The Financial Crisis Could Lead to Decriminalized Marijuana
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Even more than the permissive cultural attitude of the late 1970s, a more powerful factor may play a role in the current debate over federal marijuana policy: the recession.
Similar to how the Great Depression pushed Uncle Sam into lifting Prohibition—putting more money in government coffers through the regulation and taxation of alcohol—legalization may find itself back on the radar because of the many state budget crises. Just look at California.
New America Media’s Marcelo Ballve makes the case for legalizing pot in this article for Alternet.
NEW YORK — In 1977, President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to decriminalize marijuana possession (it never did). The next year, the Ladies Home Journal described a summer jazz festival on the White House’s South Lawn where “a haze of marijuana smoke hung heavy under the low-bending branches of a magnolia tree.”
The late 1970’s may have been the high-water mark for permissiveness regarding marijuana. But advocates of decriminalized pot believe a confluence of factors, especially the country’s economic malaise, are leading to another countrywide reappraisal of the drug.
“There is momentum of the sort I haven’t seen since I’ve been involved in this,” says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, which supports easing marijuana laws.
He says incidents like then-candidate Barack Obama’s early admission of pot use or the flap over Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps’s bong-smoking may lead to initial public hand-wringing, but in the end they tend to legitimize pot use. So does the growing recognition of medical marijuana.
But, he adds, “the economic crisis is the single most important factor” in this new shift in perceptions.
That’s because the ailing economy is triggering a scramble for new government savings or sources of revenue. Nadelmann compares today’s marijuana laws to alcohol prohibition, approved during prosperous times in 1920 only to become unpopular during the Great Depression. Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, in part due to the cost of reining in illegal booze and the need to recoup lost tax revenue in tough economic times.
As he signed a law easing prohibition, President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly quipped, “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”
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March 18th, 2009 at 10:00 am
[…] The Financial Crisis Could Lead to Decriminalized Marijuana […]
March 19th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
George Washington himself, wrote about his MJ fields in his diaries, even talking about making sure he separated male from female plants. I think most of us know the only reason for separating/destroying the males Maybe saving 1 good one for seeding, but you can always, re-root the plant from a cutting creating more of the same aka cloning.
Hemp/Marijuana should be farmed in the USA again, tax the recreational drug use, a good part of MJ’s madicinal parts to go directly to the sick as a legal medication, strong strains can be for medical use mostly. Use the hemp stalk for paper and clothes, the seeds as a very healthy food product, it can be used as bio-fuel, the uses and applications are many and much money can be made via many ways frm every single plant that is grown. PLUS it’s money that is shall I say ‘homegrown’. Good ole american jobs created and much money to be made and not solely frm taxation. True trade can be produced, rope, clothig, paper, gas/alternate fuel, medicine, very very strong cloth for sails, tarps anything that needs the use of strong fiber/cloth. I think I’ve jeard that a plastic like substance can be made frm hemp. Ptentials are almost limitless. For people can create/invent new things if it is widely available to the everyperson
We can stop, in the very least slow substantionally, the cutting down trees if we used hemp paper, plus it lasts longer than tree pulp paper, plus hemp grows faster and can produce way more than logging & chopping down forests -or forests the us used to have- and the few that are left are so much smaller than they used to be!
Cotton fields eat away at the soil they grow in, hemp helps to replenish soil, we can make much longer lasting lasting clothing, I’m even up for hemp cotton hemp/silk mixes.
Use the ‘drug’ it produces for sick people. Tax it for adults who choose to use it of thier own free will! The government needs to pay more attention to all the crooks that flock to and around wall street and its money markets and put these thiefs and frauds, these bigwig rich criminals in the business world in jail, just not slapping wrists and giving fines they can easily pay nly t dupe others, instead of jailing anyone who uses Marijuana! And soo many people are in jail or even prison on MJ charges, many muderers and rapists can get out sooner, than some caught with MJ. Were wasting $ keeping these non-violent “criminals” in.
I remember the year that
California,
O
regon and here in A
rizona put petitions on the ballots of medicalizing Marijuana and taxation, California and Oregon it went thru, but here in AZ the law that the people passes -I myself voted for it. It passed with about eightyfive percent. The feds came down hard and nixed AZ saying if the fed says its illegal it’s impossible for DR’s to give prescriptions for M.J. And there was a time before the feds jumped on the overwelming passing of dr’s prescribing and growers to register and pay high taxes on the MJ, and all bags needed the tax stamp on it for the patient to be legally in possesion of the ‘prescription’. I know of many people who bought these MJ tax stamps as 1. a piece of history, 2. to supply legally. I even knew of a couple who were driving home with thier product tax stamped and got stopped by police -for no real reason-, I believe they were being watched.. They are an older hippy couple in thier fifties/sixties. And got charged with having -within legal limit- of all tax stamped MJ. And had to fight in court for thier freedom, during the time before the law was nixed by the government, even though eightyfive plus percent passage of said proposition was passed by Arizonans. It was Made NULL AND VOID by the feds. But Oregon and California were not duped by the government
-the vote for medical MJ that year was on all 3 states’ ballots at the same time- that we the american people are supposedly the boss of people in government, denied Arizonans our right to vote and have said ballt pass. Before 1 year had gone by the whole thing was scrapped and Az MJ tax stamps are a prized thing as they stopped selling them very soon after the bru-haha started.
I agree that Hemp and it’s budding mild drug can help many in pain and dealing with diseases, but can also be opened up t the adult market like alcohol and cigarettes, if the ‘men’ aka ‘TheMan’ plural are frightened of it make its sale more restricted, such as going into a club where you must be a certain age and provide proof and controlled there. Or You can also have to go orders, maybe like drinking, no drinking in public -as in most places that I know of x-cept New Orlenes-. No consuming in public. I think it should be way more lax but I’m willing to make stronger rules for imbibing MJ, if it is made legal, or even decriminalized. It does not belong in scedule 1 drug classification, it does not meet the critera of what a schedule 1 drug is classified as! I think Alcohol has more a spot in schedule 1 than MJ, even cigarettes, they are truely addictive. If you become an alcoholic you go thru terrible withdrawals! I’ve heard that it is some of the worst that can be experienced.
So many peple enjoy the high of marijuana as well as the many people with various diseases that it helps, so much money can be made from farming Hemp. The government in the past ordered farmers to grow a certain percent of hemp to help get thru a war. How many peple a year are killed -either partied too hard and o.d.’d on liquor crashhed thier car while putting others in danger and often killing innocents, put in jail for vilolence unleashed while drinking, arrested for drinking and driving, picked up for drinking in public, ruin thier lives because they are alchololic often end up homeless and kill thier body by excessive drinking. I’m sure you all already know all this preaching to the choir, but I had to say exactly what I feel. And totally agree MJ can most certainly help out in out what they call recession I call it a depression.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
[…] The Financial Crisis Could Lead to Decriminalized Marijuana […]