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Potheads Help To Build a Better America

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Potheads Help To Build a Better America
Posted by CN Staff on October 02, 2007 at 06:51:07 PT
By Jeff Ackerman
Source: Union

California — So one guy is dead and another is in a hospital with bullet holes after a reported weekend shoot-out near North San Juan over some pot. You know … the green, leafy substance one out of every 10 doctors says will ease your pain faster than a pill-popping Rush Limbaugh could shout, “Liberal Potheads!”
Enough of the reefer madness already. I know a friend-of-a-friend’s-friend who smoked pot once or a thousand times, and he never once put a cat in a microwave or shot heroin into his big toe.

In fact, the only way you’d ever know he enjoys his pot is if you looked in his pantry and saw the 1,000 packs of Oreos and 500 jars of Costco jumbo peanut butter.

My pot-smoking (sometimes he eats it with milk and cookies) friend-of-a-friend’s-friend doesn’t look like someone the FBI would bother pursuing.

Not with Osama bin Laden still on the loose and federal agents still wondering what happened to the guy who jumped out of a jet plane with millions of dollars and a parachute. The pothead I know is semi-retired, has snow-white hair and goes to bed by 9 p.m., mostly, I suspect, because he eats too much pot and gets tired.

Just so you know, there is a BIG difference between pot and … say … crank. All you need do is compare the user profiles.

A typical pothead is generally:

1. Mellow.
2. Not an early riser.
3. Casual dresser (buttons can be problematic).
4. Romantic (hence the late mornings).
5. Weight-challenged (there is no Oreo/peanutbutter diet).

A typical crankhead, by comparison, is generally:

1. Hyper (they can vacuum an entire block in one hour).
2. An early riser (mostly because they never sleep in the first place).
3. Romantic (at least until their teeth fall out).
4. Casual dresser (they eventually sell their wardrobe to pay for the crank).
5. Weight-challenged (they sell all of their Oreos and Peanutbutter to the potheads and get very skinny).

And before any of you start suggesting that a pothead eventually becomes a crankhead, stop. It’s not true. Lots of potheads have never tried crank and lots of crankheads have never tried pot. The government wants us to believe that because it allows them to continue to trade pot for oil. That’s right, Americans.

My friend’s-friend’s-friend says he heard about the government plot from a guy he buys Oreos from at WalMart. He says that all that pot the DEA guys take from the farms around North San Juan goes straight to Washington, D.C., where they grind it up into a boatload of brownies and ship it to Saudi in exchange for a few barrels of oil. As you know, it’s hard to grow pot in the desert, even with all the heat, and those sheiks like to kick back on those giant floor pillows listening to Michael Jackson’s greatest hits.

How else can you possibly explain why the federal government keeps putting heat on the potheads and their crops that could, if taxed properly, fund parks, roads, schools and a gigantic crankhead rehab center? That’s right, Americans, potheads helping crankheads, in cooperation with the FBI and Internal Revenue Service.

And if we can finally decriminalize pot we won’t need to keep building prisons to house potheads and their suppliers. Last time I checked, they were stacking inmates six high at San Quentin and paying the guards $100,000 per year, with medical benefits and an unlimited supply of rubber gloves.

According to one estimate, the state spends $160 million per year to arrest, prosecute and imprison marijuana offenders. Our prisons house around 173,000 people today, and seven of every 10 of them we release eventually wind up behind bars again. Yet the state is about to spend another $7 billion or so to build new prisons and add new beds. This at a time when our schools could use some money and our medical-care costs are out of reach for many families. What’s wrong with this picture?

They also estimate that taxes from pot sales could generate as much as $3 billion per year.

“Yes … but won’t that lead to more pot use?” you ask once again. I don’t think so. Why would every single Californian start smoking pot when they have pain pills, booze and Viagra? Besides, half the fun is breaking the law.

One thing I’m fairly certain of is this: If pot were legal today, one guy would probably still be alive and another would probably not be in a hospital with bullet holes in his skin.

Jeff Ackerman is the publisher of The Union. His column appears on Tuesdays.

Source: Union, The (Grass Valley, CA)
Author: Jeff Ackerman
Published: October 2, 2007
Copyright: 2007 The Union
Contact: letters@theunion.com
Website: http://www.theunion.com/

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Tags: california, Costco, DC, Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal government, Internal Revenue Service, Jeff Ackerman Source, Jeff Ackerman, Michael Jackson, microwave, oil, Oreos, Osama bin Laden, rubber gloves, San Juan, USD, Washington

The Stoner’s Dilemma
Posted by CN Staff on October 01, 2007 at 13:34:51 PT
By Garrett G. D. Nelson
Source: Harvard Crimson

USA — Paint out an exaggerated caricature of the Left and you are likely to find among “Bible-burning,” “latte-drinking,” and “tax-raising” the common epithet “pot-smoking.” A well-stuffed joint is, apparently, a familiar staple in the progressive’s quiver alongside a Che shirt and a burning American flag. Unfortunately, marijuana as political issue goes better to the tune of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” than “The Internationale,” for drug consumption, even if it frees minds, shackles the lower class into economic bondsmanship.

It is disingenuous and regressive to attack the “degenerate habit” of marijuana from a cultural stand, as conservatives frequently do. It is hard to argue that the puffs of pot that waft out of college dormitories are inculcating slothfulness or Marxism among developing generations. It is even harder to attack pot from a cultural standpoint when it is hardly the exclusive domain of young people; when presidential candidates can openly admit their use of the drug without consequence, it is clear enough that the mainstreaming of pot is complete. While the aesthetic horror of a lazy smoking hippie may still be an effective bogeyman for the farthest-right conservatives, most Americans correctly realize that marijuana is a fairly innocent drug.
What most of them don’t realize, though, is how utterly irresponsible pot is when viewed from a broader social perspective. We live in an age where the Left has wisely and effectively turned their efforts toward influencing society through the marketplace. There are few consumer goods left which do not have some sort of socially-responsible alternatives. Bananas are sold with the promise that their pickers were paid and housed decently, automobiles are sold with the promise that they will sip gingerly on gas, retailers market their community activism, and even mutual funds tout their responsible investments. Our accouterments are now accountable from the point where they were dug out of the earth to the point that they arrive at our table.

Yet most of the same people who insist that their apples are local, their bankers tolerant, their handbags messianic, and their maids affluent seem perfectly comfortable propping up the demand side of a trade which forces thousands of Americans into a life at the margins of society. Between all of their insistences that pot doesn’t hurt people, they seem to have forgotten that the stuff has to come from somewhere. And this is quite a large omission to make.

The legal differential between consumers and suppliers of marijuana is enormous. Middle- and upper- class users of pot face essentially no consequences for their actions. Law enforcement across the country generally looks in the other direction when teenagers listening to the Flaming Lips (or their parents listening to Big Brother & The Holding Company) toke up in the evenings. When they do run into trouble, legal help is easy and effective. Nobody worries too much about serving hard time for smoking pot at home, and even hard-nosed stalwarts of the law have given up on prosecuting every offense of petty possession. At Harvard, certainly, we’re more likely to get into trouble for covering up our fire extinguisher to keep it from squawking at the smoke than we are from smoking the pot itself.

For growers and distributors, though, the situation is different entirely. They form the linemen of a vast American underclass of crime and poverty. Their entire lives are, by and large, extralegal. They do not donate to politicians and they do not vote. Their trade demands that they shed their citizenry, that they give up the privileges and protections of society for them and their families. The law does not demur to strip away their freedom, and they fill up the ranks of inmates in wild overproportion—over 55 percent of the federal prison population is incarcerated for drug offenses.

And this legal differential mirrors a class differential. Most drug dealers are not recent economics graduates, and most freshly-minted MBAs do not consider a career in dealing alongside their offers from McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs. They are made up mostly of desperately poor people—people for whom the inflated demand of pot represents a rare economic opportunity in a world where jobs are scarce and education scarcer.

Yet we continue to smoke our pot, liberally, as it were, missing among its innocent curls of smoke the sinister economic system that it sets up. One cannot sneer at the social irresponsibility of a Hummer driver and then return home to relax over a joint whose procurement demanded the subjection of an impoverished underclass on the fringes of society.

This is, of course, not an argument against the legalization of marijuana. Perhaps there is a legitimate argument to be made that all of these problems could be easily dissolved by legal sanction for the drug trade. But until that point comes, we light up with the legal system we have, not the legal system we wish we had, and we cannot merely pretend that our actions have no consequences.

So perhaps a measure of consumer responsibility ought to make its way over to the liberal-minded drug users of our country. And perhaps we should insert into our caricature of the pot smoker the fat cigar of the plutocrat.

Garrett G. D. Nelson ’09 is a social studies and visual and environmental studies concentrator in Cabot House.

Source: Harvard Crimson (MA Edu)
Author: Garrett G. D. Nelson
Published: Monday, October 01, 2007
Copyright: 2007, The Harvard Crimson, Inc.
Contact: letters@thecrimson.com
Website: http://www.thecrimson.com/

Tell me why do prohibitionists always come off sounding like “why do you make me hurt you?” “just behave yourself!” and “why are you making me do this?”

Under the US constitution and law, marijuana could not legally be made illegal. To overcome this, they taxed it and refused to give out tax stamps, effectively making it illegal (and proves they knowingly were breaking the law by circumventing it).

Smoking does not make me stronger, smarter, or able to leap tall building in a single bound. I simply enjoy it (kinda, sorta, but not quite, “among these..” and “pursuit of happiness”).

Passing the buck on a history corruption and lies doesn’t hold. Responsibility remains exclusively with the prohibitionists and policy.

Tags: Brother & The Holding Company, Cabot, Garrett G. D. Nelson, Goldman Sachs, Harvard, Law enforcement, McKinsey & Co., Nelson Published, Nelson Source, The Harvard Crimson Inc

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 6, 2007
Contact: Clifford Schaffer, tel: 661-268-0442, e-mail: info@letuspaytaxes.com
Marijuana Dealers Offer Schwarzenegger One Billion Dollars

August 6 — A coalition of California marijuana growers and dealers has offered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger one billion dollars to solve the current state budget crisis. The group, calling itself Let Us Pay Taxes makes the offer through its web site LetUsPayTaxes.com. The offer comes at a time when the California legislature is deadlocked on a new budget and California has stopped issuing checks for vitally needed social services. Legislators are currently arguing over which programs will be cut in order to balance the budget.

“It is ridiculous that California can’t pay its bills,” said spokesman Clifford Schaffer. “It is a tragedy that they will cut badly needed services and programs such as medical care for the elderly and prison drug treatment when the money to fund all these programs and more is there and available. Everyone who is currently waiting for a check from the state should be enraged at this foolishness.”

Regulation and taxation of marijuana could produce six billion dollars in additional tax revenue, according to economic studies linked from their web site LetUsPayTaxes.com. In addition, it could save up to ten billion dollars in enforcement costs. “That is a conservative estimate,” said Schaffer. “By other estimates, the revenues could be five times that. The economists are with us all the way on this one. Marijuana prohibition is an economic disaster.”

“Let’s face reality,” Schaffer says. “Marijuana legalization is inevitable. The situation is already beyond control in California. The state and local authorities have offered safe harbor for medical marijuana use and the Federal Government simply doesn’t have the resources for effective control.” More importantly, says Schaffer, the operators of the medical marijuana clubs are no longer afraid of the Federal Government. “If you talk to them, you will find that they know they are going to win this battle.
They know that the DEA is vastly outnumbered and can’t begin to prosecute all of them. The few that are prosecuted are accepting their fate as martyrs because they know that what they are doing is right. They are willing to sacrifice themselves to make the point that the Federal Government has just gone too far in interfering with very personal and private decisions. There is no way the DEA is going to win this battle. At this point, it is all over but the counting of the money – and the victims of the DEA.”

Schaffer went on to say that the national market for marijuana has been estimated from a low of ten billion dollars per year to more than fifty billion dollars per year. “The first states to regulate and tax marijuana will receive an economic bonanza bigger than the original California Gold Rush,” says Schaffer. “Some states will get rich like the Saudis.” Schaffer predicts that it will not take long for some local areas to wake up to the economic possibilities. “We are talking potentially big bucks here,” he said. “The Canadians are already starting to take note of a cannabis-fueled economic boom in some areas. Politicians can’t resist fresh cash, especially when it is coming to their local community. There will be big winners and losers here. The winners will be the ones who recognize the foregone conclusion first.”

The group also cites foreign terrorism as a reason to regulate and tax marijuana. “Drug Czar John Walters is being dishonest when he says that marijuana money goes to criminals and terrorists. The only reason any of that money goes to criminals or terrorists is because of the prohibition that Walters supports,” said Schaffer. “Marijuana prohibition makes criminals rich just like alcohol prohibition did. The criminals are now so rich and powerful that they can challenge the legitimate governments of their own countries. There is no reason to send billions of dollars per year to foreign criminal gangs when patriotic Americans make the best products in the world. There is no reason to suffer such a huge foreign trade deficit when that money could be providing jobs and funding badly needed services right here in the USA.”

Let Us Pay Taxes calls upon all US citizens to sign their petition at their web site http://LetUsPayTaxes.com and press the issue with their lawmakers. “Take the money, please,” said Schaffer. “These people want to contribute. Now it is up to our politicians to tell us why they want to send those billions to foreign criminal gangs rather than to their own voters.”

Tags: 661-268-0442, Arnold Schwarzenegger, california, California legislature, Clifford Schaffer, federal government, John Walters, needed services, offer through its web site, social services, USD