Posted on 07/12/2014 2:55:46 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
And most is consumed by a minority of daily users.
About 9% of Colorado’s population consumes marijuana, according to a market demand study conducted by the state department of revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division and the state’s Marijuana Policy Group. And those users, it’s estimated, will get through about 121.4 metric tons of pot every year.
According to the report, that consumption — calculated through survey results, demographic data and source data — is “31 percent higher than a recent department of revenue assessment, 89 percent higher than a study by the Colorado Futures Center, and 111 percent higher than an older study by the Colorado Center for Law and Policy.”
The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division analyzed the market demand for the drug, which Colorado began selling for recreational use in January, in an effort to “effectively manage production within the regulated industry,” according to a press release.
According to the study, published Wednesday, the bulk of the demand for the drug comes from the most frequent users....
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
...and has been for years. Only now, with legalization, there's some way to measure the amount.
Let me show you my shocked face.
I’ve seen it. The daily users always seem to have to have their morning wake-n-bake.
I’ve know people who wake’n’bake. They are gluey-eyed all day.
My son is 5. My wife and I have to start planning how to deal with this issue.
We have friends who have a boy in high school and they were moving to a new neighborhood in the same city and the kid doesn’t want to change schools and he told his parents, “in my current school, the drug of choice is pot, in the new school it’s cocaine”.
Wonderful thing for a parent to hear, that their kid even knows that.
I heard on the news that drug related auto deaths increased from 5% to !0% since legalization began. Can’t finds the link for it.
Not a surprise at all; CO people have been in the doldrums for a decade or more really.
It’s a Colorado Rocky Mountain high
A couple of months ago there was an article reprinted on FR about how the CO pot retailers were doing so poorly - sales were way below projections and the government was not collecting anywhere near the tax revenues they had anticipated.
Which is it?
All good points.
There is physical addictiveness to alcohol. There is psychological addictiveness to marijuana. The health and mental and behavioral aspects of the two vary widely.
I’ve known several people, personally in my lifetime, to drink themselves to death. I’ve known of one person who smoked themselves to death by overdose of carbon monoxide from pot...somewhere in Britain, according to an article I read. I’m sure there’s plenty of extraneous connections to combining these drugs with other drugs and destruction of oneself and others.
Of course there’s many ramifications for abusing any drug.
There are so many mind altering drugs, both legal and illegal, and both maufactured/concocted and naturally originating.
Regarding the brain, it seems to me, I know many people whose brains have been utterly destroyed by psyche meds than any other type of drugs...to the point where they are in a constant battle to thrive in the real world. Their brains’ chemistry have been permanently altered and they will never be “normal” again. There is a host of diabetes and metabolic disorders resulting from their use - as prescribed. I feel the numbers/percentages of these people far surpass the pot smokers and alcoholics. 7% of schoolchildren are already on them. 25% of the female population and 15% of the male population take mental health related medications.
If people are really concerned about the “level of productiveness” of our society/culture, they will of course need to be first concerned with these medications.
I'm talking about differences in brain structure, as revealed in imaging studies. This article talks about it.
While that article discusses one type of damage, other studies have shown different kinds of damage. For instance, studies have demonstrated durable personality changes (such as the lack of motivation that afflicts pot smokers). And yet others show that pot use in adolescence precipitates psychotic disorder. Here, adolescence refers to the period of time in which the brain is still developing, which occurs up to about age 25. In these studies, there is no way to determine whether the kids who become psychotic were predisposed, were already developing the disease, or got the disease as a result of the pot use.
As this experiment with pot legalization goes on, we will see a lot more impaired people. I'm inclined to think that the old propaganda film, "Reefer Madness" was not as over-the-top as I had always believed. I do not think that pot legalization will continue, as it becomes more and more apparent just how damaging it is and government officials roll back legalization as a result.
Pot use will go up when you decriminalize it...
Based on the issues and costs associated with alcohol abuse, you would think they can add 1+ 1 = 2
More use more problems and issues and additional costs...
I wonder how much of these additional tax dollars generated from pot sales Colorado wind up being used to address these issues...
Interesting article. Thanks for posting. I think I am behind on keeping up with this issue and what I posted earlier is the result of things I read years ago, probably now out of date. As a parent, it’s my responsibility to read more about this. Thanks again.
It's been said about drugs in general:
"What we have now, with the War on Drugs, is a Criminal Justice Disaster.
"What we will have when all drugs are legalized is a Public Health Disaster."
Or words to that effect.
Recreational MJ is much higher taxed than medical MJ and it getting a bogus medical MJ recommendation continues to be easy — so basically it’s only tourists and people who don’t want any written record they use MJ who are buying recreational.
I was glad to see that at least there hasn’t been an increase in motor vehicle accidents or fatalities as a direct result of legalized pot use so you may be correct...
Liberalism promotes pot use and pot use leads to stupidity which leads to voting for liberals.
A classroom full of pot-stoned children makes it that much easier for the NEA to stick their idiot-dumbing-down version of American "education" down the throats of the young.
The force at the core of Common Core is the enforced ignorance of the masses, enforced by the government army of "teachers", and aided by all the forces of ignorance at their disposal, including the dumbing-down effects of marijuana legalization.
“That’s like saying people who drink alcohol every day for years are not alcoholics...”
I think they’re right. They’re drunks. Alcoholics go to meetings.
I support legalization. Individual freedom is a hallmark of conservative thought. Prohibition worked so well, after all.
Thought your post was spot on...except for the last line...
Considering that the main reason pot is moving toward legalization is driven by the tax revenue generated...
Our government has a very poor history regarding public health issues when tax dollars will be impacted...
Alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco come to mind. All these products are legal and far more impacting health wise than pot...
If anything government will at some point increase the tax to drive pot use down but once these tax dollars are generated the politicians will never give them up...
I don’t care if that STOP sign still says, “STOP.” Eventually, you’re going to have to move along.
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