You want to know how marijuana is going to get legalized?  It’s going to happen on the state and local level; and we have California and their defiance of federal law to thank for starting the localization movement.  The federal government, which has become nothing more than a finely tuned group of organized criminals, makes far too much on marijuana being illegal that we should just give up hope of them ever legalizing it–at most they’ll legalize medicinal marijuana, even though it looks like the pharmaceutical companies will get to push their THC pills on everyone before that happens.  But given all the fines and fees that the government pulls in from every pothead cuffed and processed, it makes zero sense to sit back and hope the aliens in Congress will ever let common sense override greed and tradition.  Besides, on the local level people actually have the ability to affect change. Continue Reading

A recent article on RasmussenReports.com entertained the idea that legalizing marijuana might actually do some good for the struggling economy. While the main focus of the piece is a recent poll stating that 40% of Americans favor legalization, it was the following excerpt that was the most interesting nugget of information in the article:

The World Health Organization estimates that 42% of Americans have tried marijuana, the highest usage level in the 17 countries it profiled. Some researchers contend that marijuana is the number one cash crop in the United States.

Three Nobel Prize winners including Milton Friedman were among the more than 500 economists who endorsed a 2005 Harvard study that concluded that legalization of marijuana “would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2 billion annually.”

Given Obama’s public support for decriminalization in 2004 as well as his appointment of former Seattle police chief, Gil Kerlikowske, as drug czar, there is hope that rational thought rather than demented ideology will dictate America’s drug policy in the future.

For more information check out the following articles: Continue Reading

So I was skimming the interwebs and I came across this website, the war on drugs clock.  Basically it breaks down just how much money our government is spending to put away non-violent offenders, and just how many of them are in jail, arrested, and a bunch of other pretty staggering numbers.

Now look at these numbers, and tell me why we are in a massive economic crisis. 17 Billion Dollars?!?!? Are you fucking kidding me? That number is absolutely unreal to me, and that is only on a Federal level.  States have spent over 27 Billion on the drug war, do they realize it’s easier than ever to walk out one’s front door and have a bag in your hand within 10 minutes?  Do they realize that this will NEVER change?  Some states have, 13 at last count, with Michigan and Massachusetts on the way.  We are slowly catching on, but it certainly isn’t fast enough.

Am I asking to completely decriminalize the plant and put it in the hands of anyone and everyone?  No, absolutely not, it could easily be regulated at least as much as alcohol is to keep it out of the hands of the younger generation before they have developed to a point where they can responsibly use the drug.  But isn’t throwing almost 40 billion dollars a year at a losing battle absolutely gut wrenching?  I’d say so, especially for the number 2 cash crop in our nation.  Marijuana and hemp could easily be MAKING us billions of dollars in taxes, and stimulating our floundering economy.  Instead we choose to sit back and be robbed blind by our governments; state and federal, on a war that is more hopeless than Iraq and Afghanistan could ever imagine to be. Continue Reading