It isn't a "cure" it is a "treatment", and no, it is *NOT* worse than the disease. The disease will destroy a nation. We know this because it already happened once in history.
Posted on 01/28/2015 5:25:32 AM PST by Wolfie
Legal Marijuana Blooms into the Fastest-Growing Industry in America
Back in 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article about how cannabis (specifically, hemp) was the new "billion dollar crop." It may have taken nearly eight decades, but according to a report released this week, the legal cannabis industry is now worth well over twice that.
The report by ArcView Market Research, the research arm of cannabis-focused angel investor network The ArcView Group, finds that the U.S. cannabis industry has a value of $2.7 billion. That's a 74 percent increase from 2013, making it the fastest-growing industry in the country.
If all 50 states were to legalize sales of recreational marijuana, the market would be larger than the organic food industry, with a value of $36.8 billion, ArcView's "State of Legal Marijuana Markets" report finds.
To date, 23 states have legalized medical marijuana. Colorado and Washington state have legalized recreational cannabis for adults over 21. Voters in Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. approved recreational cannabis as well, but the retail industry is not yet off the ground in Alaska and Oregon and Congress has banned retail sales in the nation's capital.
The report predicts that in the next five years 14 other states will adopt recreational sales and two more states will legalize medical cannabis. ArcView says by 2019, the new legal markets and "maturation of the existing markets" will produce a $10.8 billion market.
Interestingly enough, Colorado is not the biggest cannabis market, according to the report. California, which legalized medical sales in 1996, leads all states at $1.3 billion. The report also says that five states now boast marijuana markets worth more than $100 million.
The success in Colorado and Washington is not due to corporate America. Instead, the legal marijuana market in America has grown thanks to entrepreneurs and private investors--"sophisticated players" who "capitalized on the seismic shifts occurring in the regulatory environment," CEO of the ArcView Group Troy Dayton says in the report.
As the recreational marijuana market in those states continues to mature, public perception also has changed, Dayton says. "In the last year, the rise of the cannabis industry went from an interesting cocktail conversation to being taken seriously as the fastest growing industry in America," he says. "At this point, it's hard to imagine that any serious businessperson who is paying attention hasn't spent some time thinking about the possibilities in this market."
A tragic mistake? About 100 times a day somewhere in this nation, police will smash in a door and charge into a citizens home with sub machine guns. The cure is far worse than the disease.
Perhaps you do not care for the 4th amendment protections we used to have but I do. There are two ways to get a person to conform to your ideals. Force or persuasion. People demanding government force be used to make people conform is not working. In fact it backfired.
Gun grabbers blame guns for crime. Drug warriors blame a plant for crime. Drug warriors and gun grabbers are cast in the same mold.
It isn't a "cure" it is a "treatment", and no, it is *NOT* worse than the disease. The disease will destroy a nation. We know this because it already happened once in history.
Of course, you already know that, but like the good little jack-booted thug drug warrior you are, you have a statist agenda to push.
You are an idiot. It is a waste of my time to argue with you.
False - this only applies to states that have legalized.
The core issue is that underage users are most seriously impacted.
Only the federal government can protect children? Delusional bootlicking.
Didn't you get the memo? All illegal drugs are equally evil - but when discussing them one must shrilly deride any mention of the legal drug alcohol.
Thank you very much for stating the obvious.
And the opium problem was, of course, solved when legitimate German pharmaceutical company Bayer introduced their newly patented product - Heroin.
Are we trying to go with other successes such as opium poppies in Afghanistan?
So all of your scientific evidence is from a site named after pizza-man?
Find a life that doesn’t involve trying to control others.
Dangit....I normally check before I link.
“What, no blame for the Parents who ran a drug house?”
They weren’t! The cops found no drugs.
You know those police brutality stories that pop up here all the time? The ‘oops’ stories, where a cop kills or injures an innocent person? The ‘violation of civil rights’ stories? The dead dog stories?
The vast majority of those stories begin with the WOD.
No, they begin with people not being taught morality as children. Often such people come from fatherless families and never learn to do things like "obey laws" when they are young.
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and so on are good examples of this.
So you are a "statist", "good little jack-booted drug warrior", on other drugs, just not pot?
SWAT didn’t start because of drugs being illegal, and legalizing drugs won’t fix our police problems.
A point that is lost on these people. What they don't understand with their myopic focus on pot, is that their arguments for legalizing it apply to all other drugs as well.
Another point lost on them is that people start with pot, and some eventually transfer to stronger drugs. The place to break the chain of addiction is before it gets started.
Once the government decides to making a recreational drug legal, then it's just harder to justify why we have laws against meth.
In Colorado, the cartels have given up on selling weed. They cannot compete with the free market. As a person must show ID proving legal age, (21) no children can buy weed. Just like liquor stores.
In Arizona there are no go zones in National forests. The cartels grow weed there. They kill trespassers.
In Colorado, weed is grown in greenhouses. It is the fastest growing industry in a failing economy. That is what the thread is about.
The United States was founded by people who wanted to be left alone. Freedom used to be important. Giving up essential freedom (like the 4th amendment) for false security cost us dearly.
We tried it your way since 1973. Colorado decided to do something different.
Legal Marijuana Blooms into the Fastest-Growing Industry in America. That is the title of the thread. Opium is not included.
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