Posted on 01/25/2009 10:28:56 AM PST by MAD-AS-HELL
“Just how do you propose taxing an item for which there is an established tax free market which currently avoids the law? Why should pot dealers and growers start paying a tax?”
The tax would be collected the same as on alcohol. Remember prohibition? They weren’t paying tax then, but they are now.
The free production of marijuana will bring down the price of it considerably. It will also reduce the crime associated with it.
“Companies open themselves up to liability hiring someone who tested positive to a legal substance and then causes an accident that could be blamed on that substance intoxication.”
Then don’t hire them if they screen positive. You don’t have to.
I’m for making it legal and taxed, but would not hire anyone who had it in their system when tested. I bought a company once who had an employee practically put his eye out with a screwdriver when he was high on MJ at work. We hadn’t tested existing employees yet.
Needless to say, he was not invited back to the party.
“I bought a company once who had an employee practically put his eye out with a screwdriver when he was high on MJ at work.”
What an incompetent. Eye work takes a socket wrench.
Same way it's done with tobacco. Because it would be legal, the price, including taxes, would be way lower than it is today. Comparable to cigarettes.
And after a while, no more worries about pot smugglers.
1) develop a “roadside test” like a Breathalyzer that will accurately measure pot in the system, AND come up with reasonable standards for acceptable legal levels.”
Alcohol was relegalized without a roadside test. There are several drugs for which they do not have roadside tests to indicate that one has had enough of the particular substance. In fact, alcohol is the only drug for which we have set maximum levels that one can have in his blood and drive. People get DWIs for all sorts of different drugs though, including marijuana, even though they don't have have some test that can determine intoxication or that one has ingested enough to become intoxicated. If the officer feels that a person is intoxicated, he might have the person blow in his portable breath test, but he's certainly going to try to ask the appropriate questions and have the person do field sobriety tests. Now they are training officers to be drug recognition experts, DREs, who can not only recognize impairment but they are pretty good at guessing which drug someone is impaired on. These tests are usually recorded on video now and those suspected of driving while intoxicated on something other than alcohol are required to have blood or urine screens done. At court the judge (or jury) will listen to the testimony of the officers involved, including the DRE who did the special tests if it is someone other than the arresting officer. The court will watch the video tapes and they'll look at the drug screen results. They'll convict almost every time, just like they do with alcohol DWIs. Most people will go ahead and plead guilty because the potential punishments are always a lot worse than what people are offered in plea negotiations and most don't want to risk taking the case to trial and getting a harsher sentence for wasting the court's time. It happens all the time already.
I think most people who want to smoke pot are already smoking it. If they're the kind of jerks who would get really stoned and drive, they're already doing it. The precious few who want to smoke pot but don't because it is illegal and not because of all the other good reasons not to smoke pot have already shown that they are law abiding people with some self control. They're probably less likely to do things like smoke pot and drive than those who already smoke it.
“2) Ban 3rd party lawsuits from injuries related to pot use.
ie...Suing the employer because an employee injured someone or himself while having pot in their system.”
That's nonsense. We haven't done that for alcohol, and it's a lot more prone to causing accidents than pot. It impairs people more.
“Give it up, will never happen.”
I bet it does happen. I doubt it happens anytime soon, but I could see it happening in fifteen or twenty years, maybe sooner, maybe a little later. The percentage of people who think it should be legal and regulated similar to alcohol has been steadily growing over the years. The most recent surveys put the percentage for legalization at around forty percent and since the nineties it's been increasing by about one point a year on average. Sooner or later the majority will be for it and we'll start hearing a lot more serious talk about legalization from Washington. I think we'll need to see a change of the guard up there though to people born in the second half of the 20th Century. Right now our most powerful lawmakers tend to be people in their late sixties and seventies who came of age before marijuana use took off in this country and they tend to be more strongly opposed to it on average than younger folks. When most of these geezers are replaced I don't think it will be long before we see marijuana become legal. By then the majority will probably be for it. We'll probably have millions of old retired people that smoke pot that we don't really want to arrest (we have a couple of hundred thousand of those 65 and older now according to government stats but that number is growing and will explode as Baby Boomers retire). The whole debate is going to change over the next couple of decades. It's changing now.
I'm sure you are right about that. Look at the medical marijuana dispensaries in California and the coffeeshops in the Netherlands. People with medical marijuana cards are allowed to grow their own, yet these dispensaries are doing gangbusters business even though they sell super expensive pot, often 420 or $30 a gram, hundreds of dollars an ounce. In the Netherlands people are allowed to grow five plants for personal use, yet their coffeeshops that are allowed to sell marijuana do gangbusters business. Hardly anyone grows their own. A smaller percentage of their population than ours smokes it too, even though it's illegal here.
Americans consume an awful lot of marijuana. More marijuana is consumed in this country than all other illegal drugs combined. According to the last estimate from our government that I saw there are between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons of marijuana available in this country every year. If the actual number is closer to the high end of that, most is produced here. If it's closer to the low end, most is produced in Mexico. According to our Office of Drug Control Policy Mexican drug trafficking organizations make around $13.8 billion a year selling drugs to Americans, about $8.6 from marijuana alone. That's about 62% of their gross sales to Americans. They gross about $3.9 billion from cocaine, the second most popular drug. Their net proceeds from marijuana are probably much higher than 62% of their total proceeds from drug sales to Americans because they are only the middlemen for cocaine which must first be purchased and smuggled from South America before it is smuggled into this country.
If we legalized marijuana and allowed American farmers with permits grow it and allowed for it to be sold from licensed shops, similar to the way we regulate alcohol, it would be a devastating blow to Mexican organized crime. We'd be taking their cash cow from them. It would be a devastating blow to other organized crime groups operating within our borders that derive a substantial portion of their income from marijuana sales. With large farms growing it like we grow other crops, the wholesale cost of it would be a fraction of what it is today. The only thing that could keep prices anywhere close to current prices would be taxes and regulatory costs. People aren't going to want to buy it on the street and most won't want to go to the trouble of growing their own. They'll want to go to nice clean shops where they can select from a wide variety of quality product and tax paying law abiding citizens will be making the money from it and paying taxes on what they make. We'll save a fortune that we are currently spending trying in vain to keep up this ban, and we'll bring in billions in tax revenues that we aren't getting now on all the many billions of dollars worth of marijuana being consumed in this country every year.
“Legalizing makes sense even if they can’t tax it.”
I agree with that too, but I think the government can and will tax it when it finally is legalized. Being legal the actual cost of this stuff will be far lower than it is today. There will be a lot of room for taxes before they get so high that it will encourage a black market or encourage that many to go to all the trouble of spending months growing their own. It wouldn't take long before those that smoke it will have their favorite kinds they like to pick up at the “pot store.” They won't want crappy homegrown or something grown in the woods by criminals who treat it with God knows what kind of toxic chemicals. Given the choice, most will buy it from the store, just like most buy their booze and smokes from the store.
>That's nonsense. We haven't done that for alcohol, and it's a lot more prone to causing accidents than pot. It impairs people more.<
It doesn't matter that the pot caused, or didn't cause, the accident. If it was in their system it gives a lawyer the legal opening to sue the employer.
The reason you see all the companies going to zero tolerance drug policies is because the liability insurance companies charge them a fortune if they don't have one.
The difference with alcohol is you can smell it on their breath and see rather easily if someone had too much. That isn't the case with pot, plus there is a cheap, instant test for alcohol.
I couldn't care less that someone smokes pot at home on the weekend but the company insurance policy demands that you have zero tolerance rules. The reason is lawsuits. You may not like that fact, but it's still a fact.
Which takes more time and effort....making alcoholic beverages, or sticking a couple seeds in the ground? If it were legal every garden and flower bed would have pot plants growing in it. Pretty hard to regulate and tax something that would be growing EVERYWHERE!
A lot of companies would probably still test for marijuana and not allow pot smokers to work for them even if it was legal. We see the same thing already with cigarette smokers. There are companies now that won’t let cigarette smokers work for them even if they only smoke when they are off the clock and away from company property. Courts have backed the businesses on this. I imagine we’d see the same thing with marijuana if it was legal.
In Amsterdam they are going in the other direction.
Are they going the other direction or are they just trying to get more control? They aren't changing their main policies. They aren't closing down all their coffeeshops. Drug use by the Dutch isn't really a problem there like it is here and in many other countries in the EU. They have two problems there, drug tourists and organized crime. They have drug tourists because the Netherlands is the only place where people can go into a shop and choose from a variety of marijuana products. People go there for the novelty of it. They get a lot of young people who go there to party and some of them go overboard, drinking, taking other drugs and just generally getting out of hand. Neighboring countries complain too, both because they don't like that their citizens go there to buy pot (even though it's already easy to get it just about everywhere in the EU), and they don't like the big time illegal commercial dealing that goes on. In the Netherlands retail marijuana sales are allowed from these shops with permits, but commercial production and wholesale sales are forbidden. The coffeeshops buy their supply from the black market. Naturally organized crime has stepped in to supply the coffeeshops and of course they'll sell it to anyone who wants it and they'll sell more than just marijuana, so the Netherlands has become a major drug supplier and transshipment point for Europe.
If they would legalize and regulate production and wholesale sales of marijuana this would be much less of a problem. They can't do that though because they are part of the European Union and they signed on to the same international conventions and treaties on drugs other countries most every other country has signed off on.
They're working through these issues, but the majority in the Netherlands are happy with the way they do things. They don't really have a big drug problem there. Even though they have open marijuana sales there are several countries in the European Union with higher percentages of their populations that smoke marijuana. When you look at per capita marijuana use rates the Netherlands is middle of the road for the European Union. A lot bigger percentage of our population smoke marijuana even though it is illegal here and we have about the most harsh anti drug laws and enforcement in the Western World. Marijuana should really be legalized and regulated everywhere in the West where it is already prevalent and easy to find. Governments would have a lot more control over it if it was legal and regulated than they do in today's entirely unregulated marijuana industry that is run in large part by organized crime.
In Australia, the government has restricted alcohol and pornography going to aborigines, and it’s working.
Gee, maybe we should try that with our aborigines?
Easily. Running a black market operation without getting caught is a PITA, really. If one can avoid that PITA by paying a reasonable amount of taxes, most people would choose to do so.
Ultimately, it's the same reason most people pay their taxes rather than going into the underground barter economy.
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