I don't have any personal stake in this — I've never used pot and have no particular urge to. But looking at the excessive costs of anti-pot policing, vs. the marginal gain, treating it as anything worse than alcohol is just foolish. #ddtb
Reshared post from +Breaking News
Colorado asks DEA to reclassify marijuana
Denver, Colo., USAWed Dec 28, 5:48 p.m. MST: The head of the Colorado Department of Revenue has written a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration asking that federal controls on marijuana be loosened slightly to account for its "potential medicinal value," +The Denver Post reports.
Colorado is the third state with a medical-marijuana program to ask the DEA to reschedule marijuana.
Read more:
+The Denver Post – http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_19634321
#Colorado
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Colorado asks DEA to reclassify marijuana – The Denver Post
You have an absolutely personal stake in this. It's a quite expensive injustice that affects the health of the society we live in.
Agreed. DH and I were talking about this the other day…if they are so worried about pot specifically then they need to ban alcohol as well. It is just as bad… Have you seen/read the history of the whole drug thing? It was initially used to get rid of Chinese immigrant workers way back when they were building railroads. When they were seeing a lot of workers smoke opium they decided that was the best way to get rid of them is to ban it….and it just snowballed from there.
+George Wiman , I know I have a stake here in terms of my tax dollars (for law enforcement, for incarceration, for the added tax burden / reduced tax production of folks whose lives are ruined for silly drug charges). I consider that a secondary stake, and one that affects society as a whole less than it does me, personally.
But in some ways that's just quibbling; it's an unnecessary drain on our society and our nation and too many of its individual people. And it's maintained only due to a Puritanical streak among some of the populace, and a financial and prestige and existential stake from the War on Drugs industry (both private and public).
+Sandy L., the racial aspect of drug policy is certainly worth noting — from anti-opium efforts vs Chinese to anti-marijuana efforts vs Latinos to anti-crack and anti-booze efforts vs Blacks. (The KKK was a big proponent of Prohibition, and many of the Progressive arguments for it were more subtly but just as clearly racist.)
I don't know that it was so much to "get rid of" the undesirable elements, so much as to (a) restrain some of their more overtly undesirable behaviors and (b) provide another tool for keeping them under control.