My phone doesn't seem to allow me to use reply with quote and I have no other Internet at the moment. I was trying to quote CG in post #1032.
First off the story about the people getting reimbursed $6,400 a plant is awesome.
As far as the resistance to relaxing MJ laws in any form, there certainly is a lot of money funding it. How much do we waste in the so called war on drugs? Since pot is the most used drug a good portion of that money is used on fighting marijuana. It's a big fucking business and tons of people are making a living from it. And with the crap drug education that exists there are a lot of ignorant people who think if you try pot you'll end up a homeless junkie doing all sorts of awful things to fund your habit. That's getting better, but not much and not quickly enough. At least most people my age and younger have seen that most people who smoke do just fine in life.
I'm personally against the prohibition of all drugs. We saw what prohibition did with alcohol, it actually increased alcohol consumption. Because there was no one monitoring the manufacture it resulted in people putting all kinds of dangerous shit like wood alcohol being added or outright sold as alcohol, causing a huge jump in alcohol related health problems including blindness and death from people ingesting methanol. Worst of all it caused violent criminal gangs to take over the supply. With alcohol illegal there was no legal recourse if a deal went south. Instead of being able to sue someone for breech of contract the gangs had to use violence and hope to make an example of the person so that others would be afraid to do something. The same situation exists today with every illegal drug. Nothing is pure or of a known potency. You could buy a bundle of dope (10 bags of heroin for those who don't know) and one bag might have a bit that didn't mix properly with the cut and is 80-90% pure while the rest are only 20%. The user can be safe and do a test shot and find that one bag of the 20% gets them to where they want to be. Then they do the uncut bag and OD and quite possibly die because the stigma of using hard drugs mean people do them in isolation. Even having safe spots to use like they have in Vancouver prevents this tragedy. But we can't relax the drug laws. The current methamphetamine epidemic is MUCH MUCH worse than the pretty much worldwide post WW2 meth epidemic because back then it was pharm grade 99%+ pure. Every army that fought in WW2 was methed up. They gave it to soldiers to combat fatigue. There was one pill they made that was a combo of meth, cocaine, and oxycodone they gave to soldiers to keep them awake, alert, energetic, aggressive, and numb to pain. Afer the war there was so much stockpiled that they started marketing it to civillians. Probably half the housewives in the US were on mothers little helper that was an amphetamine a barbiturate (don't even get me started on how dangerous these are) or a combo of the two. It wasn't until we had a counterculture that used drugs that they became a "problem." I'm not in favor of people using drugs like meth and crack and heroin, but I'm not naive enough to think that people aren't going to do them regardless of their legal status. And I'm certainly not in favor of violent criminal organizations making billions from the sale of them and literally ripping countries apart (look at how much violence there is in Mexico or Columbia). If drugs were legal the violence would be hugely reduced, they could be sold known purities, potencies, and quantities. And instead of spending billions trying to do the impossible and stop people from getting high, the government could tax the shit out of them (making them legal reduces the number of middlemen who increase the price and put god knows what into them, drugs are almost all cheap to produce) without really effecting the end user price per dose. Take say half of that money and put it into funding drug treatment so help is readily available and accessable, and bank the rest. We also save because people won't be going to jail for possesing drugs. The police will be freed up to investigate actual crimes.
Even marijuana isn't safe because of prohibition. People kill over the money associated with it, people spray microscopic glass balls on pot to make it look like it has more crystals. I'm a chemist (or was before my health problems made me unable to work) so I know people who work in crime labs and they've told me that the glass thing is becoming more and more common, these are friends who have no problem with me smoking so they aren't trying to scare me straight (I've seen it in Microgram, the DEA's formerly internal journal about the analysis of seized drugs, as well. It stopped being inhouse because it got leaked so much that they make it available to the public now) it did scare me enough that a few months back I got some especially frosty nugs from a guy who quite possibly gets his shit from the kind of people who would try to improve the bag appeal at the expense of someone's health. So I asked a friend to run it on the TEM and it was straight, it was actually some of the best nugget I've had in awhile. But I was concerned about wether or not my pot was too good (not that pot can be too good) or too good to be true. Because of prohibition.
I think pot will be legalized first. And that the resultant increase in revenue fro
taxation and drop in crime, etc results in an end to prohibition. It only hurts people.
Sorry for the rant. This is an issue that makes me kinda run my mouth.
