Thread: Legalizing Mary-Jane Yes or No?

Originally Posted by Beef

I do agree with parts of that. Taxing & legalizing marijuana would definately hurt a drug dealer's business in turn making the streets a bit safer. (in theory anyway) However, if everyone picks up a pack of joints to go with their 12 pack of beer our highways are destined to become a graveyard. So recreational use doesn't have my vote as much as medicinally does.

Please. I agree that driving while high is dangerous, but it's less dangerous than driving while drunk, and alcohol is already legal for recreational use. So legalizing recreational marijuana use is not going to push us over the brink into some driving-safety nightmare where the highways are graveyards. It's not going to make that much of a difference.

Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable

So basically you're saying that the government is artificially altering what succeeds in the market so that things that make less sense end up winning out. This will fix that. Sounds like a pretty good thing that should have happened awhile ago.

Yes, he's not denying that it's a good thing, he's pointing out the political difficulties that will nevertheless the attend to it due to the substantial size of the industries that legalized marijuana and hemp cultivation would compete with. He's not offering an argument against legalization, he's pointing out an obstacle to legalization. Although I think he's exaggerating. Industrial hemp farming will not "annihilate" other textile products or lumber-derived paper products, for instance; the US is the only country in the world that bans industrial hemp farming, so we can look to other countries for insight on this matter, and see that despite the legality of industrial hemp farming in those countries, non-hemp products have no problem existing in the market along with similar hemp-derived products. The same is true of the pharmaceuticals industry. Marijuana has some interesting applications but it is never going to "annihilate" a large portion of the pharma industry's profits.