Put that in your pipe and smoke it

The marijuana debate is not just about medicine. It's time to drive a wedge between the criminal drug dealers and our kids. Licensing, taxing, and regulating marijuana will put the drug dealers out of business and protect our children. Regulate the marijuana business, medical or otherwise. While we’re at it, let’s implement a personal cultivation permit. Limit the number of plants, and put a fee on it, something like a fishing license, with maybe a little extra for education or fixing the roads.

How about $100 per year for a permit to cultivate a dozen plants? It's a win-win.

Sadly, D.A. Cooley, in his infinite wisdom, will probably argue that this chart proves that we need to spend way more money to arrest all those people. "One in three! Quick build more prisons!!"
I cannot understand how that man can continue to ignore the fact that every single dispensary they raid sends that much more money back to the gangs and cartels, instead of being taxed and regulated. It's such a basic principle; it makes you wonder who he's really working for...

Fine.
But put some teeth in the taxation regulation.
Enforcement has to be stringent to prevent a black-market living on the edges of untaxed edges of legality.

Every puff is taxed, one way or another.

1) Every grower, transporter, seller and smoker needs a license--which all cost money to get.

2) Stiff financial and criminal penalties for growing, transporting, selling or smoking without the license.

3) Incentives (rewards) for info leading to arrest & conviction of any unlicensed growing, transporting, sales or smoking.

4) State constitutional guarantees that pot smoking NEVER becomes a "protected" activity and that pot smokers NEVER become a "protected" class. (CA is now close to being smoke-free. That is fantastic. We're not going to backslide into forcing any property owner or business to allow smoking because its "medical" related. This point is non-negotiable.)

When you put those in place, I'm on board.

anon, you're missing the point. Cannabis should be completely legalized for the benefit of society. The restrictions you've postulated are, in my opinion, still too stringent. You advocate the implementation of a system of licenses to cultivate while exacting punishment (both financial AND criminal) on those who don't step in line. This leaves those who don't have the financial means to pay for a license, holding the short end of the blunt. We'll still be wasting money prosecuting and ruining the lives of people with lower incomes and all because "they didn't pay to play."

With all due respect, I think people should be allowed to grow and smoke freely. Regulation should be in the commercial distribution of cannabis. Those who want to sell cannabis, must keep accurate books, and collect sales tax from each sale. We don't tax your neighborhood grandmothers because they choose to grow their own tomatoes, but we do have people making sure that Albertson's pays its taxes when they sell theirs.

As for eradicating the black market, all we need to do is legalize it!

Hey Anon

1) Every grower, transporter, seller and smoker needs a license--which all cost money to get.

Easy there, that's overkill, those in commerce, should licensed, but not users.

2) Stiff financial and criminal penalties for growing, transporting, selling or smoking without the license.

We already have those and they didn't work. Same as alcohol would be fine.

3) Incentives (rewards) for info leading to arrest & conviction of any unlicensed growing, transporting, sales or smoking.

Bad idea, overkill, and not at all necessary. Calm down. A suceessfull elimination of the black market means making it like other things like alcohol.

how about treat it like booze

Deficit buster? Fair taxation would be a real deficit buster. That means progressive taxation. All neoliberal governments are playing this ruse on the people where they may like the deficit is an evil thing that we can't have, while they create them and use them as leverage against the people and their demands for governments (they were encouraged via a supposedly democratic process to help create) to do social spending. Social spending is spending on the people. You know? The little ones who 'have' to pay their taxes?

Those tax cuts, together with national security ideology that is shoved down peoples' throats to make them accept all those subsidies going to the military industrial complex, together with a zillion other tax breaks and loopholes, mean deficits that those who didn't ask for them are now told to fix - by lowering their expectation of what their elected politicians can do for them. (See 'Take The Rich Off Welfare', by Mark Zepezauer)

And then there's offshore tax havens and banking secrecy. Obama has squeaked a little about that. But where's that effort gone? Besides, I don't expect much from corporacrats who sit in the White House while their armies are permitted to hijack other countries (Iraq, Afghanistan) or ignore it when their capitalist allies do the same (Honduras).

You know this will never go through. There are to many people, agencies, groups making money or there livelihood based on the illegality of drugs, all drugs not just marijuana. Cops, lawyers, prison guards, the whole legal system, prison construction, prison maintenance-the list goes on.

Trying to tax something that is illegal does not effects the bottom lone. the 14,000,000,000 spent will remain the same and possibly increase because the status quo will demand a cut.

Drugs should be decriminalized as in Portugal as a start --with full legalization for most drugs in the future.

I THInK IT SHOULD BE LEGAL ALR3ADII.

anon | 11/27/2009 at 11:13 AM: my main problem with your regulation requirements is the idea that every toke should be taxed. People can manufacture alcohol for their own use without taxation. Given that cannabis is clearly far, far less deadly than alcohol, why should the law take alcohol's side in this or any other matter? I can live with your other requirements, but prohibiting adult cannabis users who have no history of causing problems from growing enough cannabis for their own use is as unfair as it is unwise. Make the penalty severe, include a huge fine, for abusing the right to engage in personal cultivation. .Maybe you haven't considered the problems caused by how the current law forces people to use alcohol, including people who simply can't handle alcohol. Alcohol leaves the system so quickly that people on probation or parole for alcohol related offenses, who undergo routine drug testing, wind up being more effectively tested for cannabis than for the drug whose use caused their offense.
Yep, you read that right, drunk drivers under court supervision, even those prohibited from using alcohol, are normally tested much more effectively for whether they are using cannabis than for whether they are using the drug that could easily have led to their murdering an innocent person.

GO WEED

Taxing a major earner is a no brainer! This "blue law"system is a destructively harmful program. The multiple uses of hemp, or cannabis, could rescue much of what is wrong with our dependance on foreign oil. Even calling it marijuana is racist jingoism to make middle America afraid of it as foreign substance. Educate the public to recognize it as a social asset which has a shadow side as well; yes, just like alcohol. An arrest every 38 seconds underlines the wasteful double negative - loss of individual income and public treasury - of the present policy. Of course, people, especially kids, see 'forbidden fruit' with unequal curiosity. The taxes on tobacco and alcohol facilitates education and rehab programs. Let us join the 21st Century in our approach to this manageable problem.

When they repealed Prohibition, a lot of the criminal gangs had to get real jobs, selling liquor legally, paying taxes and following the regulations and the law.

We need to get over our Puritanical hangups and start to realize that marijuana and such vices as prostitution should be legalized, regulated and taxed. Only then will the criminal elements be forced to get real jobs and pay real taxes and live real lives.