This, and raise taxes for every other legal drug.

Or portugal. They decriminalized possesing small amounts of all drugs and the rate of overdoses for all drugs dropped while treatment levels went up.

I know a few people who are thinking about moving to california because of the lenient weed laws.

When I say tax the crap out of it, I mean tax it relative to the cost of production, and profit margin...Not so high that no one would want to buy it legally.

In a perfect scenario, legal pot is cheap enough that you can easily buy it from a legitimate source at a price that is better than home-grown varieties, but enough to ensure the government gets a heavy dose of money when you buy some from Pot-Mart.

I have no idea what the costs are to make pot, but I assume its a similar case as legal/illegal alcohol in the US. Simply put, the cost of making a still and producing the alcohol is too prohibitive to do it seriously as a bootlegger (in most cases).

This whole tax the crap out of it will not make states any money at all. They will just have to use it like the billions they already do to help those who become addict, are in their current state useless and on welfare, taking any hand out they can to get that one more puff, or just stay alive another day. Anyone who thinks the governments are actually going to profit off of it in long the run are not looking at the big picture. Just look at tobacco and alcohol. They are taxed to hell. Guess what? the goverment spends a hell of a lot more on helping and caring for thoose people than they will ever make from the taxes. There has yet to be one good reason to make yet another drug legal that cannot be easily taken away with a little bit of reasearch.

Games4Fun -

As others have said, legalization of pot in other countries hasn't equated to more addicts. In Portugal, the rate of usage has gone DOWN.

Lets not forget that after prohibition in the US, we didn't have a random wave of alcoholics.

Having said that, the government has a choice on who they help with welfare. They could simply say (as many in the public are wanting them to) that they cannot have government services if they do drugs. Making pot legal doesn't make it 'right', it just seeks to take the illegal revenue aspects out of the system.

The amount of savings to the US by legalizing pot is immense:

- $15 billion/yr in new taxes (based on California's estimate of $1.3b if pot is legalized this year)
- $1 billion/yr saved from incarceration of people jailed for marijuana drug offenses
- Lives saved by cops going after the real criminals
- Lives saved in Mexico, as cartels has less money coming into them through the drug trade

The fact is, many people are dying due to our criminalization of drugs. The cartels are murdering and raping thousands of people a few miles from our border, because we're giving them the money, instead of our own people.

BOLDED: Tobacco (with dozens of man-made ingredients) and Alcohol can kill you. Weed (That isn't laced) cannot, so comparing it to the other legal drugs is unfair.

In the Netherlands use among the 17-20something crowd went up. This lead to them closing down many of the "coffee" shops. There the law at the time I did paper was under5grams they would look the other way, or something along those lines.

Yes they do to a point have a choice on whether or not to help some of those people, but it does not just effect the addicts life. It effects whole families. I have nothing against addicts or welfare or any of that. The degree I am working on is in Human Services. These are the same people I want to help get their lifes put back on a better coarse. I am not even that far in and I have seen some people in horrible situations. Some from legal drugs some from illegal. In any case, it is always more than the addict that is affected. Do you think anyone is going to turn down the wife and couple kids who might now at least for a time be homeless because Daddy wasted his check on stupid shit? In that kind of situation it would be my job to help them in anyway I could. This could be helping them find a suitable job, places for free meals,housing, therapies to help with the coping etc etc etc. I will be gladly helping all involved as many do already. However, it is a very sad situation.

Lots of addicts and families do make it through these hardtimes, but at what cost? Every dime we save from locking them up will just get used in other ways. All the taxes put on it will be used in the same ways. I do not have the answer on how to fix these kinds of things to make it a non issue. I just think it is time to be proactive and stop being so reactive with every little thing in society. Making it legal make us that much more accepting of the drug and puts us that much further down the ladder.


"The fact is, many people are dying due to our criminalization of drugs. The cartels are murdering and raping thousands of people a few miles from our border, because we're giving them the money, instead of our own people."
What is just as sad is they will just find another way to make up this money with another drug or what have you. What is also a true is while we become more accepting of such a drug we will also take in every negative effect it causes. I do not have the current statistics at the moment, but lets atleast think about what Could happen. Increase in traffic accidents. headline POT ADDICT kills Mother of 3 in car accident. Actually lets not go down that road it just leads to me looking like I am trying to use shock to fit my agenda. Anyways, Like I said before. There is not one good reason I have heard that cannot be easily taken away with a little bit of research. Did you know at the moment there are more negative effects of using pot medically then there are positive? While this is research that needs to be on going, it is at this time a fact.

And you think marijuana is going to be any different if it is made legel? Hell, even in its current state people put crap in it. You do realize Tobacco was not always full of all this shit right? Also, where do you get Marijuana cannot kill you? Ruffly 1 joint is = to one pack of smokes in harm it does to your lungs.

Uh

I'd like to see the statistics on that one, please.

http://www.justice.gov/ndic/ Good site to look up some statistics you may or may not be interested in.

At Khuutra here is one I found within seconds of your post



Smoking marijuana is far more dangerous than smoking cigarettes, according to a group of scientists in New Zealand.

The researchers found that smoking one joint is equivalent to 20 cigarettes in terms of lung cancer.

While studies in the past have shown that marijuana can cause cancer, few have actually established a strong link between marijuana use and the actual incidence of lung cancer.

For the study, researchers interviewed 79 lung cancer patients in an effort identify the main risk factors for the disease, such as smoking, family history and occupation. The patients were questioned about alcohol and marijuana consumption.

In the high-exposure group, lung cancer risk rose by 5.7 times for patients who smoked more than a joint a day for 10 years, or two joints a day for 5 years, after adjusting for other variables, including cigarette smoking.

"Cannabis smokers end up with five times more carbon monoxide in their bloodstream (than tobacco smokers)," team leader Richard Beasley, at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, said in a news release.

The scientists also noted that marijuana could be expected to harm the airways more than tobacco since its smoke contained twice the level of carcinogens, such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons, compared with tobacco cigarettes.

"There are higher concentrations of carcinogens in cannabis smoke...what is intriguing to us is there is so little work done on cannabis when there is so much done on tobacco,” said Beasley.

"In the near future we may see an 'epidemic' of lung cancers connected with this new carcinogen. And the future risk probably applies to many other countries, where increasing use of cannabis among young adults and adolescents is becoming a major public health problem,” he added.

Study results appear in the in the European Respiratory Journal.


While looking this up for you I also found many links claiming that 1 joint= 5 smokes. Also, where I got mine for my paper I really cannot link. I used a school database we call the virtual library. If you are in College you might have something similar to it. My research included research done at Havard. It may take yo ua bit of time to find it as it is a lot of pro Pot articles, but it was a bit eye opening to me. While I was already against it, it really shows some great reasons why if you have the time and put in the effort to find WELL DONE research.