Looking over Congressman Mark Kirk’s bio reveals someone who should know better than to introduce legislation as ridiculous as calling for marijuana penalties that exceed those for first degree murder.  Besides being a Republican pro-lifer, he’s older than he looks (born in 1959) and he’s an active duty military reservist.

According to Wiki, Kirk introduced the marijuana legislation on June 16, 2009, at the behest of “…[t]he Lake County Sheriff's Department, the Lake County Metropolitan Enforcement Group and Waukegan Police Department [who] urged Kirk to expand the laws when they began to discover more potent strains of marijuana. As a result, Kirk called for 25 year prison sentences for first time marijuana users, despite the fact that medical marijuana is legal in 13 states.”

There has to be more to it than this.  Maybe the Lake County sheriff’s boys caught Kirk doing a wide stance in a public airport restroom stall while smoking a joint.  Blackmailed into cooperating with cops motivated to sustain the drug war at any cost, Kirk responded by introducing the most ridiculous legislation he could think of, something that had as much chance of taking flight in Congress as a fossilized pterodactyl.

Mark Kirk’s pandering to the forces of prohibition evil may very well produce negative consequences in his next election cycle, where his previous lead over his Democratc opponent was a modest six points in the most recent election.

Giordano

Higher than what? How many more grams of THC per joint is 15% higher? How was this figure arrived at?

How is this measured? Show us your math, Rep. Kirk (R-IL).

Wouldn't it make more sense to remove all things hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and let states decide how to regulate and tax the quantity of THC per joint?

States could also mandate that there can be no herbicides, pesticides or other added chemicals in a marijuana joint. That alone would allow states to deal with their current financial crisis.

Too, with all things hemp, it would expand state's agricultural and manufacturing base.

But apparently neither Rep. Kirk nor the rest of Congress has any inclination to help states out financially. No wonder Mark Twain called Congress the National Asylum.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

— Thomas Jefferson

The claims about greatly higher potency cannabis than what was around in the 60s and 70s in the US can't even claim historical accuracy. A great deal of very strong grass was available, partly due to the large number of Americans in Vietnam. What average potency of grass was compared to today or what the THC percentages of either is, is something I don't know. Where I lived hash was very common from 1967 (when I started smoking) to sometime in the early or middle 70s and still common years later. I don't think anyone is going to find statistics that the hash had less than this "zombie" producing 15% level of THC. Extremely potent hash oil was very common by the early 70s and stayed common for years. Thai stick clearly didn't sell for such relatively high prices in the 70s for the novelty factor.

People didn't smoke the same amounts of grass, hash and hash oil when they smoked; they smoked the amounts that produced the effects they wanted. Presumably anything in the 60s and 70s that pretty much lived up to the description of "one poke pot" was pretty high in THC. And the fact that "one poke pot" was a normal term in the language should be evidence for even the dimmest bulbs in Congress that people also adjusted the amount of grass they smoked according to how strong it was. Why would anyone think that has changed?

And for what it's worth, I've never come across grass that was stronger than the strongest grass I smoked in the 60s or 70s though it does seem the weakest grass being sold in recent decades isn't as weak as the weakest that was sold in the 60s. Of course, that's just my personal observation and by the early 90s prices had gotten so outrageously high that I generally thought it was worth the greater legal risk of growing my own rather than buying small amounts so I've less representative experience with "street" grass since then (mostly other people's purchases) but none of that experience has been with anything that seemed stronger than my homegrown from selectively saved seeds.