a uniformed officer stood by unflinchingly as Snoop, and dozens in the audience, sent up telltale clouds.
''It's selective enforcement,'' said Miami musician Todd Thompson, who doesn't have a problem admitting that he gets high. ``At Langerado [a Broward outdoor music festival], there was smoking going on everywhere. I wouldn't do it in front of a cop, just in case. But cops don't always do something about a little marijuana smoke.''
Marijuana laws are a mishmash among the 50 states. It isn't entirely legal anywhere, but 12 states have at least partly decriminalized it, to the point that in Alaska there is no penalty for possessing an ounce or less at home.
In Florida, possession of 20 grams or less -- 28 grams would be an ounce -- is a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine; having more than 20 grams is a felony worth five years and/or a $5,000 fine.
Over the decades, debate about whether marijuana should be legalized has remained lively.
Said Howard Finkelstein, Broward County public defender and legal guru of the ''Help Me Howard'' segment on WSVN-Fox 7: 'We're making war on our own people. We take good fathers and lawyers and doctors and wives and make them outlaws. We're playing a stupid and harmful game of `gotcha.' ''
Some support for legalization comes from the belief that it's not dangerous to health, says Dr. J. Bryan Page, professor of anthropology and psychiatry and an expert on substance abuse in the University of Miami Department of Psychiatry.
''A student I knew claimed to be part of a group who all had grade-point averages over 3.6 who were very regular users,'' he said. 'She wanted me to study them to counter all the `Just say no' stuff.''
White House drug czar John Walters, not surprisingly, sees it differently. In April, his office released an analysis from the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project that said the level of THC -- the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana -- has more than doubled since 1983, from 4 percent to 8.5 percent.
`WAKE-UP CALL'
''This new report serves as a wake-up call for parents who may still hold outdated notions about the harms of marijuana,'' his announcement said.
The increased potency is from the exotic new hybrids and sophisticated indoor growing techniques, says Nova Southeastern's Hall.
Marijuana-related emergency-room visits increased from 45,000 in 1995 to 119,000 in 2002, the most recent comparison available, federal drug officials say.
Added Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse: ``Science has shown that marijuana can produce adverse physical, mental, emotional and behavioral changes, and -- contrary to popular belief -- it can be addictive.''
Norman Kent, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer and board member of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, scoffed: ``More people died last year from eating spinach than smoking pot.''
Yes, you must. But as I mentioned, the only rules that apply have to do with race. While this would never affect me personally, as I'm not a racist, the libertarian purist side of me would like to see this one prohibition erased, simply for principle's sake.
The government could generate tax revenues from a legal marijuana market. The feds and the states could bring in sales taxes and excises. They’d also generate income taxes from all those working in the legal industry. I don’t know how much they’d bring in in tax revenues, but it would sure be a heck of a lot more than they bring in now, and they’d save a lot of money they currently spend trying to enforce the ban, locking people up, etc..
There are a lot of reasons why there is so much opposition to legalizing marijuana. I doubt very seriously that some perceived inability to generate tax revenues from a legal marijuana industry is chief among those reasons. I don’t think the government or anyone else in who opposes legalization cares that much about that issue. About the only time you hear people arguing about it is when those who want to end marijuana prohibition and regulate it similar to the way alcohol is regulated argue that taxes could be generated and those who oppose legalization respond with the same type of arguments you are giving. If the tax revenue angle wasn’t brought up by those who want to see the marijuana industry regulated, the other side wouldn’t even really think about it.
As I am oft reminded, a 100 IQ is the average.
The poster was claiming that the government lies, as though only smart people like himself can figure that out. That if people knew the truth, marijuana would be legal. Hell, if people knew the truth they'd all be conservatives. Well, at least not liberals.
As to people being stupid, I'm reminded of what William F. Buckley, Jr. said about that: "I'd rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty."
Who wants cheap marijuana? (I mean besides users, and they're only 6% of everyone 12 and older.) Not employers, certainly not parents, not insurance companies, not law enforcement, not the medical profession. Seriously, who wants to see pot at $3 a pound?
Besides, users have already demonstrated that they're willing to pay $200-$800 per ounce. Ask anyone on this board who smokes pot if they would be willing to pay the same amount for legal pot and they'd probably admit they'd pay more if only it was legal.
Can pot be cheap if it was mass produced? Of course it can. Would it? I sincerely doubt it.
I would review supply and demand. The demand most likely would not change. Pot being 'mass produced' vastly increases the supply. Prices would plummet.
The reason pot costs $200-$800 per ounce is because of the risk in growing and selling it. If marijuana was legal many more people would grow and sell it due to the ease at which it can be grown, creating a perfectly competitive market. It’s simple economics.
As for users paying $200 to $800 an ounce, they don’t do that where I live. Ounces of standard commercial grade Mexican pot go for a good bit less than a $100 on average. Some people are paying as low as $50 an ounce. There is some expensive stuff available that very few people buy, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying anywhere near $800 for an ounce of pot. Mexican is cheaper around here than it was twenty years ago.
Supply issues aren’t really what keeps marijuana so expensive in the black market. Other factors cause that. It starts with high production costs. Modern farms producing legal agricultural products tend to be in the thousands of acres. Small farms with a few hundred acres can’t compete with the large farms even though the small farms tend to be using modern agricultural methods. Pot farms are rarely ever in the hundreds of acres. Most plots don't even cover a whole acre, and the marijuana farmer is not using machines to plant his seeds and combines to harvest and machines to process his crops. He’s hiking out into the boonies to plant and tend to his tiny little plots, doing all of the work by hand. It’s even that way in Mexico where they used to get away with growing huge fields of the stuff, and all of these growers and the people that help them are demanding super high pay relative to what others producing legal crops produce because they are taking huge risks.
Thousands and thousands of tons of marijuana are produced in North America every year, mostly in small plots, and increasingly indoors where growing space is measured in square feet, not in thousands of acres, and where growing costs are incredibly high because they have to use artificial light to produce their crops.
A lot of marijuana is seized by law enforcement before growers can harvest it, and a lot more is seized along the way before reaching the end consumer. Smuggling it across the border is incredibly expensive. A truck driver with a couple of tons stashed in his legal load might charge fifty grand to drive that load across the border. Often big bribes end up getting paid to border guards and customs officials, etc. Then they have to pay to get it transported to safe houses, and will pay thousands to people who take comparatively small loads of a couple of hundred pounds in the trunks of their cars across the country to other destinations. It’s expensive as heck to produce, and really expensive to transport and distribute. The product changes hands so many times and everyone who touches it wants to be paid handsomely for the risks they are taking.
If it was legal and produced on a huge scale like other crops are produced today, most of these costs would shrink down to a tiny fraction of what they are today. It would be a whole lot cheaper to produce, transport and distribute. It would change hands far fewer times and those involved in producing and distributing would not command nearly the premium they command today because the risks would be gone. They’d make their money by moving a large volume of product, profit margins would be much thinner but they’d make up for it in volume. One licensed retail shop would do the work of perhaps hundreds of little small time pot dealers. A truck driver with a 90 thousand pound load of pot would get paid about what the guy with a couple of hundred pounds in his trunk gets paid today, or actually probably considerably less. Costs would plummet.
I don’t know that we’d see a huge increase in supply though, because like you I doubt demand would increase that much. I think most people who want to smoke marijuana already smoke it. I’m sure there are probably a few people out there who have no other reason for not smoking it other than the laws against it, but I think the overwhelming majority of us that don’t smoke it don’t smoke it because of all the other reasons it’s a bad idea to smoke pot. Making it legal would not take away all those other negatives.
But my point is that I don't think simple economics will apply. Medical marijuana is legal in Canada. It is grown and supplied to patients by the Canadian government. It is garbage. And they charge $5 per gram ($140 per ounce), supposedly at "cost". Drugs are cheap in Canada, remember?
Marijuana is perfectly legal in the "coffee shops" in Amsterdam. It has been for decades. You can smoke there or purchase up to 5 grams daily to take with you. The price for marijuana ranges from $2-10 per gram ($56 - $280 per ounce). A little higher for hashish.
Legal medical marijuana in California goes for $480 per ounce. (Fine -- you can call it "semi-legal" in California, but it still can't cost that much to grow).
All of the above is tax-free. Imagine the taxes added by the US federal government, states, counties, and cities as they look at legal marijuana as their next major revenue stream for cash starved budgets.
And who's gonna complain?
Righteous!
Oh please. The number of users would double, if not triple. Teens, especially.
Marijuana use was as low as 4.6% in the 90's and as high as 13.2% in the late 70's. Legalize it and we could see the number rise to 15% easily. Especially if it's going to be as cheap as everyone says.
Probably for the same reason some companies refuse to hire cigarette smokers -- lower insurance costs.
Based on what evidence?
You think there is 10% of the population sitting out there wanting to smoke pot, but don't because it's illegal? If they want to smoke pot, they don't care about the law, they are going to go smoke it.
Yep. And I'd say half of those were underage, waiting for the price to come down so they can afford it.
As for the the other half, they're the ones who could lose their jobs, their house, their car, their family, or their freedom if they're caught -- and it just isn't worth it. Make pot legal, take away the "criminal" stigma, take away any punishment, and yeah, I think we could come up with 5%.
As I said, we had 13% in 1979 and it was illegal.
IMHO, anyone who believes the State has the right to imprison a human being for owning the wrong plant, simply does not understand human Freedom.
It’s just ludicrous to grant any State such arbitrary power, whether enabled by a democratic majority or not...
Medical marijuana is completely legal in Canada. It is produced and sold by the Canadian government, for crying out loud! $140 per ounce, and it's sold at cost, tax free.
"In the Netherlands it is still illegal for anyone but coffeeshops to sell marijuana"
And they charge $50 to $300 per ounce. Legally. No risk of being arrested. They've been doing it for decades.
"in fact the people that actually sell marijuana to the coffeeshops are still considered criminals."
Yeah. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
And if marijuana is so cheap, why are the sick and dying in California paying $480 per ounce?
See my post #75. That's why.
Now please return the favor. Where's your evidence that pot use would not rise if it was legal? Or is that just because you think so?
Exactly my point. The government only allows itself to grow and sell marijuana, giving them a monopoly and complete control over the price. Not exactly an example of a free market. As for the Netherlands, they charge so much for "legal" marijuana because they have to first buy it from the same people that dealers get their marijuana from. They are the ones who carry the risk of being arrested, so they raise the wholesale price to compensate for the risk.
And if marijuana is so cheap, why are the sick and dying in California paying $480 per ounce?
Even you admitted it is only semi-legal there. The risk of the seller being arrested, either by the state police or the DEA, is a barrier to entering the marijuana market and helps drive the price up.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that none of your examples are that of a free market for marijuana, meaning anyone who wants to sell it can sell it legally.
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