Daily Skiff

First, cocaine should also be legal as well as marijuana. An individual should have the right to put into his body whatever he wishes as long as he does not hurt anyone else. Making it illegal also gives gangs and mobsters there revenues.

Second, I was hoping to God that you weren't going to use the tax revenue bit but I was disappointed. The government has plently of other things to tax and does not need marijuana to get it's revenue.

You also talk about taxes like they create wealth. They don't. They are simply taking one man's money and putting it in another. If taxes did create wealth, then we would tax everything 100 percent and then tax that money. You can see that would be nonsense.

Your on the right track with legalization, you just need to reevaluate what your argument is.

We are actually doing a better job of enforcing the regulation laws over obacco cigarettes than the total ban on the marijuana market, and we are doing so at a fraction of the cost to taxpayers.

Listen, medical marijuana isn't a trick and it's pathetic to pretend that the people trying to legalize marijuana are behaving surreptitiously when we've been screaming "legalize marijuana" at the top of our lungs for a damn long time now. You can't blame us for the fact that the medical marijuana debate necessarily serves to illustrate so much about the absurdity of marijuana prohibition as a whole. Nor does it in any way undermine our credibility when we place the interests of seriously ill patients before those of casual users when setting our political priorities. Critics of medical marijuana advocacy often accuse us of demanding unusual regulatory exceptions for marijuana, complaining that it hasn't been approved by the FDA and that the whole concept of medicine by referendum is absurd, as though there exists any other path for us to take. It really shouldn't be necessary to explain all the ways in which endemic and entrenched anti-pot prejudice across numerous government agencies renders preposterous any notion that we could just play this out by the usual rules. We've been trying that for decades now and we get cheated at every turn, so you can save your appeals to procedure. Marijuana can't be treated like other medicines, because it's nothing like them. It was here first and it's vastly cheaper, safer, and more versatile than its modern pharmaceutical counterparts. It's a bush that just grows out of the ground and what we want is for the government to stop arresting people who've found ways to use it. There's nothing even the least bit complicated or disingenuous about that. Those who now lament the cascading political momentum of medical marijuana as some sort of grand conspiracy have it exactly backwards. Marijuana was prohibited through a vicious series of outrageous lies and perversions of science. We all know the history of racism, demagoguery, and blind hysteria that somehow turned a helpful plant into a scary satanic deathbush. From the very beginning, there has never been a time when any of this made sense. To now stand proudly atop the pedestal of prohibition while questioning our credibility and our motives is just insane. Yes, there is a massive lie at the center of this debate, but we're not the ones telling it. The drug war itself is the true Trojan Horse that masquerades as a symbol of health and safety, while harboring destruction within its folds.

Let's get the drug cartels out of the marijuana business and cut off their money pipeline. Let's allow ordinary Americans to grow a little marijuana for personal use. Limit the number of plants, and put a small user-fee on it to cover administrative costs, something like a fishing license; $100 per year for a dozen plants.
It's a win-win.