Goodness. The San Diego Tribune makes sense from one end of the article to the other.
I’d be for legalizing pot if everyone who did something under its influence had the same thing done to them three-times over in return.
If you smoke and drive and run into something, you get three times the damage done to your stuff. If you maim someone, you lose three times the functionality. If you kill someone, well, you die.
How is it that Fornicalia can clamp down on Winstons but not on Mad Dog 20/20?
As we all know - no one who smokes weed can be productive or successful! This must be left up to the state.
Bull shite
I’ve never used drugs however I’m sure there are many successful people who smoke marijuana. The fact is that most drug users are not high-achievers and quite often they are on some kind of public assistance. Walking around stoned all day simply isn’t going to propel anyone through life unless they are a member of the Grateful Dead or Phish.
Did anybody else read this and immediately think O'bama?
Ah yes, here come the Drug Warriors (Armchair Brigade).
Getting marijuana is now easy enough that almost anybody who sets his will to it can score.
Where this marijuana comes from is a different bothersome question. It used to be clandestine local growers, who varied in their viciousness. Now Mexican thugs have pumped the country full of cheap and strong marijuana, and we see someone kidnapped daily in Phoenix because of it. (That poor person should move to Maine. Bada-bing.)
Like the failed alcohol prohibition, it seems to have become a question of not whether, but how, people will get their pot.
I don’t want to have to deal or try to converse with someone that is somewhere off in space.
I am not going to comment on the merits of the argument, but the statement above seems dubious at best.
Look at all the statists on freerepublic.
Sounds like any democrat to me. What's the diff?
They are currently using the drug war to revoke the Second Amendment.
The Liberal-terrorists need to give up on the lie that it will generate billions in taxes. It wont.
I would rather put up with some stoners on the streets, rather than have our drug demand funding the transformation of Mexico into a narco-state.
As other people have pointed out, even with drugs being legal, you can penalize certain behaviors, such as drugging and driving, with the severity of the penalties increasing with the harder or more exotic drugs (heroin, LSD, etc.).
As for druggies being on public assistance, that’s a good argument for ENDING public assistance. They can keep their minds clear and work like the rest of us, or they can get stoned and sit in the gutter on THEIR dime, not OURS.
BTW: If you don’t live in California you may not realize that marijuana is already “decriminalized” in California. Posession of less than one ounce (28.4 grams) will result in a misdameanor ticket, the outcome of which will generally be a fine. You will not be arrested. Also remember that in California an attorney can handle misdameanor matters, and you need not appear as a defendant.
So basically, the situation, as it exists now, is that many police are not at all intersted in small amounts of marijuana. You will often hear tales of police simply confiscating the drugs, and/or directing the person caught to destroy them in front of the officers, since actually writing the misdameanor ticket will require additional paperwork.
Excellent article.
There’s a reason why they call it “dope.”
The idea that legalization would somehow improve the economy is silly. We need legalization to save the Constitution from the shredder and to deprive violent drug cartels of a major source of revenue.