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The country is going to pot — 6 Comments

  1. As usual you need to follow the money. By making drug possession a "ticket" the government get to collects fines and in many places also charge you "court costs". At the same time they avoid the cost of actually putting people in jail. An alternative is to make it "legal" adn collect license fees for producers and taxes for purchasers and this becomes a new revenue stream. 

    • Which ever way they do things, they'll fuck it up.  Criminalising it just fills the jails [which by all accounts are noting more than gigantic crack houses anyway].  Legalising it will just mean gubmint control and massive taxation which will mean the underground will still thrive.  Decriminalising it the way they have done just means a "lesser offence" which doesn't really change anything.  Decriminalising it altogether is the only way to go.  Remove the whole shebang from the statute books.

  2. Heh! Same as that,GD. I used to smoke industrial quantities of the stuff when I was younger, and I still enjoy a toke.

    I don't get this 'decriminalisation' stuff though. Either you legalise, regulate and presumably tax the stuff, or you don't.

    Personally, and I've been saying this for more than forty years to anyone who would listen, I'd legalise all drugs. The only reason there is a drug 'problem' is because drugs are illegal.

    When I was in Thailand in 1970/71, dope was a social norm. Everywhere I went I was constantly being invited for a smoke, and dynamite weed it was too. Then the lawmakers, in their wisdom, decided that it needed to be eradicated, so there was a crackdown. Result? All the kids are doing meth and going out robbing and murdering now. Brilliant.

    Same thing when I arrived in Australia after I left Thailand. The place was awash with locally grown 'Zombie' grass. Very good, cheap and plentiful. So of course gubmint decided to fix that by finding all the plantations and razing them to the ground, which choked off the supply. Result? A year later, all the kids were doing heroin and dying in their hundreds from overdoses etc etc. Clever, huh?

    I can't decide if it's because the authorities are complete fucking morons, or whether it's a deliberate ploy. Because it's as plain as the nose on your face that if you take one drug out of circulation that people will find an alternative. And usually that alternative, at least initially, will be an unknown quantity.

    • I can understand some kind of control on heroin which by all accounts is pretty messy stuff [never tried it myself], but trying to impose laws, rules and regulations on something you can easily grow at home just doesn't work.

      Trying to control something by either banning it or making it difficult to obtain is only going to lead to a massive black market.  They discovered that in the States with Prohibition and they are discovering it here now with tobacco.  Let the market have free reign and crime will all but disappear.

      Having weed freely available is of course a problem for gubmints.  A population, half of whom are stoned out of their minds is a lot harder to control! 

       

  3. The government won't decriminalise either the possession or sale of anything unless it sees ways to snatch revenue from the punters. The tobacco companies are going to lobby heavily too as they don't want to see competitive sources of smoking pleasure easing onto their pitch.

    • If my memory serves me correctly, wasn't it the tobacco companies who originally campaigned to have marijuana made illegal?  Of course they can't renew that campaign now as the Puritans have told the gubmint they must never talk to Big Tobacco!

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