“Then again, it takes a special sort of genius to ban the growing of plants and inflating the price to astronomical levels.”
Some would grow it but not most. Most people don’t distill their own scotch or ferment their own wine.
The war on drugs is a failure, agreed. Drugs are an evil upon our society and legalizing them won’t help. I’ve seen the difference pot smoking has on people, you will never convince me that it is harmless.
Most people don’t moonshine because a) it’s pointless when you can go to the liquor store and get a ton of booze at a pretty cheap price and b) it’s a little more involved and risky than growing a plant. I believe stills can blow up in your face and if the booze isn’t made right you can go blind (or get sick or die or whatever) from drinking the stuff.
With pot, growing is pretty simple. Most people don’t do it because the laws against it are ridiculously harsh. In Colorado growing a single pot plant is a potential class 4 felony, which is the same class of felony as certain types of sexual assault, large scale theft, kidnapping, and other crimes that are actually like crimes. It’s absurd that growing a single pot plant in the eyes of the state is equivalent to sexual assault, but it is and that scares people off from growing.
If they made jaywalking a class 4 felony in this state, I probably wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t make the law any less awful and it wouldn’t make the fact that someone could go to prison for it for 2=6 years any less a total travesty of justice, but I do guarantee it would cut down on jaywalkers.
I would never make the claim that pot smoking is “harmless.” But this country allows people to do a lot of things that are not harmless, and frankly, different people can do the same thing with varying degrees of harm to themselves. Not everyone who drinks is a violent stone cold alcoholic who gets the DTs when they aren’t drinking, and not every pot smoker is a Jeff Spicoli caricature living in his mother’s basement and not able to form a basic sentence in his head.