Posted on 02/26/2006 7:55:05 AM PST by Wolfie
That's why it should be legalized--so it can be taxed. Let's make money on it legally instead of siphoning the money to other countries. There is a demand for it so why shouldn't the government get involved?
They were all out drinkin last nite & pukin in the toilet before they ceashed on the couch.
First... Do No Harm
Here is some info about a lady named Elvie Musika, who lost the sight in one eye due to glaucoma, took the feds to court and won the right to use MJ as for medicinal purposes. The feds actually mail her medicinal MJ to her to this day. As she still has the sight in one eye after using the MJ as medicine, and lost the sight in one eye before using it as medicine, few can argue with the results. But some will, I'm sure.
7 to 9 AM on "The Morning Show" with Jon Beaupre
12-12:30 Live with Elvie Musika, one of 5 people in the U.S. who smokes marijuana legally, and who is provided the medicine by the federal government. Her eyesight was saved by marijuana. She gives an update on the state of California Proposition 215 in which the voters decided to legalize marijuana for medical use in the state. (of course we all know that it has always been legal, having been grandfathered in as a prior used medicine and that the federal government has always been acting illegally in trying to stop it.
Link: http://old.kpfk.org/upcoming_arc20020211.html
Starting with a MJ seed, and eventually producing a joint, is so easy that stoned people do it it all the time.
So...how are you going to tax it?
Me too, and medical opium. It's a plant, you know.
Grow and sell the product here. Tax it when it's sold. We put people to work, farmers have a viable cash crop, government gets the tax money.
As much as I dislike being in a room full of smokers, have you ever been in a room full of pot-smokers? Big difference!
You're probably right.
Oh, and untrimmed Medical Prime Rib...
They had to wait for the talking points memo to be faxed from the DEA.
LOL!
I think they are equally easy to grow and produce a smokable product. The taxes come from the government.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the chemical gobbledygook peddled by Big Pharm is healthy for you.
LOL! Last week was the first time in who knows how many YEARS! that I heard an anti-drug commercial on the radio. What's up with that?
And ice cream made with real uncooked eggs, with the yolks. Real heavy cream, and Scharfenberger 78% dark chocolate.
Improves gall bladder function.
"The great thing about pot is that once it gives you cancer, heart disease or stroke, you can smoke more of it as medicine".
ANNUAL AMERICAN DEATHS CAUSED BY DRUGS
TOBACCO ........................ 400,000
ALCOHOL ........................ 100,000
ALL LEGAL DRUGS ................ 20,000
ALL ILLEGAL DRUGS .............. 15,000
CAFFEINE ....................... 2,000
ASPIRIN ........................ 500
MARIJUANA ...................... 0
Source: United States government...
National Institute on Drug Abuse,
Bureau of Mortality Statistics
How about posting some facts to support your claims? Or do no facts exist to support your claims? One or the other.
You would think it would work better...;)
Reefer Madness ... and Other Tales from the American Underground
Eric Schlosser - Author
£7.99
Buy now View basket
Book: Paperback | 129 x 198mm | 352 pages | ISBN 0141010762 | 26 Feb 2004 | Penguin
Reefer Madness ... and Other Tales from the American Underground
'Schlosser provides a view of the country and its people that is both rich and disturbing'
The Times Literary Supplement
Eric Schlosser, the man who wiped the smile off the happy meal with Fast Food Nation, strips America bare …
In this outrageous, irreverent, no-holds-barred odyssey into the US underworld, he looks beneath the country’s shiny, happy surface and uncovers what’s really made it so rich: porn, pot and illegal immigrants.
Meet the cannabis crusaders who risk life imprisonment in a deranged government ‘war on drugs’ that punishes marijuana offences more harshly than murder. Take an uncensored look at the sex industry and its leading players, from feminist strippers to Reuben Sturman, the billionaire Walt Disney of porn. Enter the hidden world of the migrant workers who are ruthlessly exploited by big business fat cats. And discover how these dirty dealings, secret vices and underground economies are part of a global black market on which we all depend.
Reefer Madness is a storming must-read for anyone who’s ever felt they’re not being told the whole story about where the real money is made, and a shockingly funny glimpse of a nation on the brink of insanity …
In the state of Indiana, a person convicted of armed robbery will serve about six years in prison; someone convicted of rape will serve about eight; and a convicted murderer can expect to spend twenty-five years behind bars. These figures are actually higher than the national average: eleven years and four months in prison is the typical punishment for an American found guilty of murder. The prison terms given by Indiana judges tend to be long, but with good behaviour, an inmate will serve no more than half the nominal sentence. Those facts are worth keeping in mind when considering the case of Mark Young. At the age of thirty-eight, Young was arrested at his Indianapolis home for brokering the sale of seven hundred pounds of marijuana grown on a farm in nearby Morgan County. Young was tried and convicted under federal law. He had never before been charged with drug trafficking. He had no history of violent crime. Young's role in the illegal transaction had been that of a middleman—he never distributed the drugs; he simply introduced two people hoping to sell a large amount of marijuana to three people wishing to buy it. The offence occurred a year and a half before his arrest. No confiscated marijuana, money, or physical evidence of any kind linked Young to the crime. He was convicted solely on the testimony of co-conspirators who were now cooperating with the government. On February 8, 1992, Mark Young was sentenced by Judge Sarah Evans Barker to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Marijuana is such a familiar part of youth culture in the United States, and the smell of pot smoke is now so commonplace at high school and college parties, that many Americans assume a marijuana offence rarely leads to a prison term. In fact, there are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in American history. About 20,000 inmates in the federal prison system have been incarcerated primarily for a marijuana offence. The number currently being held in state prisons and local jails is more difficult to estimate; a reasonable guess would be an additional 25,000 to 30,000. And Mark Young's sentence, though unusual, is by no means unique. Dozens of marijuana offenders may now be serving life sentences in federal penitentiaries, without hope of parole. If one includes middle-aged inmates with sentences of twenty or thirty or forty years, the number condemned to die in prison may reach into the hundreds. Other inmates—no one knows how many—are serving life sentences in state correctional facilities across the country for growing, selling, possessing, or even buying marijuana.
The phrase "war on drugs" evokes images of Colombian cartels and inner-city crack addicts. In many ways that is a misperception. Marijuana is and has long been the most widely used illegal drug in the United States. It is used more frequently than all other illegal drugs combined. Approximately one-third of the American population over the age of twelve have smoked marijuana at least once. About nineteen million Americans smoked it in 2000. More than two million smoke it every day. Unlike heroin or cocaine, which must be imported, anywhere from a quarter to half of the marijuana used in the United States is grown here as well. Although popular stereotypes depict marijuana growers as aging hippies in Northern California or Hawaii, the majority of the marijuana now cultivated domestically is being grown in the nation's midsection—a swath running from the Appalachians west to the Great Plains. Throughout this Marijuana Belt drug fortunes are being made by farmers who often seem to have stepped from a page of the old Saturday Evening Post. The value of America's annual marijuana crop is staggering: plausible estimates start at $4 billion and range up to $25 billion. In 2001 the value of the nation's largest legal cash crop, corn, was roughly $19 billion.
Marijuana has well-organized supporters who campaign for its legalization and promote its use through books, magazines, Web sites, and popular music. They believe marijuana is important not only as a benign recreational drug but also as an herbal medicine and as a commodity with industrial applications. Marijuana's opponents are equally passionate and far better organized. They consider marijuana a dangerous drug—one that harms the user's mental, physical, and spiritual well-being, that promotes irresponsible sexual behaviour, that encourages disrespect for traditional values and threatens the nation's youth. At the heart of the ongoing, bitter debate is a hardy weed that can grow wild in all fifty states. The two sides agree that countless lives have been destroyed by marijuana, but disagree about what should be blamed: the plant itself, or the laws forbidding its use.
The war on drugs launched by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 began largely as a campaign against marijuana, organized by conservative parents' groups. After more than a decade in which penalties for marijuana offences had been reduced at both the state and federal levels, the laws prohibiting marijuana were made much tougher in the 1980's. More resources were devoted to their enforcement, and punishments more severe than those administered during the "reefer madness" of the 1930s became routine. All the legal tools commonly associated with the fight against heroin and cocaine trafficking—civil forfeitures, enhanced police search powers, the broad application of conspiracy laws, a growing reliance on the testimony of informers, and mechanistic sentencing formulas, such as mandatory minimums and "three strikes, you're out"—have been employed against marijuana offenders. The story of how Mark Young got a life sentence reveals a great deal about the emergence of the American heartland as the region where most of the nation's marijuana is now grown; about the changing composition of the federal prison population; and about the effects of the war on drugs, twenty years after its declaration, throughout America's criminal justice system. Underlying Young's tale is a simple question: How does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?
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