Wow! According to Huffington, the demos are considering putting marijuana legalization initiatives on the ballot in key 2012 battle ground states to bring out lots of young "progressives" (pot heads) whom they hope will also vote for BO as long as their at the polls. The Link
That's almost as desperate as putting same sex marriage initiatives on the 2004 ballots in battleground states.
If wanting to eliminate a stupid law that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to enforce, encarcerates millions of Americans and artificially creates a drug war that would be significantly lessened otherwise, while preventing the opportunity to legalize and tax heavily means I'm a pot head, then call me a pot head.
^^^ I wouldn't be so sure. Bush has lots of liberal friends and perhaps his best friend is a big Dem supporter who is married to a black woman.
Clean - can you give me a few good reasons why we should keep laws forbidding marijuana when we already allow nicotine and alcohol? i realize that you don't buy all the reasons why we should legalize it...but why should it be illegal in the first place? does it do greater damage to the user than nicotine and/or alcohol? does it do greater damage to society? this fight should be about why marijuana is illegal and not why marijuana should not be illegal (this likely makes no sense to anyone but me). we should start from a place of freedom and then make laws that are necessary and useful. the burden should be on the group wanting to outlaw something rather than the group wanting greater freedom.
Clean - well, increased personal liberty, increase in revenue, decreased expenses fighting a war on marijuana. those are just a few. it's not a magic bullet in any way, but it'll do those three things overnight. most of the folks who i come across who are against marijuana also consider themselves to be small-government conservatives. it would seem to me that a small-government conservative would want to start with liberty (legal pot) and only make things illegal if they meet a certain threshold of harm. yet time and again they come at this question from the exact opposite standpoint - essentially asking "why should we ALLOW this freedom". that doesn't sound like a small-government conservative to me....that sounds more like a nanny-state proponent, which is what they claim to be against in the first place. so let me ask you this, again - why do you view this as a question of "why should it be legal?" rather than "why should it be illegal"? personally i think the side wanting something to be illegal should have to prove up WHY we should limit a freedom rather than making those in favor of freedom prove up WHY we should have the freedom in the first place. if we wanted to stack marijuana up against already legal drugs, it's going to perform fairly well. should we just accept what our citizens in the 20s and 30s came up with (legal booze, illegal pot) without questioning why, especially when the whole negative campaign around marijuana back then has been uncovered as not only a campaign by competing drug interests, but also void of facts? if you won't answer any of that, maybe this - if you had to craft a new country from scratch, how would you decide which drugs were illegal and which were legal?
Clean, The disconnect you have with me and the other posters is- you seem to have the impression that having marijuana branded as 'illegal' actually does something significant to affect people's behavior. Thus, if someone brings up we consume alcohol, nicotine and caffeine- they do it in part because if you made it illegal we would nearly all continue to consume it- just with a little more discretion. Thus- the point I'd like to introduce to you is- if people are going to do it regardless of its legal status, why wouldn't you want to tax it, manage it, treat its abusers and remove a significant portion of the revenues from a very deadly black market we have squandered billions to fight?
I believe the drug cartels in Mexico derive 50% of their income from marijuana. This is a lot of money. I don't see how they could replace that much in illegal funds with any other source of income. This fact alone outweighs all other arguments of legalizing pot. Part of the tax money gained would have to be used for educational ad campaigns, just like we do for alcohol, caffeine and nicotine users. Legalization does not imply approval or that the substance is harmless. But it certainly seems better than the status quo.
JohnnyM, most of your questions (if you were to decide for a brand new country which drugs should be legal) are impossible to answer. Obviously I don't have the power to hold anybody to my standards. But, I never said that the democrats raised a "stupid" issue. I said that they raised an issue that will draw big numbers of "their kind of voter" to the polls in the swing states, a smart, but devious ploy, which I think describes the modern BO-Pelosi-Reed demo to a tee. If you have to label me, I'm closer to a small-gov conservative than a big-gov liberal.
They're not impossible to answer at all...I'm asking for YOUR belief and opinion. You're free to give it.
