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posted by azrael on Tuesday October 21 2014, @04:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the learning-lessons dept.

Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that many countries are taking a close look at what's happening in Colorado and Washington state to learn lessons that can be applied to their own situations and so far, the news coming out of Colorado and Washington is overwhelmingly positive. Dire consequences predicted by reform opponents have failed to materialize. If anything, societal and economic indicators are moving in a positive direction post-legalization. Colorado marijuana tax revenues for fiscal year 2014-2015 are on track to surpass projections.

Lisa Sanchez, a program manager at México Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a Mexican non-profit devoted to promoting "security, legality and justice", underscored how legalization efforts in the U.S. are having powerful ripple effects across the globe: events in Colorado and Washington have "created political space for Latin American countries to have a real debate [about drug policy]". She noted that motivations for reform in Latin America are somewhat different than U.S. motivations - one main driver is a need to address the epidemic of violence on those countries that is fuelled directly by prohibitionist drug war policies. Mexico's president has given signs he's open to changes in that country's marijuana laws to help combat cartel violence. Sandeep Chawla, former deputy director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, notes that one of the main obstacles to meaningful reform is layers of entrenched drug control bureaucracies at the international and national levels - just in the U.S., think of the DEA, ONDCP and NIDA, among others - for whom a relaxation of drug control laws represents an undermining of their reason for existence: "if you create a bureaucracy to solve a particular problem, when the problem is solved that bureaucracy is out of a job".

 
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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @01:31PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @01:31PM (#108646) Journal

    Marijuana isn't as addictive as opioid pain pills and SSRIs. I imagine the margins won't be as high either. Then there's losing customers to folks who would prefer to just grow their own. Maybe they could sell like a self-contained hydroponics kit or something, but then again that's lost revenue in the long term.

    1) Not addictive, but certainly habit-forming. They'll have *plenty* of lifetime customers.

    2) Margins are HUGEEEE right now, even with all the expense to grow the stuff. They'll have decent margins. They'll sell high volume too. It'll be no different than tobacco.

    3) People grow their own now because they have to. If you could buy a pack of joints from the local gas station, I don't think too many people would be growing.

    4) Hydroponics is largely pointless if it's legalized. The people who are growing now are using very expensive methods to do so largely because they have to grow indoors in the dark. When you can just plant a field of the stuff, the current independent growers will be priced out of business rather quickly.

    There's a reason they call it "weed" -- it is literally a weed. Pretty easy stuff, just throw some seeds in the mud and it'll probably grow. If Big Pharma or Big Tobacco enters the market, you're going to need several acres of land to be able to sell this stuff at a competitive price. I'm sure there will be a market for local stuff, just like there's a market for local apples, but that won't be the majority of sales.

    They're staying out of it for now because it's still illegal, even in Colorado and Washington. It's banned under federal law, and federal law always trumps state law. By "legalizing" it what the states really mean is that the state agencies will stay out of it, and the federal agencies don't have the manpower to deal with it. Odds of any grower getting arrested are pretty small (but not zero, some have been arrested) since they're all small and independent, but if you start getting massive corporate farms of it the DEA would be breaking down their doors the day they started operating.

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