California Could Use mar1juana to Help With Economic Issues

This is an interesting trend where recession gives all the vice industries an argument to legalize. Gambling and pot now. Prostitution is probably next.

 

as a resident of california


I am all for this.



personally i find cigarettes to be just as harmful and more addictive than pot is and that is legal. I am sure if they were to legalize it the state gov will make plenty of revenue from it not to mention the unnecessary court costs/jail costs for jailing pot smokers.

the only people it will piss off will be the dealers who will lose their cash crop.



reminds me of the episode of the wire where the police chief created "Hamsterdam" where a section of the city where drugs were legal as long as all you did was sell there and not on the other corners. Crime went down in the city because of it.

Of course that is just fictional, but in theory it can work and probably be beneficial to the state i think. I think the situation would be different if the drugs in questions were more harmful in nature (coke, heroin etc) but pot is a different story.


the state is in the crapper right now this may actually work.

 

The Libertarians are the only party righteous enough to publicly decry the war on drugs and make it part of their platform. This will never happen with the status quo, statist Republicrats.

http://www.lp.org/issues/crime-and-violence

Step 2. End Prohibition

Drug prohibition does more to make Americans unsafe than any other factor. Just as alcohol prohibition gave us Al Capone and the mafia, drug prohibition has given us the Crips, the Bloods and drive-by shootings. Consider the historical evidence: America's murder rate rose nearly 70% during alcohol prohibition, but returned to its previous levels after prohibition ended. Now, since the War on Drugs began, America's murder rates have doubled. The cause/effect relationship is clear. Prohibition is putting innocent lives at risk.

What's more, drug prohibition also inflates the cost of drugs, leading users to steal to support their high priced habits. It is estimated that drug addicts commit 25% of all auto thefts, 40% of robberies and assaults, and 50% of burglaries and larcenies. Prohibition puts your property at risk. Finally, nearly one half of all police resources are devoted to stopping drug trafficking, instead of preventing violent crime. The bottom line? By ending drug prohibition Libertarians would double the resources available for crime prevention, and significantly reduce the number of violent criminals at work in your neighborhood.

 

I question the economic wisdom of this. By legalizing pot, California would severely reduce the value of their "largest cash crop". Sure they'd be able to collect sin taxes from it, but they'd lose revenue from what the pot growers spend. I don't know, but I would guess that pot is a major net export from California to other states. That brings money into the state.

States that don't grow much illegal pot could get a boost by legalizing, because they'd gain revenue of stuff produced elsewhere, and they'd probably get new producers in their state.

 

It seems to me that for California, Marajuana would become like the coca trade in Bolivia. There would be one legal crop for domestic use, and a parallel black market export crop. The only market that would evaporate would be in-state illegal mar1juana. Because it would still be illegal in other states, the black market export of large quantities would still command a premium.

 

Unless they erected customs offices going in and out of California checking you for mar1juana, they've just made that whole market lot easier. It'd be like getting Coors in the seventies (according to my dad). Everyone would just ask their friends to pick them up some pot when they went to California, small-time dealers would make pot runs and charge enough when they got back to cover their trip, etc.

 

I just don't know how they can effectively regulate it. If it were legal, I'd think a lot of people would just grow their own 2-3 plants in their home for personal use.

 

While the price would go down cutting down revenue and potential sales taxes from pot growers spending you would get a tradeoff in savings from enforcing anti-pot laws.

 

That's like saying I could grow my own basil and tomatoes at home and while alot of people do you still see a lot of people producing it.

My limited understanding of mar1juana is that to hemp isn't hard to grow but to produce something you could get high off of that takes a lot of work.

 

Yeah, but the price different between growing tomatoes and buying them at the grocery store isn't as vast as street prices of mar1juana vs growing your own stuff.

The plant isn't very hard to grow. It takes time and caring for it, but it isn't a lot of work.

 

It's all about genetics. You could teach a 6 yr old to grow primo bud if you have good seeds.

 

I will concede to both or your greater knowledge on growing ganja.

 

so, are you saying there'd be a smokey and the bandit remake, but this time with pot? sweet!

 

sign me up!

 

You create new jobs, which creates corporate income taxes and individual income taxes. You also collect sales tax when said corporations and individuals buy things. I think it is a net gain for California. How much do you think the price of pot will drop? I have no idea how much it costs now.

 

So, to look at the obvious comparison, do you think alcohol prohibition in the 1930's helped the American economy by driving up profits for people like Al Capone? Was ending alcohol prohibition a poor move for the US economy?

 

Alcohol prohibition didn't stop the Roaring Twenties from happening, and ending prohibition certainly didn't get us out of the Depression, though it probably made us feel better about it.

Legalizing pot would be beneficial in net for the country as a whole, because I'm pretty sure we are net importers of it, and we are sending dollars south of the border to import it, and were it legalized, we'd grow more of it here. Unless California is a net importer of pot, it might hurt.

By the way, I'm not claiming that legalizing pot would be bad for the economy or reduce taxes. I don't have enough information to know that. I'm just saying that it's not nearly as simple as collecting taxes on $14 Billion, since that $14 Billion is based off of prices that are inflated by prohibition.