Well said. I will add that I’m 100% treating Marijuana as a medical drug, I just think it should be 100% legal for all who can legally buy cigarettes or alcohol.
Also while legal cannabis will indeed be a tax boon two fold. #1. People will prefer legal weed over the criminal stuff and #2: So much public money is wasted on chasing after pot smokers, growers, and smugglers.
Still be careful with taxing it, as if the legal stuff is SO much more expensive than the illegal stuff people will just continue to buy it on the black market, much like states who heavily tax cigarettes simply buy them illegally.
I personally think the push back against legalizing the stuff is the vestige of the baby boomer population. They may have smoked a TON of the stuff in the 60s, but they sure don’t want their kids or grand kids doing it….because that’s totally different!
As a baby boomer (1951) I tend to disagree. Most of the boomers I know are in favor of legalization. However there are plenty of boomers I don’t know. I’ve been advocating its legalization for decades myself. Although I was rather low-key about that while I was in the Army. 🙂
I hope you’re right, but the legal progression and sentiment about Obama’s increase in the drug war.
Still I hope you’re right.
One thing I fear is the ATF getting their mitts on it and regulating Marijuana just like how they got to be revenue’s for tobacco and booze.
THIS is the guy that needs to be on all the media talking about this subject. He is articulate, well spoken, well researched, and his intelligence and knowledge are obvious as soon as you hear him speak. Visually, he presents well, (clean and well-groomed) but for a real national campaign he would need to dress up a bit and (unfortunately) lose the beard and trim his hair a bit.*
* There’s nothing actually wrong with his beard or hairstyle, but on this subject it brings too much of a visual tie-in to the stereotypical image of the “bearded long-haired hippie druggie”, and will distract people from the actual message, or even cause them to ignore him completely, especially in certain parts of the country (*cough* bible belt).
Or at least GROOM the beard! looks like where the beard is growing is where his body put hair. Even I (who do NOT present well as a polished media image) shave my neck and upper cheeks to keep the lines of my beard nice and clean.
Yeah he sounds solid, but LOOKS like a dirty hippie, and that IS distracting for convincing people who think they know the story, but really don’t.
I also like that he isn’t going nuts on the medical angle. So many medical groups are loaded to the gills with stoners who want to smoke and get high. California Medical marijuana is simply a purchase permit system for recreation marijuana using an (illegally issued IMHO) prescription as a permit.
No issue with it, but I know of SO many celebrities and media personalities who are open stoners, but buy their weed legally with a prescription, that apparently is issued to ANYBODY who wants one.
These are tactics IMHO similar to the anti-rights people banning scary looking rifles by conflating them with full-auto military rifles. Its dishonest and wrong, and I can’t support that, even tho I agree with their end-goal.
As a pro-leglaization person, I don’t put a lot of stock in the medical or regulation angles of the legalization discussion. They both just serve as veneer to make the idea of legal consumption more palatable to those who don’t like the idea on its face.
I especially don’t like the taxation/regulation angle. As we have seen with tobacco, taxation of that drug is very clearly used to try to regulate personal behavior by attempting to make tobacco use prohibitively expensive. We would see the same type of backdoor social engineering with a regulation/taxation scheme on marijuana.
It is my position that the government has no right to tell you what you may or may not ingest, full stop. If you don’t have that kind of basic control over your own physical body, what kind of freedom can you really claim to have?