Gallup recently reported that 50 percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, while 46 percent remain opposed.
Well, doesn’t that just bubble my bongwater! For the first time, we can actually say that there are more rational, logical, free-thinkers in our society than idiot bovine who mindlessly devour the propaganda of the anti-fun fuddy-duddies who have lorded over our country for way too long.
Naturally, after Gallup released the report, all the anti-fun fuddy-duddies appeared on the cable news shows, rehashing their tired B.S. that marijuana is not a virtuous blossom grown from the mineral-rich soil of God’s green Earth, but that it’s a heinous pistillate fertilized in the hothouses of Hell with the blood and bone-bits of deflowered Girl Scouts.
OK, nobody quite put it that way, but there was an awful lot of fear-mongering, such as when David Evans of the Drug Free America Foundation told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing that “Marijuana use is going to double or triple” if made legal.
Don’t you hate when people make declarative, predictive statements about things that might happen when everybody knows that nobody knows what the future holds. Evans said that marijuana use is going to double or triple, not “I think it will” or “I believe it will” or “My gut feeling is that it will”– with “gut feeling” being an appropriate way to say it since double or triple is a statistic he clearly pulled from his anus. Actually, to retrieve such a ludicrous stat, he had to reach his arm beyond his anus—deep into the ravaged hinterland of his rectum, past the cold, crusty crevasse of his dying colon, up the snaky ravine of the intestines, where his fist waged an epic battle at the gates of the ileocecal valve (fiercely guarded by the Owls of Ga’Hole) and drilled into the slimy folds of the lumen, where poop and other poop-like matter (such as bogus statistics) are formed.
Double or triple? Please! There is no way of foretelling such complex matters of human behavior—especially when no one knows if legalization will cause the price of marijuana to rise or drop; or how much it would be taxed; or how much government regulation would be implemented; or how much, and what kind of, marketing will be permitted— which is why not a single, legitimate, scientific study has attempted to predict how much consumption will increase, if at all, and why Evans had no choice to but to retrieve that number from the recesses of his bowels.
Whatever. The job is to frighten the herd into submission. So, the fuddy-duddy cattle farmers spew their propaganda on cable news shows like CNN (Cattle News Network), HLN (Heifers Late Night) and, of course, FOX (For Oxen Only) News, and all the livestock on Mooing Moron Farms believe it—unquestionably—just as they believe that the slaughterhouse is where well-behaved cows go for a spa and massage.
My gut feeling is there would be a slight increase in usage if pot were made legal (about 10 to 15 percent), which would occur over the course of a dozen-or-so years, and my reasoning is:
1. Pot is already as easy to acquire as any legal drug and damn near as easy as buying groceries.
2. According to a 2009 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 102 million Americans (41 percent) have admitted to using marijuana during their lifetimes, while 15 million (6 percent) admitting to using regularly.
Put another way, of the 102 million Americans who have tried marijuana, 85 percent of them did not become regular smokers, which suggests that there is a whole shitload of people out there who tried it and realized, at some point, it wasn’t for them. This suggests that it wasn’t a law that kept those 87 million people from smoking dope (or they wouldn’t have tried it in the first place); rather, it was their own disinterest.
There is something Evans said that did make sense. He said that when cannabis consumption doubles or triples, “all the costs to society will double or triple, as well.”
That seems reasonable. Whatever the increase in consumption—10 percent, 50 percent, double, triple, centuple—the cost to society will likely increase, respectively. Of course, the question then becomes, what are the societal costs of marijuana consumption and legalization? Is it the cost of manufacturing more cardboard Pringle’s tubes ? Is it the cost of pressing all those extra String Cheese Incident concert tickets? Is it the cost of providing emergency-room health care to uninsured reefer smokers who burn their fingers trying to light the last millimeter of roach? Or, is it the cost of hiring more IRS agents to collect and oversee the estimated $6 billion in extra tax revenue should pot become legal?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Didn’t Decker just attempt to predict the future by saying we will reap $6 billion in taxes? Perhaps. But at least I didn’t pull the number from my ass. I pulled $6 billion from a study conducted by economics professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University. Of course, he could be wrong, too. It is—study or no study—just an opinion. However, it’s an educated opinion, which is only my opinion about his opinion, but I’m right about my opinion—in my opinion.
Tags: legalization, marijuana, pot, weed
Increasing use should also be predicated on MJs medical properties still unrecognized by much of the medical community. Because it addresses many of the infirmities of aging, it may be impossible to sort out using for meds versus using for fun. Why don’t we stop trying to make the distinction. This will make more time for fun.
I met 2 teenagers the other day and after some interesting discussions about the Occupy movement, the economy, the Federal crack down on the pot biz in CA, I apologized to them for my generation having not legalized pot yet. WTF????? JOBS, TAXES, FREEDOM, we have NO excuse for letting the idiots make decisions for the rest of us.
Legalizing pot will lead to government getting involved and ruining it. Decriminalizing pot is the way to go.
Love the article, Edwin. I enjoy your prose and reasoning even more than the subject matter at hand. Belinda’s comment made me queasy. I recall being in high school about 172 years ago–and watching the dregs of the “burnouts” who would almost assuradly never be motivated to do a damn thing in life. Pot IS harmful to young minds, if used heavily on a regular basis. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be LEGAL. WITH age restrictions. And I aint no drug-o-phobe, but I hate the way pot affects half of the people who use it. For me, it only ever served to make me 3 things. 1) stupid
2) paranoid and 3) pass-out tired. Who wants to be dumber than they already are? Paranoid–cause that’s fun? And I cant even stay awake half hour after one hit of pot! Its always astounded me when I’ve known highly successful people who smoke on a daily basis. But the fact is, I’m pretty sure half the populace (stat pulled from my rectum) is affected in different ways than the other half. Hell, I smoked the shit for YEARS before I realized I didn’t even ENJOY it. ??
Anyway, its NOT FOR KIDS. Just sayin’…
Thanks Ed for being so level headed once again about social issues. Why aren’t you running for office? Any office?
I lived in Franco’s fascist Spain, and was actually there when he (finally, and “still”) died. I even saw him twice. Fear was second-nature in such a long, 40 year, regime. No one questioned authority, and laws were unopposed as long as some perceived connection to order was attained. One such law was a six-year sentence for marijuana possession. When Franco died in late 1975, the pendulum did swing left into “La Movida,” “The Movement,” of the late 70s early 80s. Hashish, already well-known in Spain for centuries from almost-neighboring Morocco, and undoubtedly then a universal counterculture symbol from our own sixties movement, took root among the disquiet youth. Soon, Spanish progressives decriminalized it “for personal use” and the reactionaries warned the “gateway” was now open to horribly overwhelming hard-drug use. Yes, for a brief period the unmistakable fragrance wafted over plazas, and even on line at the post office. However, society itself regulated that form of indiscretion. Within only a few years, public hashish consumption, responsive to the decorum characteristic of the Spanish People’s spirit, retreated to the privacy of one’s home. The very same has occurred here: just how often do we smell pot burning in Balboa Park or at the beaches anymore? Trust in the People was not misplaced. Note: Spain has since partially returned to the Dark Ages, thanks to the uniformity of the European Community’s laws.