Legalized marijuana supports cartels because the legal weed gets you hooked and is priced about 50% higher than cartel black market weed. Free market does the rest.Limited IQ Redneck in PU said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:America imprisons its criminals....so that makes the "prison" of drug use ok? Is this the pot talking?Limited IQ Redneck in PU said:Drama much? How have other countries started to handle it? America, home of the free, imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation.BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Do you call that freedom? It seems more like a prison and a life sentence. And why wouldn't people be afraid of the mental destruction of large numbers of the population and what that would lead to?Limited IQ Redneck in PU said:
Why are so many people afraid of other peoples freedom?
Never touched stuff. The dufference between us is that make rules for myslef. You seem to want to make rules for others. I dont. Your way supports cartels, violence and Americas proson industry. Mine doesnt.
From the article:
Legalization hasn't delivered on its promises of emptying prisons and raising billions in taxes for government.
On the criminal justice front, the expectation that legalizing pot would help reduce America's prison population by clearing out nonviolent offenders was always overdrawn, since marijuana convictions made up a small share of the incarceration rate even at its height.
There is also no good evidence so far that legalization reduces racially discriminatory patterns of policing and arrests.
So legalization isn't necessarily striking a great blow against mass incarceration or for racial justice.
Nor is it doing great things for public health. A new paper published in the Journal of Health Economics found that "legal medical marijuana, particularly when available through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality."
This month brought a new paper strengthening the link between heavy pot use and the onset of schizophrenia in young men.
And the broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: a form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn't mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives.
The legalization era has seen a dramatic increase the number of noncasual users. Occasional use has risen substantially since 2008, but daily or near-daily use is up much more, with around 16 million Americans, out of more than 50 million users, now suffering from what is termed marijuana use disorder.
So to make the legal marketplace successful and amenable to regulation, you would probably need much more enforcement against the illegal marketplace which is difficult and expensive and, again, obviously uncool, in conflict with the good-vibrations spirit of the legalizers.
Unlicensed weed can cost as much as 50 percent less than the licensed variety. So the more you tax and regulate legal pot sales, the more you run the risk of having users just switch to the black market and if you want the licensed market to crowd out the black market instead, you probably need to make legal pot as cheap as possible, which in turn undermines any effort to discourage chronic, life-altering abuse.
In summary, Marijuana legalization as we've done it so far has been a policy failure, a potential social disaster, a clear and evident mistake.
