“that’s a little over 2 days for each marijuana plant. sounds fair to me.”
It sounds fair to me too.
But hey, if enforcing our laws causes people to be put in jail, then by all means let’s legalize everything.
Speeding is a victimless crime, right? Let’s repeal all speed laws. Let High School Harry drive 90 mph down your residential street. Don’t like it? Stay inside your house and you may be safe.
The prohibition against murder isn’t working, since people still murder other people. Legalize it! If you don’t want to get killed you’d better learn to protect yourself.
The war on illegal aliens can’t be won, so let’s open our borders. Abolish ICE and the Border Patrol. Think of all the money we’ll save. Whee! What’s next?
The war on drugs isn’t working. Legalize everything! Insert the image here of your 12 year old daughter injecting herself with heroin. Hey, nobody goes to prison, so it’s all okay, right?
Even HOLLAND is reversing their freewheeling drug policies. How long does it take for the message to sink in, folks?
1. “straw man” - The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of “reasoning” has the following pattern:
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
or
2. “red herring” - A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.
We do need laws to protect innocent people, but we can't make everything illegal. Your argument is that if we are going to legalize pot, why don't we just legalize everything else that is against the law. That works both ways. If we are going to make something with such a little risk of causing harm to innocent people illegal, why don't we make everything illegal if it presents any possible risk to innocent people or harms those who do it in any way?
I agree that drugs like cocaine and heroin and meth and so on should remain illegal. People who use super addictive drugs like this are putting innocent people at a risk to a much greater extent than someone who smokes a little weed. Those addicted to these substances are significant burdens on our communities. Most people who just smoke pot work and contribute to society. Hardly any are a burden on society just as a result their pot smoking. Most of the crime that results from marijuana use comes from the fact that it is illegal.
If pot wasn't used by so many people in this country I wouldn't see much point in legalizing it. Millions of people do it though. According to government statistics more than half of all American adults under 60 have tried it. The market for it is huge. Because so many do it, it is easy to find it just about anywhere in this country. If people aren't doing it, it's not because they can't find it. It's not because they can't afford it either, because it's really cheaper than beer on a per use basis in most cases.
Even being cheap though there are incredible amounts of money being made supplying it to all the people who do it. It's making organized crime rich. Mexican drug trafficking organizations supply half or more of of the marijuana Americans consume. The ONDCP estimates that Mexican drug trafficking organizations gross about $13.8 billion a year selling drugs to Americans, about $8.6 billion of that from marijuana sales alone. Marijuana is their cash cow. The next most profitable drug for them is cocaine but they are only grossing $3.9 billion from that compared to $8.6 billion for marijuana and they are just the middlemen for cocaine that they must import from Colombia or Peru or Bolivia before they can smuggle it into the U.S. They're actually producing the marijuana in Mexico and increasingly on our own soil, so they're making all the profits from it.
Marijuana is cheap and already about as easily available as it's going to get in this country. Most people who want to do smoke it are already smoking it. We are stopping precious few from doing it with the ban against it, but this ban is costing us a fortune in enforcement costs, costs of prisons and courts and so on, and it's causing all sorts of other problems. We aren't helping ourselves by giving so many people criminal records for marijuana offenses. We aren't helping ourselves by wasting so much jail and prison space on marijuana offenders. Our jails and prisons are packed. It takes months now in my area for a prison bed to open up for someone newly sentenced to prison and because the jails are so full most of these people will be given reporting bonds and be allowed back on the streets until a prison bed opens up. We could reduce that problem by legalizing and regulating marijuana. We'd also reduce tension and disrespect between large segments of our population and law enforcement and help create more respect for the law in general. And one big thing we would do is make take the lion's share of revenue away from these drug trafficking organizations and make it much harder for them to move their much more harmful drugs. Illegal drugs tend to go through the same channels. The existing distribution networks for marijuana are massive and reach every corner of America, so they make perfect conduits through which these drug trafficking organizations can move their other stuff. If we want to reduce the “gateway effect” and make the hard stuff harder to get, we'll legalize marijuana and regulate it similar to alcohol.