@lovehumanity: awesomely said

Wow Tommy, how long did it take for you to put together that hackneyed diatribe? Don't you get it, most of those who post and contribute this forum and others like it in webland are educated, polite and articulate. You've earned a troll cookie and a beer. Dig on that for a while.

Your prohibitionist nonsense that is hurting our country will soon be over.

It would be wonderful if ignorant people would not stick people who use marijuana OR who support the legalization of marijuana into a stereotype. If you would have taken time to educate yourself you would know that cannabis does many beneficial things, including helping new cell growth in the brain, helping cure cancer, slowing the progression of Multiple Sclerosis, as well as a treatment for MANY other medical conditions. Please EDUCATE YOURSELF

this is obviously not anyone thats ever smoked pot, prohibitionists will do and say anything to get their way. The AMA supports marijuana and its effects. You sound as if you are on ecstasy or an actual drug, not a plant that god created. 

Dont Panic

Its ORGANIC

this is obviously not anyone thats ever smoked pot, prohibitionists will do and say anything to get their way. The AMA supports marijuana and its effects. You sound as if you are on ecstasy or an actual drug, not a plant that god created. 

Dont Panic

Its ORGANIC

It's stupid we put people in prison at an average of $40K a year at times for possession or even large-scale sales.  Simply asinine.  In my experience the average joint after the first few uses is about on par with a couple of beers.  Even leaving a stoner unemployed with food stamps and welfare would likely be much cheaper per annum and not affect most non-drug users' lives in any respect except for having to smell pot smoke a bit more than usual (which granted is a little pungent -- Chocolate chip cookie smell would be better).  Somehow that inconvenience seems to me not worth jail time and ruining other people's lives for simply trying to take the edge off, albeit in a non-traditional white Episcopalian way i.e. whiskey and gin.  There's always rehab, and some rehab and welfare money almost certainly would be cheaper than jail and the tax money that goes through the court system to process these cases.  As an attorney I can tell you it's not just the money that goes to the jails and police, it's the entire court system's financing that rests on these stupid laws.   

Read the statistics: in some places you've got arrests of minorities at 13 times what it is for white middle and upper-middle class types despite every last demographic study in the last thirty years showing that white upper-middle class types are the primary economic backbone of the illicit drug industry.  Nobody who went to the chi chi prep school I attended EVER got busted.  But if you're a black adolescent male living in an apartment somewhere in a less well-heeled section of town you can get frisked on the street all the time, even if you never touched an illegal drug in your life.  The fact is that the minority pot smokers are soft targets.  Police know they aren't likely to fight, they are easy arrests, and the more they focus their policing in poorer sections of towns -- minority or not -- the less likely the arrest is going to be overturned in court because it will likely be a public defender and not some high-priced well-connected lawyer.  Even with a white upper middle class kid, it's probation at most, or maybe a fine, but with the black kid: jail. 

Now the white kid, he smokes in the back of his large house with his group of friends.  First of all a house -- even a modest one -- in the USA has about the most robust Fourth Amendment protection of all.  Moreover, the smell isn't as likely to make it to the street for any police officer to detect.  Then's there's the fact the officer who would smell it in the first place is too busy busting otherwise harmless minority youths in the poorer section of town so the white kid's pot odor definitely won't make it that far even in a hurricane-magnitude downwind.  What about the poor section of town?  Well, the young minority adolescent sitting with his group of friends smoking a joint in the poorer section of town is either doing it in an apartment amongst close apartment blocks where the smell most definitely carries to the street and kills any Fourth Amendment protection he had in the first place, or he is smoking it in a car, which has practically zip Fourth Amendment protection to begin with.  He gets busted, and he's SOL even though he isn't doing anything the white, richer teenagers aren't doing, just that the white middle and upper middle class kids do it in greater protected circumstances having nothing to do with their own personal efforts in the world, any superior moral sense of discipline, greater exceptional traits, or anything else.  Their parents just have more money.

The police and correctional officers have the strongest unions in nearly every state.  People running for office sound better if they are tough on crime (even if by all rights it shouldn't be a crime), and they need that police union campaign money along with an endorsement that goes over well with the fear-based, Viagra addled tribalistic angry white long past getting to fuck anybody they want because they are too old and unattractive including their colleagues' wives at the country club who have had any erstwhile adulterous imperatives replaced with hot flashes and a penchant for fatty foods.  Furthermore, the entire justice system's accounting hinges on non-violent drug offenders.  Take away non-violent drug offenses, half the prisons would empty out, and you could dump half the state and federally employed criminal lawyers, judges, stenographers, and court clerks.  Naturally, these people don't want legalization.  There's a county in northern California where the sheriff openly admits who goes after pot growers solely to get the federal funds he wouldn't otherwise get to keep a deputy or two extra on staff and better accommodations for his station.  Call it jail and ruined lives for good government-funded air conditioning. My taxes are paying for that shit?

As for the potentially great traffic accident argument (taxpayer clean-up), and the greater capacity for addiction based on decriminalization, the studies show neither are true.  Research this and you will find traffic collisions did not increase in the slightest upon decriminalization in parts of Europe, nor addiction (see Netherlands and Portugal).  In fact re: addiction, legalization seems to diminish addiction numbers over time.  Perhaps easy access leads to boredom.  

Waste of time, waste of tax money, waste of potentially productive citizens. 

How about violence? Ever see one liquor store owner or distributor go shoot it out with another liquor store owner or distributor?  Never once have I seen the guy who owns my local 7-11 pull a gun on the liquor store owner across the street.  It happened all the time during the Prohibition era.  St. Valentine's Day Massacre of Al Capone, etc., all that was over bootlegging illegal liquor and maintaining the territory to do so.  Why did it stop with the end of prohibition? End the illegality, and the price falls.  Simple capitalistic principles.  Guess what: nobody shoots anybody else over affordable, low-priced products.  Just doesn't happen.  It's illegal to sell liquor to teenagers.  Ever see a shoot-out over the right to be the main guy to sell the beer illegally to teens? Know why? Because the basic decriminalizing of booze at the large scale makes it still too cheap to bother trying to organize mass illegal sales of booze to kids.  Now I think there was a one-day sale at Walmart a couple years ago where some lady got stomped to death, but this wasn't over liquor -- this was just a weird aberration, not the norm. 

This whole thing is just primitive social control which should have ended years ago but for a solipsistic, tribalistic low IQ American populace.  We lost the Vietnam War, the hippies don't exist anymore, successful white guys in suits smoke dope all the time who make more money than many of you readers ever will.  Most animals are gay at the same percentage as the ratio in the human populace, including our closest genetic relative.  Natural selection is real and Creationism is something that anybody with an IQ over 98 would never buy even in the first instance.  Jesus and Santa Claus don't exist and if he did they would probably laugh at you.  All night. To your face.

Nevertheless, Tommy's speech had me rolling on the floor laughing.  He really captured a voice that hasn't existed since about 1969.  It sort of channeled Dennis Hopper and David Crosby all into one both for whom I always had a soft spot.

Hey Tommy C, you need to lay off the alcohol and zanny's and just stick to the weed. You would be much better off,  DUDE! Oh, and by the way, those cigarettes you could do without too.

Worth making the point here that the prohibs have concentrated on painting anyone who uses herb or, especially, is knowledgeable about its use, as a walking would-be child-molester, as shown by the fact that to get Prop. 19 on the ballet at all they had to include the harsh jazz about penalties for anyone who smokes in front of a 20-year-old or helps an underage person have a toke or learn to do so.

Now consider that in the USA some 900,000 youngsters a year get hooked on niggotine $igarettes (a pack a day = 182 puffs a day by one estimate) and there are statistics suggesting that at least half of all present addicts got hooked before they were of legal age to use tobacco-- what does that say about mentorship in our society.  When will anyone dare to discuss the hypercontroversial thesis that some children might be protected from lifelong lifeshortening niggotine slavery by getting acquainted with the cannabinoid alternative early, through vaporizer or one-hitter, completely bypassing the hot burning overdose paperrollup format, joint", which destroys cannabinoids and gets a youngster used to the idea of $igarette smoking.  Under the guise of protecting children, the present system protects Big 2WackGo against deserved extermination.

Despite the above cited problem I still agree with passing 19 on incrementalist grounds and keep working on further steps.

As to "cowards", I'm a natural born coward too and I don't begrudge someone avoiding the career assassination that awaits anybody who speaks up nonanonymously.  Blacklisted from the highest paying jobs in society, denied student loans, etc., etc. Thank Goethe for these big city public library computers.