Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Weed
I found this blog post over at Mother Jones fascinating. It discusses legalization of marijuana and some of the nitty gritty details therein. Long story short, it asks the question: Do we want to completely legalize marijuana and have multinational corporations targeting children with advertising campaigns with the sole purpose of getting them to start smoking the ganja? Probably not. One option, as illustrated in the post, is to make the growing and giving away of marijuana legal, but simply make the sale illegal, in effect stopping corporate advertising efforts in their tracks while still legalizing the product. It certainly strikes me as a plausible solution. Thoughts?
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4 comments:
I've always heard people argue that if pot were legal it could be taxed to hell (like cigarettes) and the revenues, if nothing else, could be added to our booming surplus. If the sale is illegal you lose the tax revenues, but I guess you still gain the savings of a smaller "drug war." I'm not sure which is more significant.
Unfortunately, as soon as pot is legal it's just not going to be as cool... The chill potheads will just be dirty smokers. Maybe that'd be a good thing.
Micah,
I think you're right about the taxation adding revenue to state coffers. However, my thought on the "drug war" costs are the opposite. If marijuana were legal, then the costs of the "drug war" would be reduced b/c we wouldn't be spending millions on catching small time marijuana dealers and putting them behind bars... not to mention the costs on society for taking those (mainly) men out of any semblance of home life.
Maybe that is a good thing. Still, going back to the original post, the argument that we don't want huge ad campaigns pushing weed on kids strikes me as very persuasive. We don't need yet another drug (tobacco and alcohol) added to the list of "things high schoolers can't do until they are old enough to die fighting in the military."
No, no, legal weed would save loads on the reduced law enforcement expenses (maybe I mis-typed before). And after more thought, I think the benefits of keeping pipes out of Cracker-Jack boxes (or any less extreme marketing scheme) far outweighs the costs of foregone tax revenue. I think it would be hard to keep at least some form of dealer out of it, but then again, I'd rather have the community gardener than a marketing powerhouse doing the dealing.
Nice shout out to the community gardener! In a proposal such as this, it's not the small time dealers that are a worry, just the big boys, as your post implies.
Mentioning "pipes" and "cracker-jack boxes" in the same sentence is a bad idea and a good joke.
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