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Having said that the government is causing more harm than good in their “War on Drugs”, I must say that not enough people understand how harmful marijuana is. Marijuana causes psychosis in one form or another. It creates paranoia and attacks the central nervous system. Some people appear more affected than others, but it is a very harmful psychedelic drug.

I think that a huge blow could be made against marijuana in a simple way: legalize, even encourage the industrial production of hemp.

Female marijuana plants are grown for the drug THC found in the resins they produce to catch pollen. Thus marijuana farmers cull all the male plants, because when a female plant is fertilized, they stop producing resin.

Even so, male marijuana pollen is so pervasive right now, that better drug quality female marijuana plants have to be grown indoors to keep them away from it.

Female hemp, however, while of the same species as marijuana, produces just trace amounts of THC in its resin, but male plants still produce vast amounts of pollen.

So if hemp production is legalized, there will be such enormous amounts of hemp pollen in the air that even indoors it will get to the female marijuana plants. Thus the quality and potency of the marijuana will significantly drop.

But there is a huge bonus beyond even this, because hemp is a tremendously versatile crop, producing a very high quality paper superior to wood pulp paper, *and* also very fine fabric similar to silk.

Hemp does not need prime farmland, either, just marginal land, with minimal irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide.

All told, wide scale hemp production in the US would be worth billions of dollars every year and employ tens of thousands of workers, directly and indirectly. And instead of grinding up good trees to make wood pulp, they could be used for much more valuable lumber.

TL;DR - Reduce marijuana potency, while creating a new industry and making billions of dollars.

We as nation have poured billions upon billions of hard earned tax dollars into a black hole...war on drugs!

On it's face, it's a great idea. Attack narco-traffickers, growers at the source in an attempt to limit drugs entering America and on to the streets.

Then on the local level, hunt down distributors and traffickers from the user up in an attempt to curb drug activity.

Problem being, it's been a miserable failure. All these tax dollars simply evaporate in a never ending battle.

The federal government never really stepping in to do what is needed to stem the flow of drugs into America through the southern border, choosing instead to leave the border wide open.

Having this conversation, it's difficult to bring out the blatant hypocrisy of legislators when it comes to their selective enforcement of drugs.

We have a drug on our streets that is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths over the decades and it is absolutely legal......Alcohol.

I'm not advocating a new prohibition on Alcohol, but it does beg a few questions. One of which would be, why does the government allow legal consumption of alcohol when there is countless studies on the ill effects of this drug on society, on individual health and our families?

I think it's time to rethink this multi-billion dollar debacle known as the war on drugs.

"Mandatory sentences breed injustice," Judge Roger Vinson told the New York Times. A Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench in Florida, Vinson was railing against a federal system that forced him to sentence a 27-year-old single mother to prison life without parole because her dealer ex-boyfriend had stored cocaine in her house.
Two areas cry for immediate action.
One: Sentencing reform. The single mother, Stephanie George, had prior drug convictions, which contributed to her draconian prison term. Even she says that she deserved to do time, but not the rest of her natural life.

Wrong! This perpetrator is three times the danger to the community than the dealer:

(1) She makes her home a safe base for the drug culture, thus infecting the community;
(2) She brings the drug culture home to infect her children, thus multiplying the future tolerance and spreading it; and
(3) She plays on the misplaced compassion of the bleeding hearts of the liberal, already drug-tolerant members of both the neighbors and of the law/justice segment.

In this, she needs twice the sentence, and perhaps death as a fitting cure and warning to her family and the community (same as though she drove negligently and caused disability and her own death); and the judge who would diminish rather than increase her penalty should be fired, perhapas jailed.

That can be a start on taking the conquering of a life of drug adventuring seriously. She did not heed the warnings of her first misadventures, and the justice system did not cause her to treat the drug life as a red-hot iron and forsake it.

To even consider the judge's attitude as viable means the general community does not take the drug problem seriously.

A number of people I have known, friends, family, co-workers have had their lives destroyed by drugs. Yet so many people think that they can sit around and get high and it will not happen to them... Anybody that manufactures, imports or distributes quanties of illegal drugs should get a fast track trial, appeal,and excecution.... Dealers (indirectly) kill hundreds, enslave thousands and cause half of the crime in this land. But when they get caught only get 5 to 8 years in prison.....Make their trade to dangerous to persue...

It is naive to think that the current body of drug laws will be changed, except to entrench it.

The money involved(in the 100s of billions) flows through the accounts of well-connected people who use all the devices of American Beltway influence to ensure their outlaw monopoly.

Bribes in the millions are mere nuisances to these untaxed lords of dope.

This is regulatory capture like no other. It will last as long as the progressive Roosevelt-launched American socialist regime lasts.

And that is unknowable.

People who use illegal drugs to escape reality are cowards. Don’t like your reality? Change it. No culture values cowardice. Smoking choom to escape reality is just running away from reality, and ultimately, reality is still there ,just waiting for you. We don’t need more cowards in this country. Blowing weed changes nothing except moving money from your wallet to a Grifter drug dealer’s pockets. Legalize it, and create more cowards. And cowards are afraid of reality and they want someone to protect them from reality and there stands the Democrat party saying, “Here. Here. We understand. We know you’re afraid. Just give us some money and your vote, and we’ll take care of you.” Nope. We don’t need more frightened Democrats.

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In light of the GOP's need to woo more young voters, drug-war reforms offer an ideological good -- limited government -- and also might be politically savvy. Think: Ron Paul and his rock star status on college campuses.

As between government by rock-star (which we have right now) and good government by good laws, I'll take the latter instead.

Oh, you want to get over on the doper vote? Yeah, that'll work. Remember what happened to China in the 19th century, when the mandarinate was wrecked by opium and China lost her independence to the drug dealers.

Saunders is a whore and a troll.