Ehh?
Where did you get that from?
They aren't transitive.

Alcohol is by far a lot more detrimental to health than weed, though using either in excess does not to do miracles to your health. Also alcohol and weed do not cause the same effects. Check up on some drug information, preferrable not the DEA information on it. (I can still remember the reefer madness campaign...now thats funny!)

you forgot about one thing, people will get addicted to the stuff more, then buy more, so yes there will be much more money for the government. but then they will steal and skip there job to get pot. thus they will not only not have a job to pay taxes they will also be taking money from others. the consequences are obvious less tax revenue for the government than they have now. tobacco is much less addictive than pot so even though there both bad one is "less bad" than the other

well it would be at least another 80 years before i die off, i'm hoping you guys die off from weed before that.

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If you make it legal, which is fine by me, it should still have constraints. For example, I don't want my neighbor growing acres of this stuff.

Who is going to regulate who can/can't grow their own stuff, and thereby bypassing all the tax revenues? You know that every serious pot-head will start growing his own stuff for himself and to make some cash. Is that ok? Or will the buying/selling be done only by the government?

I also don't want to go out to a restaurant or club and have to put up with pot. If they legalize it, they need to include in the law that it can only be smoked in your house or in private businesses that are ok with it, but not public areas like parks or even while parked in your car on the street.

Companies too should still have the full right to not hire anyone they choose. If someone is a pot-smoker, and an employer chooses not to hire them, then that should be up to the employer and this issue shouldn't end up in our courts from every pot-head who complains and hires a lawyer.

There is no evidence that this is the case. Nations where drug use was decriminalized report no increases in drug use, but do report substantial decreases in the cost to their judicial systems. You can sit here insulated in the US and theorize about this, but other countries are pursuing different policies with far different results, and not just with pot. The sole reason that the war on drugs and the penal system are growth industries today are that a large segment of our population is strongly influenced by 17th century Puritan thought, and emotion rather than logic.

Meanwhile the drug kingpins, warlords and guerrilla armies that profit from the trade have grown so rich in resources that they pose long term strategic security issues to the US and the rest of the world. When you talk about the costs down the road, how much do you think it is going to cost to deal with the guerrilla army in Columbia? How about the Afghan warlords? The warlords in Northern Burma? The Mafia that was catapulted to wealth by prohibition were small fish compared to the mega creeps our war on drugs has created. We will be dealing with them for generations at a cost none of us can calculate.

In the end, human nature is what it is, and people are going to do what they are going to do. We can either opt to treat them, and offer medical alternatives for those that are self-medicating due to clinical depression and other actual illnesses, or we can continue to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars on a policy that has been a failure by any measure for over 30yrs. The fact is, there are a certain percentage of people that are self-destructive, and that will never change. How much is it really worth to you to make drugs marginally more expensive for them, which in it's best years is all the war on drugs has accomplished?

I want to stock muggings and theft by junkies and I want to stop putting hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of creeps, warlords and guerrilla armies. The way to do that is to decriminalize all drugs and make them freely available. This will also have a huge positive imact on the spread of HIV, and it will allow us to track who is actually using what, and how much. We can then offer a medical alternative, and their drug use will be public information.

oc

FROG you stated you're young and I can tell you've been brainwahsed by the well-meaning school institution. People don't steal for pot and they don't lose their jobs because they're addicted to pot. So your money/taxes thinking is suspect, to say the least.
When was the last time you saw someone mugged/robbed for ciggies or alcohol? Do people addicted to these drugs get fired because they can't perform (they can't be drug-tested out of the job for those, yaknow)?
I got a good laugh at your parting shot statement - honey, people don't die from pot. I know the schools are required to provide anti-drug "education" but it's mostly happypeppypropaganda, "Just Say No" and painting brightly colored pictures of your future without drugs. You need more facts to have a better understanding of the difference between tweakers and potheads.

I wish they gave American's kids enough credit for smarts that they could tell them the truth.
They did when I was in junior high waybackbaby.
By the time our drug education was done we not only knew which ones could kill you and which could not (inc ciggies and booze which were included in the DRUG education, of course), we also knew which were downers and the effects, which were uppers and the effects, which were hallucinagenics and their effects, what to do for someone who's overdosing on various types of drugs, legal penalties for posession of the various classes and which drugs fall into which classes.
This was all in EIGHTH GRADE folks.
They even took us to a court to watch a drug trial and sentencing and then got a tour of the jail.

As to the comment about having everyone and their brother start growing the stuff - you're missing the dynamic here. People grow it now because it's not always easy to get and can be expensive. But when it's mass-grown on farms by our American farmers and mass-packaged by our American industries and sold at the 7-11 on the corner price and availability won't be an issue. Who do you know that grows tobacco in their yard for ciggies? Anyone you know running a still making bathtub gin?

Applause for both oddlycalm and DBG.

I agree.
Still, I won't be smoking a legal joint in Finland during my lifespan.

either you don't know any pot heads or your too bind from all the weed to see anything,

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Nambo, you would be surprised that if you want marijuana, you want the buzz that comes with it. Similarly, if you drink alcohol for the buzz, you aren't worried about how much it takes, also it is easy to get to that buzz because alcohol dehydrates you and you feel the need to drink more to make up for the thirst.
Also, nicotine is one of the most addictive substances in existence. It doesn't seem that way because there is such a relatively small amount in a single cigarette. If you have a single DROP of nicotine at once, you will die. Your veins will literally shrink and harden so much that you will be unable to send blood throughout your body fast enough resulting in death.
Legalize it, make money off of it, but also put restrictions on it, just like with alcohol and cigarettes.
Legalizing it will also allow us to control the concentrations of THC in a single . . . smoke. (I am not familiar with the term of a singular smoke for marijuana :P )

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The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing
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Add Honors society to the list of things not going broke! In Georgia, the Honors program for students to allow them to go to an in-state college with a scholarship is nearly broke from the number of students that get in for one year and then fail out.
By the way, could you cite the resource where you found that hemp/paper thing? That is very interesting and it would be cool to learn more

__________________
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing
is to be taken too seriously."
-Nicholas Butler (1862 - 1947).