DUKE SMOKES FAT BLUNTS FOR FREEDOM

Illinois is now making the move to ban Salvia, a naturally growing plant that is sold as a legal light hallucinogen. This is just business as usual for American politicians. Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug in America and because of that it has been the scourge of opportunist politicians, moral finger-wavers and all types of other grand-standers. The war on marijuana (yes war on a plant, even though it can’t really fight or talk), has cost taxpayers in the country billions of wasted dollars, prevented the development of a much needed and promising industry and has ruined the lives of non-violent offenders and their families.

It is difficult to gauge the actual number of American’s who use marijuana. NORML, the National organization for the reform of Marijuana laws does a good job of collecting data and comparing it with private and government data. According to NORML user numbers generally fall at about 20 million, with about 11 million people using regularly. This is an enormous segment of the US population and makes marijuana the third most used substance (behind tobacco and alcohol) and the most used illegal substance. The demographics of this group are not just your cast of characters from “half-baked”, old dead-heads and the Method Man, this group is made up of mostly tax-paying law abiding citizens.

Marijuana is dangerous in the sense that any mood altering chemical is dangerous. It slows reaction time, thus making things like driving more dangerous. The active ingredient in marijuana that produces these effects is a chemical called THC. This chemical can come in amounts from 3% to about 30% although certain oils and hash have even higher percentages. That can make dosage difficult especially for the novice user. Marijuana smoke is cancerous yet it not toxic; no one has ever overdosed from marijuana. The government currently has a campaign saying that one joint is as bad as five cigarettes. This propaganda doesn’t include the fact that cigarettes have filters, and only a small percentage of people smoke doobies anymore, many opt for tobacco leaves, glass pipes, bongs or vaporizers, and with the exception of the vaporizer(recommended fro medicinal use) very little study has been done in this area.

So the bad side of marijuana is that it is hard to dose consistently, it slows reaction time and it is still smoke. Yet these facts still do not qualify it by any standard of measurement to be worse than alcohol or tobacco. Those two legal drugs each year kill more people than marijuana could ever hope too. Then why, in 2006 did we arrest 829,000 individuals for marijuana offenses. Of those arrests, 89% were for possession, not sale or manufacture. Marijuana arrests total more than the combined arrests for all violent offenses in the US. We arrest more marijuana smokers than, robbers, killers, and rapists…where is Nancy Grace when you need her?

This is all at a whopping cost to the US taxpayers of 10 billion a year. With the crises in funding wars of conquest, social security and Medicare, one might want to rethink spending 10 billion harassing people who use a plant that grows naturally. In fact recently some people did, 500 top economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, sent a letter to President Bush saying that if legalized and regulated like tobacco and alcohol, it could produce revenues of 6.2 billion dollars a year. So instead of losing 10 billion, the economy could make 6.2 billion and that money could be taxed. This does not include the amount of revenue that a legalized industrial hemp industry could produce. Hemp can be used to make paper, food, clothes and a whole slew of other things, including fuel and it can be grown year round without nearly as much environmental run-off as things like corn. The color of money in America is green.

As the Method-Man once said, “marijuana is just nature’s way of saying high”. Whether it is moral, economic or practical, there is no good argument for continued prohibition. It is time to hold these politicians and grand-standers that waste billions on this fruitless venture accountable and finally do the one thing that makes sense, Legalize it!