Marijuana Price Drop Hype… Or Scare Tactics?
It seems that some are a little worried that a vote that would legalize Cannabis in California might also upset supply and demand that marijuana values could plunge by as much as 90 % and perhaps challenge the tax bonus that marijuana supporters have used to sell the proposal, a study in print Wednesday found.
An intensive study by the independent RAND Drug Policy Research Center projects some attention-grabbing possibilities if Ca in Nov becomes the second state, after Alaska, to legalize cannabis for entertaining use by adults and the first to tax commercial marijuana sales sales. Do you think marijuana should remain medical
Rand Researchers are stating Marijuana prices may well plunge from $375 an oz., within the state's present medical marijuana regulation to less than $38 per oz. prior to taxes.
Headline News shared a report that a California Democrat leader Tom Ammiamo suggests legalizing marijuana to make up for the financial loss and to build on the billion dollar financial future. Breaking sides differs, as some believe it should be legalized when others do not. Perhaps learning more about marijuana helps.
If any state makes marijuana legal, you will be taxed. That extra cash will go to the state. But when it comes to production of marijuana, no one is sure if the producers will take the route that the big tobacco companies have. During the 1980's the big tobacco companies added ingredients to certain cigarettes and protected these ingredients by “trade secrets”. Trade secrets will never be given to the people, for even I tried when speaking to a Virginia company during 1987. This can also occur for marijuana if legalized. Do you like smoking something that is intended to hook you like a fish? Probably not. Ingredients will be included if produced after being legalized. However away from the ingredients, what else did Tom forget to speak about? The price of request.
Marijuana will go up in price to suit the government needs if legalized with at least a $50 tax on one ounce. That's fair cash to spit into the system, but will it contribute to an already falling California crime statistic? When proposition K was introduced in California, the authorities did a double take. Proposition K makes prostitution more lawful by not being able to investigate prostitution. Prostitutes and johns love this idea, however the family oriented citizens could do without in hopes they do not need to purchase a therapist if their child becomes a prostitute. But what does this have to do with marijuana? Crime and therapy.
If someone can not afford marijuana, sometimes they steal to get it, in any way they can. From the expensive hydroponic high-grade to the red haired bud, crimes go hand in hand to produce potent marijuana. When the government decides to make marijuana legal, it's going to most likely be a low-grade high. And then we have the psychological and health aspects to consider.
Lung disease happens by smoke as the health care industry fights daily to have citizens quit a deadly habit. Truth is, they are tired of people harming their bodies and then running to them for help only to go back to the killer. Marijuana smoke kills just the same. Marijuana resin builds on anything that smoke comes out of. That resin lays inside of you like tobacco resin. If it isn't the smoke that stops up your system, it's the way one thinks afterwards. Once you train your brain, it's used to thinking a certain way. If you haven't spoken to someone with a slight case of ADD, just talk to someone addicted to marijuana. You may be amazed at the mood swings that they can't see, but you can. There had been a report that marijuana mid to high-grade develops schizophrenia if heavily used, but what is heavily used? Daily. And once you become addicted to the company (factory) produced marijuana, the manufacturers will make sure you come back for more because they want your money and could care less how much therapy you pay for. The government would be happy too because all they want is your money. Some can be sold on this idea of legalizing marijuana, however others are not.
Honestly, marijuana, I feel should not be sold period. I have seen people pick up the slack of the addicted ones. This is when stoners stone me, aim high. But forget what I think, what do you think?
Ca.State Marijuana Law Vs. Federal Marijuana Law
Can anyone else point out the biggest problem with the Nov. vote in California to legalize marijuana… That’s right, the Fed’s. How can CA. legalize marijuana, tax marijuana, and regulate marijuana at the state level when the federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis… period. California can abolish its own cannabis laws, leaving enforcement up to the feds, chances are that no one wants’ that. But Californian’s can't legalize a federal felony. As a result, any MMJ club paying California taxes on cannabis sales or filing cannabis related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. I’m not sure about you, but that hardly sounds like a good idea.
Marijuana was outlawed in 1937, to mostly a religious outpouring.
“Smoking marijuana might cause you to fall under the influence of listening to jazz! I believe that it was even said on the floor of Congress that marijuana had to be banned because smoking it might make a black man look at a white woman twice. And let's not forget that U.S. Treasury Department funded documentary film, called, “Reefer Madness!” So marijuana was outlawed as devil weed in 1937.”
This information was taken from: http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/congress/2503/lyrics01.html
Why would the government outlaw a drug that kills… ZERO people? Because it's moral? Because it's right? Because to control the population why legalize something that won't put pending death on people? Why not, in the same thought process, have cigarettes and alcohol which kill thousands of people every year?
Besides, a man on Jack Daniels' will think about killing you, and a split second later may actually TRY to kill you. It only takings a little bit to change the inhibitions of a completely drunk person. On the other hand a person on marijuana, even if they think about killing you, will most likely only use the energy to get off the couch for a hamburger.
What's the difference here? Marijuana is probably the only drug that you can turn your back to, and not fear getting stabbed or shot. Crack? Cocaine? Alcohol? Speed? You can almost expect an attack if someone is angry at you under the influence of one of these drugs. Cigarettes? You can EXPECT to have to become addicted to the nicotine, and keep choking down the various chemicals that are in them.
On that point, marijuana is only slightly, mentally addictive. So if you smoke it everyday, and stop, you may feel a little in the dumps for a few days, but things will get back to normal very quickly. There are no physical withdrawls to pot, unless you want to call 'moving around more' a withdrawl.
Jim Stillman wrote in this article :
“The basic Federal statute regulating cannabis is the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which describes drugs as being under one of five classes or schedules. Cannabis is considered a “Schedule I” substance, one that has a high potential for abuse, no accredited medical use, and a lack of accepted safety. (One may, and many have, questioned that description of cannabis, but that's where the law is now.)
In United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, decided in 2001, the Supreme Court held that “medical necessity” was not a defense to a prosecution for the producing and distribution of cannabis to ill persons. The Court said that Congress had made cannabis a Schedule I drug and that was that!”
So what is so bad about marijuana? It won't kill you. Why is it a Schedule I drug? It may increase your waist size, but with a country full of overweight people it may show you just how many… May 'recreationally' use this product.
California Cannabis Vote: What will the Fed's Do?
Can anyone else point out the biggest problem with the Nov. vote in California to legalize marijuana… That’s right, the Fed’s. How can CA. legalize cannabis tax marijuana, and regulate cannabis at the state level when the federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis… period. California can abolish its own marijuana laws leaving enforcement up to the feds, chances are that no one wants’ that. But Californian’s can't legalize a federal felony. As a result, any MMJ club paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing marijuana-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. I’m not sure about you, but that hardly sounds like a good idea.
Will the California budget crisis accomplish the long cherished goal among libertarians of legalizing marijuana? San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano certainly hopes so, for he has offered legislation legalizing and taxing marijuana.
Under the proposed legislation, every Californian over the age of 21 would be able to openly purchase marijuana after paying a hefty tax. The tax would consist of a special fifty dollar an ounce levy along with the normal state sales taxes. It is estimated that legally sold and taxed marijuana would bring in $1.3 billion in revenues to the state of California.
According to a Zogby Poll commissioned by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) a growing number of people support the legalization and taxing of marijuana.
“When asked: “Should marijuana be taxed and legally regulated like alcohol and cigarettes to help raise money for public services and to reduce law enforcement costs?”, voters responded: 44% Yes, 52% No, and 4% Undecided.
“Surprisingly high support was reported in the West, where voters favored legalization 58% - 36%. However, the significance of this margin is questionable due to the relatively small number of respondents (232). Easterners were nearly divided - 48% Yes, 49% No - while other regions were strongly opposed.
“A similar Zogby/NORML poll in 2006 found only 36% of Americans in support of legalization, with 55% opposed.”
Libertarians and even some conservatives have maintained that the current regime of criminalizing drug abuse is counterproductive and futile. Drug legalization advocates compare the current “war on drugs” to the 1920s era prohibition, during which alcohol was banned, leading to wide spread law breaking by ordinary people and the rise of organized crime. They suggest, for instance, that marijuana is a relatively benign recreational narcotic, compared to alcohol and especially tobacco. Marijuana also has some beneficial medical properties, such as glaucoma and the pain and nausea surrounding chemotherapy.
There may well be a case for legalizing and taxing marijuana. On the other hand, many drug advocates suggest that all illegal drugs, including cocaine and heroin, should also be legalized. People, they maintain, have a right to put any substance into their bodies that they want, even ones that are unhealthy.
There is a joke that the test of a true libertarian is whether he or she believes that crystal meth should be available to school children from vending machines. The proper libertarian answer is that only if the said vending machines are operated by the private sector.
The advocates for legalizing hard drugs ignore the societal cost of drug addiction. People addicted to cocaine, heroin, or crystal meth simply are not able to function after a time. Legalization will cut costs for law enforcement and deny organized crime a source of revenue. But health care, rehabilitation, and other costs would remain and perhaps even increase.
Libertarians would respond, well, fine, drug addicts should pay for those costs. In the real world, that is not going to happen, though.
As for California legalizing marijuana, traditionally the federal government has taken a dim view of states getting wobbly on illegal drugs. On the other hand, Barack Obama promised during the campaign that he would not interfere with the states concerning drug enforcement.
Will the time come when, at least in California, one can take out a joint at ones favorite coffee shop and light up? There is another problem, which cigarette smokers are very familiar with. Because of concerns over second hand smoke, the places where one can light up anything are getting few and far between. It may be that one day one can have the right to own and use marijuana, just not the right to do it just about anywhere.
Of course there is always brownies.
Source: Legalizing marijuana could help California get out of debt, assemblyman says, Kelly Bush, MSNBC, February 24th, 2009
New Poll Finds Growing Support for Legalization, California NORML, February 19th, 2009
Legal Cannabis Price Drop Propaganda…Or fact?
It seems that some are a little worried that a vote that would legalize Cannabis in California might also upset supply and demand that marijuana values could plunge by as much as 90 % and perhaps challenge the tax bonus that cannabis supporters have used to sell the proposal, a study in print Wednesday found.
The study by the independent RAND Drug Policy Research Center projects some attention-grabbing possibilities if Ca in Nov becomes the second state, after Alaska, to legalize cannabis for entertaining use by adults and the first to tax commercial marijuana sales sales. Do you think marijuana should remain medical
Rand Researchers are stating Cannabis prices may well plunge from $375 an oz., within the state's present medical cannabis regulation to less than $38 per oz. prior to taxes.
What is wrong with the War on Drugs?
Six recent reports - from the American Enterprise Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, The Sentencing Project, a Harvard University economics professor, and the U.S. Department of Justice - point out the failures and steep costs of marijuana prohibition and call for a new approach.
I. Its almost certainly unconstitutional:
Unlawful searches and seizures are not permitted - unless cops are searching for drugs, which are not legal property and therefore not protected. No self-incrimination - unless it's a drug test. No cruel and unusual punishment - unless you were caught with cocaine. And so our two greatest bulwarks against tyranny, checks and balances and the Bill of Rights, are out the drug war window. More than 700,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges last year, and more than 5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the past decade. Almost 90 percent of these arrests are for simple possession, not trafficking or sale. This is a misapplication of the criminal sanction that invites government into areas of our private lives that are inappropriate and wastes valuable law enforcement resources that should be focused on serious and violent crime.
II. It is not working:
After a third of a century of escalating penalties against marijuana and of antimarijuana propaganda, marijuana has reached an unprecedented peak of popularity. Prohibition does not work. As the United States learned from 1920 to 1933, it didn't work with alcohol. As the country has been learning since 1914, it doesn't work with heroin. It isn't working today with marijuana, LSD, or any of the other illicit drugs. Nor is prohibition likely to prove more effective in the future. What prohibition does accomplish is to raise prices and thus to attract more entrepreneurs to the black market. If the drug is addicting and the price escalation is carried to outrageous extremes (as in the case of heroin), addicts resort to crime to finance their purchases–– at a tragic cost, not only in dollars but in community disruption. What prohibition also achieves is to convert the market from relatively bland, bulky substances to more hazardous concentrates which are more readily smugglable and marketable–– from opium smoking to heroin mainlining, from coca leaves to cocaine, from marijuana to hashish.
III. It is wasting money:
“As currently implemented, American drug policies are unconvincing,” Reuter and Boyum write. “They are intrusive … divisive … and expensive, with an approximate $35 billion annual expenditure on drug control … yet they leave the nation with a massive drug problem, greater than that of any other Western nation.” Reuter and Boyum call for, among other proposals, eliminating criminal penalties associated with marijuana and drastically increasing emphasis on drug treatment instead of incarceration. In fiscal year (FY) 2004 alone, the federal government spent nearly $4 billion to combat marijuana. Despite spending billions of dollars over the years to enforce the prohibition of marijuana, use and perception of the drug are little different now than they were 30 years ago. Despite record deficits, U.S. taxpayers continue to watch as year after year tax dollars go up in smoke funding expensive but ineffective government programs intended to reduce marijuana use. The “Federal Marijuana Policy: A Preliminary Assessment,” released June 28, 2005 by Taxpayers for Common Sense assesses the cost of the nation's anti-marijuana efforts and the effect those efforts have had on marijuana use and finds the program to have been a failure, noting that increased federal spending on marijuana has accompanied increased use. The report singles out as particularly wasteful and ineffective marijuana arrests (which have not stemmed marijuana usage rates), the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's youth anti-drug media campaign, and student drug testing programs.
Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcoholic beverages would produce combined savings and tax revenues of between $10 billion and $14 billion per year, finds a June 2005 report by Dr. Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard University. Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures on prohibition enforcement - $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels (Miron’s conservative estimates). Revenue from taxation of marijuana sales would range from $2.4 billion per year if marijuana were taxed like ordinary consumer goods to $6.2 billion if it were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.
Marijuana prohibition costs law enforcement a minimum of 2,400,000 man-hours annually. These are policeman hours and fiscal costs that could be better spent targeting violent crime. For example, following the adoption of marijuana decriminalisation in California in 1976, the state saved an average of $95.8 million annually. Of course, these fiscal costs do not end with an arrest. In many instances, police continue to investigate the facts of the case, prosecutors prepare the case for trial or negotiate a plea bargain (estimated at between five and ten hours per case), and judges and court personnel engage in a trial or accept a plea agreement in open court. These prosecutorial costs alone likely cost Americans hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Most Americans do not want to spend public funds incarcerating non-violent marijuana offenders, at a cost of $23,000-$45,000 per year. In 1995, nearly 600,000 of the total 1.5 million drug arrests in America were for marijuana offences. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that between 25 and 40 percent of the total $31 billion annual costs are related to marijuana prohibition. Using this basic calculation, marijuana prohibition costs the American taxpayers between $7.5 and $10 billion annually in enforcement alone.
IV. It is overly nationalized:
In fact, as workers in the drug scene confirm, the “drug problem” is a collection of local problems. The predominant drugs differ from place to place and from time to time. Effective solutions to problems also vary; a plan that works now for New York City may not be applicable to upstate New York and vice versa. With respect to education and propaganda, the need for local wisdom and local control is particularly pressing. Warning children against drugs readily available to them is a risky business at best, requiring careful, truthful, unsensational approaches. Warning children against drugs used elsewhere, of which they may never have heard, can be like warning them against putting beans in their ears. The role of anti-glue-sniffing warnings in popularising glue sniffing is the most striking of many examples.
V. It is disproportionately incarcerating minorities:
Marijuana prohibition disproportionately impacts minorities. Blacks and Hispanics are over-represented both in the numbers of arrests and in the numbers of marijuana offenders incarcerated. Blacks and Hispanics make up 20 percent of the marijuana smokers in the United States, but comprise 58 percent of the marijuana offenders sentenced under federal law last year. What started out disgraceful remains so today, as the United States continues to imprison innocent people because of victimless crimes. African Americans comprise 12% of the nation's population, and 13% of its drug users, yet they account for one third of all drug-related arrests and nearly two thirds of all convictions. In his September 1989 drug policy speech, President Bush promised to double the federal prison population. He did, and so did President Clinton in 1996. Now, “On any given day in the U.S., more than one out of every three Black males between 18-29 are either incarcerated, on probation, on parole or under warrant for arrest. The figure for Latinos is one in six. For Whites, it is one in twenty.” State disparities are equally unjust; in Illinois, 57 percent of those sent to prison for marijuana in 1995 were black or Hispanic. In California, 49 percent of those arrested for marijuana offenses in 1994 were black or Hispanic. And in New York state, 71 percent of those arrested for misdemeanor marijuana charges in 1995 were non-white.
VI. It is causing more harm than good:
A nihil nocere (a physician must guard against doing more harm than good) guideline is needed for drug laws and law enforcement. For instance, a law-enforcement policy that converts marijuana smokers into LSD or heroin users should be abandoned. The same is true of a law that turns marijuana smokers into convicts and ex-convicts, with all that the prison experience and the prison record implies. Nor can much be said in favor of a law-enforcement policy that results in raising the price of a nickel's worth of heroin to five dollars–– with the further result that addicts must steal vast amounts in order to buy their heroin. A complete revision of laws and enforcement policies in the spirit of the nihil nocere principle is called for. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates the inability of laws and law enforcement to solve the drug problem, and conversely, they should not be allowed to exacerbate it. Attempts to stamp out illicit drug use tend to increase both drug use and drug damage. Here LSD is the prime example. Finally, as we have shown, efforts to stamp out one drug merely shifts users to another–– from marijuana to LSD and heroin, from heroin to alcohol.
In 1972, a blue-ribbon panel of experts appointed by President Richard Nixon and led by former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer concluded that marijuana prohibition posed significantly greater harm to the user than the use of marijuana itself.
VII. It is taking aim at the wrong drugs:
The Justice Department's 2005 “National Drug Threat Assessment” concludes that not only is the war on marijuana a failure, but police officers overwhelmingly see methamphetamine as a much greater threat than marijuana. Asked to identify the greatest drug threat in their communities, only 12 percent of local law enforcement agencies named marijuana - a figure that has been declining for years. In contrast, 36 percent named cocaine and 40 percent cited methamphetamine as the greatest threat - despite the fact that marijuana use is massively more common and despite what the report describes as “marijuana's widespread and ready availability in the United States.” Yet the government stubbornly insists marijuana is the real problem. In November 2002, ONDCP sent a letter to the nation's prosecutors declaring flatly, “Nationwide, no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana.” The report also finds “no reports of a trend toward decreased availability” anywhere in the country … Indeed, reporting from some areas has suggested that marijuana is easier for youths to obtain than alcohol or cigarettes.”
Let's resume shall we? Prohibition produces: Scare tactics, misinformation and lies, draconian criminal penalties, overcrowded prisons, racial discrimination, increased exposure to hard drugs, violent and criminalized black market, budget deficits, ruined lives, no discernable decrease in drug use, distrust in the government.
