Making Money on Alcohol or Marijuana?

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I personally don't like drugs at all. I do like to drink beer and the occasional glass of wine with a good meal. I think that moderation in all things is the only rational approach. If we're talking about regulation, restrict access to hard liquors along with hard drugs. I wouldn't mind going to a little extra effort to get the cognac and the dark rum that I sometimes use in cooking.

A lot of stupid propaganda circulated back in the 1930s about marijuana because big companies like DuPont wanted to see the production industrial hemp go away, since it cut into their profits. It's rather ridiculous when you think about it, because there is such a small percentage of THC in industrial hemp is so low, it's useless as an intoxicant.

tried it, didn't work, ended up being an epic failure

just like the War On Drugs has now turned out to be

stop trying to control what someone willingly puts into their own body

I didn't say that I advocated regulation of hard alcohol, I said IF you had to. And as far as hard drugs go, anything that leads to crime, and they do, is bad for society and hence is bad for us. This, however, is a problem for you flatlanders, not for me as I have 7-1/2 acres and a clear field of fire.

This would be funny if it hadn't had such a powerful effect.

Do tell.

I wouldn't be so sure.

prohibition is what leads to crime

I think there needs to be some control over certain schedule one drugs, just not marijuana because it's not much different than alcohol and yet all this jail time over possessing or selling it has ruined so many lives. Plus, instead of suing another state, if these Tea Party Repuplicans in this state are willing to walk the walk as they say, they should be appalled at the mere mention of one state suing another. Why would they turn their back on commerce in favor of suing another state? Almost makes them sound like liberals, don't it?

What impedes marijuana's legality is the fact so many billions have been spent to control it's distribution and consumption, and so many lives have been ruined by overly harsh prison sentences because of it, last thing the criminal justice system wants is for everyone to say, you know what? Weed's not a big deal. Just let people smoke it, sell it, without hassling them. Legalize it. Suddenly, all this money spent on control and the wrecked lives are meaningless because we are admitting it was never that bad all along. The entire war on weed has been a big fat lie. That's the real reason it isn't legal.

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 07 Sep 2015, 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Most of the problems associated with drugs come about from prohibition and could be greatly alleviated by the legal regulation and medicalizing drug addiction as opposed to criminalizing it. Dirty needles, what it was cut with, dosing, gang turf, it's all prohibition.

Some drugs truly are horrid with or without legalizing. I don't support them being legal. I will not believe any argument in favor of them being legal because we already have some of them legal, like Oxycontin and methadone to name two, and people OD on those all the time so no. Legalizing will not stop people from ODing. They will just take it until they are unconscious and dead like they do now. Won't change a thing and might even make insidiously evil drugs like heroin, which looks like dried piles of horse dung, to be honest, more widely available. I cannot support that. People die more of Oxycontin and Methadone than heroin now and guess what? The former two are LEGAL, not schedule 1. No good comes from them being legal since we see more OD deaths from them than heroin. If heroin becomes legal, you would see a huge explosion in overdoses. People will just take it until they die. That's what it does. No amount of legalizing will alter what it does.

By definition, no?

You say:
"Suddenly, all this money spent on control and the wrecked lives are meaningless because we are admitting it was never that bad all along. The entire war on weed has been a big fat lie. That's the real reason it isn't legal."

I agree. And as you know the legal system including cops, DAs, etc. has long pursued this war/attack with something approaching religious fervor. Lives of innocent people have been lost on both sides of the battle and it's very hard for warriors (which is how the police see themselves) to turn their backs on (what may be to them) a holy cause and fallen brothers and sisters. There is also a huge financial incentive for the entire legal industry to keep the "war" alive and people locked up.

Heroin is not hard to find, drugs in general are not hard to find and this is coming from someone that is not a social butterfly to say the least, it would be a lot easier for me to get heroin than it would be oxycontin or methadone as I do not need to go thru a doctor to get it. I don't go and do heroin not because its illegal, I don't do it because I care about my health and seen what it has done to people I cared about. ODing is exactly the problem regulation could help solve, people would actually know what they are putting into their body

I agree, but I'm not so pessimistic about the future of marijuana specifically. These groups will fight legalization with a fervor since it's a business for them, but at the end of the day we live in a democratic republic, they don't get final say in our laws.

Perhaps it's because I live in Colorado and we've done it, but I think the American people will eventually demand to stop wasting money on such a useless and never ending cause. I mean chicken little came out screaming here about 3 years ago when we had legalization up for referendum, but it's been 3 years and the sky still has not fallen. People will see the logical approach we've taken here and want to adopt it. At the end of the day what really matters is that we took a law that was costing our state's taxpayers approx. 30 million dollars a year for enforcement and turned it into an approx. 55 million dollar a year boon to the state coffers. All that with relatively few side effects. We don't have a crime problem, we don't have people dying on the streets, about the worse you hear is some jackass deciding to give granny a laced brownie without her knowledge and now she needs to visit Mickey D's for some munchies. And to be honest, that crap was going on well before legalization.

Not necessarily since heroin is somewhat dubious anyway. It looks like it is literally mixed with horse dung. I have my doubts much will change when it becomes legal and right now the legal opioids are preferred. People look for heroin when they cannot get what's legal but it's far easier to go to a pill mill and talk to a doctor than it is to ask around for heroin and then get this bag of stuff that looks like it came from someone's unprocessed compost pile.

My point is, the legality doesn't change a thing with opioids because people just take them until they die. Opioids have a reputation for causing this condition which is why they are all pretty horrid even though some are legal. Some people have to stay on methadone forever and never fully recover from opioid addiction. Their brains are completely damaged by it to the point they stay in recovery forever. It's best to not go down that road in the first place and if weed can help people from going there, and I have seen it help people that I have known from wanting to go further, along with the drug Ecstacy, I say legalize the weed.

I've seen two many young kids looking older than me due to heroin. However, the discussion is about weed. Does smoking pot lead to taking hard drugs? I've seen cases where it definitely has. Why should a man feel the need to smoke mariuana in the toilet at work knowing full well he'd get sacked on the spot if caught? People say it isn't addictive.

I brought up heroin in response to the suggestion all drugs should be legal which I don't support.

As far as weed leading to harder drugs, I doubt the notion people start out with weed then go onto other things. I think what they do is try a bunch of stuff and they talk to other people, find out what they like. When I was a teenager, this process screened out heroin because no one liked it back then, so people were not smoking pot and saying, hey I want some heroin now. They were saying, don't ever bring heroin around here. They didn't want that stuff in their homes and it was enough to get someone shunned. I knew people who threatened shunning if someone brought it to their homes even though they liked weed with resin, which is pretty strong stuff, and ecstacy.
Weed is one of the substances people who experiment try. They experiment and this is what can get them addicted to substances like opioids which there are many different varieties, like hydrocodone, oxycontin and methadone. The illegal variety is heroin but the more popular where I live are the legal opioids because people mistrust the way heroin looks and would rather have something that looks clean. Heroin is only a last resort, like when there's a crack down on sources for pills.
The truth about opioids, and I had an Rx for a bottle full once, is they aren't that exciting. They can help with physical pain and psychological demoralization but when I took them I didn't feel like it was the best thing in the world and like it was something I had to have everyday, at least not with Percocet.

Weed might actually prevent people from moving on to other drugs, if it is available and they don't have a fear of going to jail over it. That way they can just smoke it when they feel like it, it's a cheap thrill and it might actually fulfill that need to be doing something like that so they can be satisfied with smoking or ingesting it or whatever.

As far as what weed does to the mind, with resin it's not worse than being drunk. Same sort of thing. Hemp-type weed doesn't even have an effect. It does nothing. So it can't be worse than alcohol yet look at what people have to go through just for possessing or selling it. Even some legal drugs are worse than it is, like Oxycontin, yet if you can get a pill mill doctor to write you an Rx for Oxycontin, you have a perfectly legal supply you won't get in trouble for.