He was saying that the dealers are harmless. I was educating him on the fact that street gangs , prison gangs and the cartels in Mexico make profit off of the small time dealers. So yeah it's a vicious cycle.
Yeah, but the thing is, MANY people grow their own, or buy directly from others who grown their own. Yes, drug cartels see a huge profit in trafficking, but not every dollar spent on pot goes to them. And like others have said, if you give people a LEGAL way to buy it, they will flock to that, which in turn will cripple the bad guys' profit. The best way to fight drug cartels is taking away their customer base.
Alcohol usage has been around for a long time in the United States. When America was founded there wasn't much trouble in making laws about it.
Read a history book.
Pot is a whole different animal.
How?
Did you not see the part about how the government has to make new laws regarding it's usage ? Because that's kinda what has to happen.
Obviously laws would need to be created. But that's kinda what the government does. They're experts in making laws (for better or worse). If every decision needed to be made was forgotten because people couldn't be bothered coming up with new laws, alcohol would be illegal and we'd still be speaking the Kings English.
$13,000,000,000 is spent annually on fighting drugs and enforcing antidrug laws. $13 billion dollars. HALF of that could be going to schools and charities, road maintenance, welfare, etc and we'd see marked improvements. Like the Prohibition, the illegalization of marijuana has caused far more harm (financially, ethically, physically, criminally) than good.
In order to understand why it should be legalized, we need to understand why it currently is illegal:
- The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 claims it is easily abused. Wait, you mean like alcohol and cigarettes?
- Marijuana was originally seen as an "Ethnic Drug" back when the Anti-Mexican, Pro-White racist culture was at it's highest in the 1930s and its banning was meant to subvert the growing ethnic cultures in America. Yes, racism is a GREAT reason to make things illegal.
- There is "no medicinal use". Someone should probably tell the sea of cancer, AIDS and MS patients who use it and find it to be extremely effective, if not the cornerstone in their ability to deal with their disease, never mind all the other uses science has found for it. Fun fact - marijuana has considerably less harmful effects on the kidneys and liver than any LEGAL drug you can find at the grocery store.
- Marijuana was wrongly classified as a narcotic - opium based drugs - lumping it in with heroin, morphine and cocaine. Despite marijuana being more closely related to other, everyday drugs like nicotine, alcohol and caffeine, the stigma created by this error has fooled an entire generation's (and more) opinion.
These are just a few "reasons" why Marijuana is illegal. You can't NOT read this and not see the fallacy in the logic. I'm not saying you have to change your mind, but admitting that the reasons are extremely poor is important.
And for what it's worth, I don't smoke pot, so my opinion on this isn't selfish, nor about anything other than disagreeing with the laws that are outdated, racist, inaccurate, and based on incentives for big (prescription drug, oil, chemical, and other) companies hurt by pot use.
Interesting article:
http://100777.com/drugs/marijuanaconspiracy
