Will Obama decriminalize pot?

[Mononoke28 135]

Will Obama decriminalize pot?

I doubt it.

Even if he were to attempt it - I don't think he would get very far with it.

He should. There's nothing wrong with smoking a little weed from time to time.

Diana

[Jasman0717 9]

Do cartels have lobbyists?

Edited December 23, 2008 by jasman0717

[mox 298]

Do cartels have lobbiests?

Yeah. They're called hit squads.

[HAL 9000 96]

Do cartels have lobbyists?

Sure, they're called

HAL 9000 can't say

.

No, seriously... the pharmaceutical cartels have them too.

With this backache I have from working all day near-nonstop I sure wish weed was legal right now.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Do cartels have lobbyists?

They only exist because of the current drug prohibition. Just like Al Capone style booze running disappeared when alcohol prohibition ended.

[Dr. A ♥ O 203]

Pass on the info for future reference pls.

http://www.maps.org/

[jundp 191]

When I taught college some students approached me and asked if I'd be the faculty adviser for NORML. Apparently I looked "laid back, man."

[NickD 203]

For a so called free nation, this country or our leaders, haven't figured that out yet, is so up tight about drugs, even to the point where pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to play with illegal drugs for the benefit of mankind to relieve pain and suffering while some of these plants have been used successfully for thousands of years.

And getting to the point where you need a prescription to get an aspirin, was nice in Venezuela, could buy any prescription drug I wanted without a prescription. A tube of cream for a rash has to be purchased with a prescription, what a racket when you have to pay a dermatologist 250 bucks to get that prescription. Then he tells you if it doesn't work, we will try something different, for another 250 bucks!

Least living in the drunk state of America, the price of beer is cheap, just as cheap if not cheaper than buying a six pack of Pepsi, but a hell of a lot cheaper than buy the same quantity of milk. Thought we were the diary state, should change that to the beer state. Talking about taxing beer, that will be the day, Miller owns the state.

Another stupid law we have, can't even buy a bottle of wine after 9:00 PM to take home. Only way to get a drink after 9:00 PM is to go to some bar that stays open to 2:00 AM, and these bars are everyplace, many dippy towns only have a bar and a church, not even a gas station or a grocery store. And the only way to get there and come back is by driving, so if you do go there, better not drink.

[zqt3344 21]

Sure he will try to for he is a doobie toking brotha himself! Great just what we need a pot smoking change agent! There is no telling what will happen next to us in the USA, we are all doomed, doomed I say!

Famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the United States banking system during the first seven days of his first term.

And what did he do on the eighth day? "I think this would be a good time for beer," he said.

Congress had already repealed Prohibition, pending ratification from the states. But the people needed a lift, and legalizing beer would create a million jobs. And lo, booze was back. Two days after the bill passed, Milwaukee brewers hired six hundred people and paid their first $10 million in taxes. Soon the auto industry was tooling up the first $12 million worth of delivery trucks, and brewers were pouring tens of millions into new plants.

"Roosevelt's move to legalize beer had the effect he intended," says Adam Cohen, author of Nothing To Fear, a thrilling new history of FDR's first hundred days. "It was, one journalist observed, 'like a stick of dynamite into a log jam.'"

Many in the marijuana world are now hoping for something similar from Barack Obama. After all, the president-elect said in 2004 that the war on drugs had been "an utter failure" and that America should decriminalize pot:

In July, Obama told Rolling Stone that he believed in "shifting the paradigm" to a public-health approach: "I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives -- it's expensive, it's counterproductive, and it doesn't make sense."

Meanwhile, economists have been making the beer argument. In a paper titled "Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard argues that legalized marijuana would generate between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year -- conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton "Free Market" Friedman himself.

...

Some of Obama's biggest financial donors are friends of the legalization movement, [NORML executive director] St. Pierre notes. "Frankly, George Soros, Peter Lewis, and John Sperling -- this triumvirate of billionaires -- if those three men, who put up $50 to $60 million to get Democrats and Obama elected, can't pick up the phone and actually get a one-to-one meeting on where this drug policy is going, then maybe it's true that when you give money, you don't expect favors."

Another member of that moneyed group: Marsha Rosenbaum, the former head of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, who quit last year to become a fundraiser for Obama and "bundled" an impressive $204,000 for his campaign ... "I'm hoping that what the administration will do," she says, "is something this country hasn't done since 1971, which is to undertake a presidential commission to look at drug policy, convene a group of blue-ribbon experts to look at the issue, and make recommendations."

But ultimately, Rosenbaum remains confident that those recommendations would call for an end to the drug war.

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson...lization-122308