Legalizing Marijuana... are we ready?

If I were to put some thought into my post I would have said exactly this. However, you're forgetting one key point: If cocaine, weed, heroin, etc were legal their black market value would either plummet or disappear entirely.

Remember how prohibition resulted in skyrocketing black market alcohol prices, which resulted in petty low level thieves having the extremely lucrative option of all things black market alcohol trade? How petty two-bit thieves became mobster bosses, incredibly rich, incredibly powerful, and able to throw their weight around with little police opposition?

The international drug trade is the same exact situation, except that the cartels get even more money, they're even more heavily armed, and they've been doing it for longer than the prohibition lasted. I'll bet anything that at least part of the reason why drugs are still illegal is at least in part due to international bribery of politicians to keep them illegal.

If drugs were legal, how would cartel bosses feed their children? It would be horrible.

 

I don't know if this has been mentioned, because I don't feel like going through 11 pages-

The original spelling was marihuana. Feds changed it to a "j" to stigmatize the plant with Mexican immigrants.

Marijuana was originally criminalized because publishing giant Hearst had a large investment in a timber company tied to his newspaper and used his clout.

We're so scared of weed that we'll even ban the growing of shit that just looks like it, hemp for instance which we import from Canada. I repeat, we increase the trade deficit by importing a crop that grows naturally in the US because it looks like another plant. It's ok to use it once harvested, you just can't grow it.

What next? Are we going to ban flour and import it from Mexico?


And to rebuke the "Gateway" drug argument- If pot was legal, it'd be less of a "gateway" drug because the stigma wouldn't be as strong.

 

I believe the argument goes along the lines of: Since it's less stigmatized to do/get weed, the average (ab)user would feel less scared to jump into harder stuff like Hash, Mushrooms, Acids and eventually hard drugs.

A lot of kids do E these days, but all the research I've conducted point toward irreversible brain damage. I'm pro-Marijuana but I can safely say that 90% of the people I know who pop E have and will smoke weed.

 

No one ever talks about alcohol or tobacco being a gateway drug because they're legal, lifting the taboo.

My point exactly.

 

Is this an argument or a circle jerk? You seem to be agreeing with each other and repeating the same point over and over.

Damn stoners. Get a haircut.

 

Contrary to popular belief, Marijuana is not legal in The Netherlands. There are laws prohibiting its sale and transit, but not its use and posession. In effect, use is allowed despite the fact that something illegal must have occured somewhere down the line. It's fucked up, and the debate about whether it should be fully legalized or banned altogether has been going on for an eternity. Neither camp is getting anywhere, so the stalemate has, and will be, the status quo until the international community lifts the taboo on pot. We don't have a taboo anymore, it's just international pressure now. So please, legalize that shit already.

 

I apologize if this has been mentioned in this thread already since I skimmed through most of the posts.

The reason weed became illegal was purely for economic reasons and nothing else. I'll try to summarize it the best I can:

When hemp was the new cotton in the mid-to-late 1800's, the main guy (CEO or owner or whatever) of the cotton industry got pissed because he realized his black slaves were going to end up being useless as well as the cotton they were picking. He somehow picked up on weed being smoked by those goddamn, brown mexicans, and basically got the media and government to spew propaganda about it. All those scenes like the first scene of pineapple express is actually not too much of an exaggeration. It's illegal because our white ancestors were just a bunch of douchebags. You thought Reefer Madness was bad? When weed was first heard about in the states, it was known as the drug that blacks and mexicans smoke to rape all the white women.

But, I think it's getting better. Even in the 90's, weed was considered something bad even by the people who smoked it. Today, more and more people are waking up to the realization that it's relatively harmless. Good for us.

 

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