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Hoosiernorm
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Hoosiernorm »

http://www.deadline.com/2012/11/marijua ... producers/
EXCLUSIVE: The marijuana legalization movement gained major momentum in the recent November elections as measures to regulate the drug made it to the ballot in three Western states and passed in two — Colorado and Washington — with several others working on similar legislation. Now the grass-roots campaign is set as the backdrop for a comedy in development at Fox. The Happy Tree, from former Entourage executive producers Rob Weiss, Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson, centers on a brilliant young corporate attorney who, after a nervous breakdown, quits his job and seeks a life of peace and serenity on Venice Beach only to find himself the unlikely voice for the marijuana “legalize it” movement
Countdown to all the stoners praising Fox as a beacon of free speech
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Hoosiernorm
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Hoosiernorm »

http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... ar/265729/

Why Legalizing Pot Won't Curb the Drug War
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Doc
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Doc »

Hoosiernorm wrote:http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... ar/265729/

Why Legalizing Pot Won't Curb the Drug War
But along with other drugs, it will do wonders for the human trafficking biz as drug gangs diversify into other businesses.
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Hoosiernorm
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

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monster_gardener
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Immigration by Illegal Marijuana

Post by monster_gardener »

Thank you VERY Much for the Thread, Monster Gardener ;) :lol: :roll:

On talk radio yesterday one caller had a very innovative possible solution to the Marijuana & Illegal immigrant problems.......

Instead of legalizing Marijuana or trying to enforce Immigration laws which gets States in trouble with the Fudderal ;) Government....

States should make it Legal for Illegal Immigrants to buy, grow, sell, use & transport Marijuana.....

Possible that this might drive Present Dunce Choom Hog the Lying Son of a Bitch Eater Obama and Evil Shyster General Eric Holder crazy........ :twisted:

Or at least frustrate them a little............ ;)

They don't want to have enforcement of immigration laws but are big on bashing medical marijuana.......

Imagine the contending compulsions...... ;) :twisted: :lol: 8-)
Last edited by monster_gardener on Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Typhoon »

Hoosiernorm wrote:http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... ar/265729/

Why Legalizing Pot Won't Curb the Drug War
Well, marijuana is not the only drug in demand,
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Typhoon »

Someone has been watching Mythbusters . . .

PopSci | Mexican Drug Smugglers Are Launching Pot Into The U.S. With A Huge Pneumatic Cannon

The beginning of the Mexican space program . . .
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Crocus sativus »

.


U.S. has ‘bigger fish to fry’ than going after pot smokers in states where marijuana use is now legal, Obama says

President Barack Obama said Friday he won’t go after Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana, leaving supporters of the movement cautiously optimistic that a showdown with federal law won’t happen.

In a Barbara Walters interview airing Friday on ABC, Obama was asked whether he supports making pot legal. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.

But the president, who has admitted smoking pot when he was younger, said his administration won’t pursue the issue in the states where voters in November legalized the use of marijuana. The drug remains illegal under federal law, but the Justice Department has been vague about what its response to the votes would be.

“It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view” to focus on drug use in states where it is now legal, Obama said. Possession of up to one ounce (28 grams) of marijuana is now legal for adults over 21 in both Washington and Colorado


.
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Typhoon wrote:Someone has been watching Mythbusters . . .

PopSci | Mexican Drug Smugglers Are Launching Pot Into The U.S. With A Huge Pneumatic Cannon

The beginning of the Mexican space program . . .
I bet it makes a loud "BONG!" sound when i goes off.
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Cannon went off with a BONG! Re: Drug Culture News - Mariju

Post by monster_gardener »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Someone has been watching Mythbusters . . .

PopSci | Mexican Drug Smugglers Are Launching Pot Into The U.S. With A Huge Pneumatic Cannon

The beginning of the Mexican space program . . .
I bet it makes a loud "BONG!" sound when i goes off.
Thank you VERY Much for your post, Nonc.

:lol: :lol: :lol: 8-)

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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Apollonius »

Regulate antibiotics, not recreational drugs, ethicist argues - CBC News, 21 February 2013
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/201 ... otics.html

Governments worldwide should stop wasting money on criminalizing recreational drugs and use those funds to curb antibiotic misuse, a medical ethicist suggests.

Philosophy Prof. Jonny Anomaly of Duke University in Durham, N.C., called the war on drugs "unwinnable and morally dubious," in his paper published this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics. ...
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by monster_gardener »

Apollonius wrote:Regulate antibiotics, not recreational drugs, ethicist argues - CBC News, 21 February 2013
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/201 ... otics.html

Governments worldwide should stop wasting money on criminalizing recreational drugs and use those funds to curb antibiotic misuse, a medical ethicist suggests.

Philosophy Prof. Jonny Anomaly of Duke University in Durham, N.C., called the war on drugs "unwinnable and morally dubious," in his paper published this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics. ...
Thank You VERY MUCH for your post, Apollonius.

Seconded.
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by YMix »

David Simon, creator of The Wire, says new US drug laws help only 'white, middle-class kids'

The award-winning creator of The Wire, David Simon, has emerged as a critic of the 'racial bias' in the US debate on the war on drugs

David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore – The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. But what keeps him there is his apocalyptic and unrelenting heresy over the failed "war on drugs", the multibillion-dollar worldwide crusade launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

When Simon brought that heresy to London last week – to take part in a debate hosted by the Observer – he was inevitably asked about what reformers celebrate as recent "successes" – votes in Colorado and Washington to legalise marijuana.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

If marijuana were exempted from the war on drugs, he insisted, "it'd be another 10 or 40 years of assigning people of colour to this dystopia."

Simon joined two film directors for a discussion onstage: Eugene Jarecki, in whose movie The House I Live In – on the toll of America's war on drugs – he features prominently, and Rachel Seifert, whose Cocaine Unwrapped charts the drug's progress from blighted "producer" countries to the addicts in Europe and the US.
Eugene Jarecki on the war on drugs Link to video: The House I Live In director Eugene Jarecki on America's war on drugs

The occasion was staged by the Observer and chaired by its editor, John Mulholland, as part of its campaign to address the global drugs crisis.

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on – and the curse of – drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore's case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, "excess Americans": once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs "a holocaust in slow motion".

Simon said he "begins with the assumption that drugs are bad", but also that the war on drugs has "always proceeded along racial lines", since the banning of opium.

It is waged "not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans," he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: "We do not need 10-12% of our population; they've been abandoned. They don't have barbed wire around them, but they might as well."

As a result, "drugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and east St Louis" – an industry that employs "children, old people, people who've been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn't matter. It's the only factory that's still open. The doors are open."

While his co-panellists sipped their water, Simon poured himself another glass of red wine as he continued. A bull of a man, a presence in any room – even one as large as the packed theatre in the colonnaded heart of Britain's scientific establishment.

"Capitalism," Simon said, "has tried to jail its way out of the problem" with the result that "the prison industry has been given over to capitalism. If we need to get rid of these people, we might as well make some money out of getting rid of them."

Jarecki, in a scathing portrayal of the American prison system in both his film and at Thursday's event, cited some statistics: "We have ravaged our poor communities," he said, some of which, African-American, counted "4,000 per 100,000 in jail, as compared with an average dose of around 300". Meanwhile, Simon said the police in some cities had "become an army of occupation that sends brothers and fathers to jail".

He described a logic to policing in Baltimore whereby "street-rips" in drug-infested areas make for easy arrests to achieve "cost-efficient" policing, while criminal activity other than drugs was ignored because prosecutions were laborious.

Simon said he had seen a decrease in arrests for non-drug offences from 70-90% to 20-40%, while drug-related arrests increased on some beats from 5,000 to 30,000 because, as Jarecki put it, "it's like shooting fish in a barrel".

"So the drug war," concluded Simon, "makes the city unsafe." But has it worked? "The drugs in my city are more powerful, cheaper and more available than ever before," replied Simon.

Simon said he had "no faith in our political leadership to ever address the problem. There is no incentive to walk away from law and order as a political currency." He said change would come, if it does, from jurors simply "refusing to send husbands, sons and fathers from their communities to jail … That is how prohibition [of alcohol] ended. They couldn't find 12 Americans who would send a 13th to jail for selling bathtub gin."

Simon regarded "legalisation" of drugs as "a word invented by advocates of the drug war to make the other side look goofy, saying 'everything should be legalised'. The issue is: how do we get out of here? And I say: decriminalisation. As with other controlled substances – taxed and regulated." He later said he did not think change would come of any moral decision, but because "someone just figures out: this is costing too much money".

From the audience, the Colombian ambassador to London, Mauricio Rodríguez, drew attention to his government's leadership of initiatives from Latin America to "completely redraw" a global strategy on drugs, with co-responsibility assumed by consuming countries, focusing on social and economic issues, and money laundering by banks. "Basta!" he said, "the Latin American countries have had enough." Such thinking had driven a recent report, which Rodríguez brandished, by the Organisation of American States, of which, he pointed out, the US is a member.

Simon replied that America had fought "proxy wars" across the world for decades, and the war on drugs in Latin America was among them. On the carnage in neighbouring Mexico, he said: "If 40,000 Mexicans are dead, we don't give a damn as long as it stays that side of the border – turn northern Mexico into an abattoir, so long as it doesn't get to Tucson. If we can fight to the last Mexican, for a suburban American to send their kid safely to junior high school, we will."
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Enki »

I agree with David Simon in spirit, but in the specifics he is totally wrong. More blacks and latinos go to prison for marijuana prohibition than white people do. So marijuana legalization will keep more people of color out of prison than it will keep white folk out of prison. White folks generally don't go to prison for marijuana offenses unless they are a grower or a trafficker.
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monster_gardener
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Singularity.........

Post by monster_gardener »

YMix wrote:
David Simon, creator of The Wire, says new US drug laws help only 'white, middle-class kids'

The award-winning creator of The Wire, David Simon, has emerged as a critic of the 'racial bias' in the US debate on the war on drugs

David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore – The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. But what keeps him there is his apocalyptic and unrelenting heresy over the failed "war on drugs", the multibillion-dollar worldwide crusade launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

When Simon brought that heresy to London last week – to take part in a debate hosted by the Observer – he was inevitably asked about what reformers celebrate as recent "successes" – votes in Colorado and Washington to legalise marijuana.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

If marijuana were exempted from the war on drugs, he insisted, "it'd be another 10 or 40 years of assigning people of colour to this dystopia."

Simon joined two film directors for a discussion onstage: Eugene Jarecki, in whose movie The House I Live In – on the toll of America's war on drugs – he features prominently, and Rachel Seifert, whose Cocaine Unwrapped charts the drug's progress from blighted "producer" countries to the addicts in Europe and the US.
Eugene Jarecki on the war on drugs Link to video: The House I Live In director Eugene Jarecki on America's war on drugs

The occasion was staged by the Observer and chaired by its editor, John Mulholland, as part of its campaign to address the global drugs crisis.

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on – and the curse of – drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore's case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, "excess Americans": once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs "a holocaust in slow motion".

Simon said he "begins with the assumption that drugs are bad", but also that the war on drugs has "always proceeded along racial lines", since the banning of opium.

It is waged "not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans," he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: "We do not need 10-12% of our population; they've been abandoned. They don't have barbed wire around them, but they might as well."

As a result, "drugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and east St Louis" – an industry that employs "children, old people, people who've been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn't matter. It's the only factory that's still open. The doors are open."

While his co-panellists sipped their water, Simon poured himself another glass of red wine as he continued. A bull of a man, a presence in any room – even one as large as the packed theatre in the colonnaded heart of Britain's scientific establishment.

"Capitalism," Simon said, "has tried to jail its way out of the problem" with the result that "the prison industry has been given over to capitalism. If we need to get rid of these people, we might as well make some money out of getting rid of them."

Jarecki, in a scathing portrayal of the American prison system in both his film and at Thursday's event, cited some statistics: "We have ravaged our poor communities," he said, some of which, African-American, counted "4,000 per 100,000 in jail, as compared with an average dose of around 300". Meanwhile, Simon said the police in some cities had "become an army of occupation that sends brothers and fathers to jail".

He described a logic to policing in Baltimore whereby "street-rips" in drug-infested areas make for easy arrests to achieve "cost-efficient" policing, while criminal activity other than drugs was ignored because prosecutions were laborious.

Simon said he had seen a decrease in arrests for non-drug offences from 70-90% to 20-40%, while drug-related arrests increased on some beats from 5,000 to 30,000 because, as Jarecki put it, "it's like shooting fish in a barrel".

"So the drug war," concluded Simon, "makes the city unsafe." But has it worked? "The drugs in my city are more powerful, cheaper and more available than ever before," replied Simon.

Simon said he had "no faith in our political leadership to ever address the problem. There is no incentive to walk away from law and order as a political currency." He said change would come, if it does, from jurors simply "refusing to send husbands, sons and fathers from their communities to jail … That is how prohibition [of alcohol] ended. They couldn't find 12 Americans who would send a 13th to jail for selling bathtub gin."

Simon regarded "legalisation" of drugs as "a word invented by advocates of the drug war to make the other side look goofy, saying 'everything should be legalised'. The issue is: how do we get out of here? And I say: decriminalisation. As with other controlled substances – taxed and regulated." He later said he did not think change would come of any moral decision, but because "someone just figures out: this is costing too much money".

From the audience, the Colombian ambassador to London, Mauricio Rodríguez, drew attention to his government's leadership of initiatives from Latin America to "completely redraw" a global strategy on drugs, with co-responsibility assumed by consuming countries, focusing on social and economic issues, and money laundering by banks. "Basta!" he said, "the Latin American countries have had enough." Such thinking had driven a recent report, which Rodríguez brandished, by the Organisation of American States, of which, he pointed out, the US is a member.

Simon replied that America had fought "proxy wars" across the world for decades, and the war on drugs in Latin America was among them. On the carnage in neighbouring Mexico, he said: "If 40,000 Mexicans are dead, we don't give a damn as long as it stays that side of the border – turn northern Mexico into an abattoir, so long as it doesn't get to Tucson. If we can fight to the last Mexican, for a suburban American to send their kid safely to junior high school, we will."
Thank You Very Much for your post, YMix
The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, "excess Americans": once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs "a holocaust in slow motion".
Maybe this belongs in the Singularity thread too.........
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Ibrahim
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Ibrahim »

Here are some charts on the gap between how drug suspects are treated based on race:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... ne-charts/


This is the root of the incarceration gap and Juggs' "pattern identification."
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Apollonius
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Weed Man vs. Beer Man

Post by Apollonius »

In Times Square, a bizarre clash of Weed Man versus Beer Man - Vivian Yee, New York Times, 25 June 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/nyreg ... dlers.html


This is not an only in New York story.

This is an only in Times Square story, in a place where the Beer Man and the Weed Man in a Box can star as the principals; a different Weed Man can serve as the falsely accused; and Alien and the Predator can stand in as the witnesses to a low-rent attack in a high-rent district.

More than six months ago, the Weed Man in a Box, or Weed Head to some, began wandering around the pedestrian plaza at 46th Street and Seventh Avenue, a cardboard box on his head and a sign over his chest, cajoling cash from tourists with a simple pitch: “I am the weed man. I’m too sexy for you to see me.”

As charming as this tactic may have been to some, his appearance rankled the other creative panhandlers of Times Square, who make their living not by donning Elmo suits or coating themselves with metallic paint, but by simply advertising their need for marijuana, beer or both on handwritten signs.

Busking being serious business in Midtown, long-simmering tensions between the box man and one of his rivals erupted into violence on Friday night, when the box man was said to have stabbed a competing panhandler, Wayne Semancik, five times in the head and chest with a pen.

Mr. Semancik, 56, said the man who is charged with attacking him (whom he knows as Andre but who the Manhattan district attorney’s office said is named Dwight Laird) had committed the offense of telling a local newspaper that all of his competitors were con artists, drug addicts and thieves.

“I’m not a drug addict, baby,” Mr. Semancik said Sunday, though he acknowledged a passing familiarity with marijuana. Rather, he said, he is an entrepreneur, claiming to have saved enough money in 14 years of Times Square panhandling to buy a small place in the Pennsylvania mountains. His office is a fire hydrant and a post outside the Thomson Reuters building on Seventh Avenue.

Mr. Semancik’s sign, which asks for “Spare change for pot, pizza and beer,” takes a more comprehensive view than Mr. Laird’s box, which, in its single-mindedness, could give politicians a lesson in message discipline. “Weed all day weed all night,” one side of the box reads, according to a video posted on YouTube.

Relations deteriorated further when, Mr. Semancik said, Mr. Laird hit one of Mr. Semancik’s friends on the head with a bottle of frozen water.

Even so, things had settled into a steady, if tense, détente until Friday, when, Mr. Semancik said, Mr. Laird spat in his face.

“You know what? I’m going to hit you. I’m going to hurt you,” Mr. Semancik said, with a steely blue-eyed stare. “Enough is enough. So I walked up and wham — I hit him.”

Mr. Semancik knows how to take care of himself: he said he has an arrest record, including felony convictions. But the box man had a pen in his pocket, and Mr. Semancik ended up with ink-stained puncture wounds on his nose, chin, scalp and chest.

Questioned on Monday, several of the costumed figures — including Buzz Lightyear, Mario, Luigi, Hello Kitty and an assortment of Elmos and Cookie Monsters — seemed puzzled to hear about the violence.

One Cookie Monster shrugged, as if to say he had no information, and offered a hug instead.

Yet if the worlds of the costumed and plain-clothed in Times Square are normally separate, two of the characters found themselves crossing over Friday night: a photograph in The Daily News showed the police interviewing Alien and Predator as witnesses after the episode. (Mr. Semancik said that, far from being adversaries, they are brothers from North Carolina who work together.)

Mr. Laird, 30, has pleaded not guilty. A judge released him on his own recognizance.

The attack has had ramifications for Times Square’s other weed men: at least one news outlet, the blog Gothamist, named another sign-toting entrepreneur, Joshua Long, as the stabber, though Mr. Semancik said he was not involved. Yet another one, who gave his name as Superman, said he wanted all the weed men to get along, lest the police shut them all down.

Meanwhile, Mr. Semancik’s business is as strong as ever.

“Hey, you know where I can get some good bud around here?” a passer-by asked after dropping a dollar in his cup.

Mr. Semancik grinned, but kept his secret.
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Apollonius
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Apollonius »

Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada*, announced his support for the full legalization and regulation of marijuana in this country. I like the approach he took, which was to say it was to "protect our children".







* This has actually been part of the party platform for a year now, but Trudeau didn't personally come out in favour until yesterday.





Also in the news:


Pro-marijuana ad to appear outside big NASCAR race - Bruce Horowitz, USA Today, 25 July 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/bus ... t/2587511/

Fans attending a major NASCAR race this weekend will see a most unlikely video posted on a giant video screen shortly before entering the track: a pro-marijuana legalization ad.

Outside the NASCAR Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, the same track that hosts the famed Indianapolis 500, Marijuana Policy Project, the nation's largest pro-marijuana legalization advocacy group, has purchased space to air – dozens of times over the weekend – a video that pushes the theme that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. ...
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

Will tobacco become the new pot?.........
$10 billion. That is the widely accepted figure our government estimates is lost each year from tobacco trafficking schemes. With few federal resources dedicated to stop this fraud, the U.S. taxpayer continues to foot the bill. The money that should be going into state coffers via taxes is instead going to criminals, some with ties to terrorists, drug cartels, and violent street gangs.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/18/tobac ... z2aDWyOs6g
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
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Re: Drug Culture News - Marijuana and More

Post by Typhoon »

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:Will tobacco become the new pot?.........
$10 billion. That is the widely accepted figure our government estimates is lost each year from tobacco trafficking schemes. With few federal resources dedicated to stop this fraud, the U.S. taxpayer continues to foot the bill. The money that should be going into state coffers via taxes is instead going to criminals, some with ties to terrorists, drug cartels, and violent street gangs.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/18/tobac ... z2aDWyOs6g
Missouri Excise Tax per Pack: USD $0.17

New York Excise Tax per Pack: USD $4.35

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_ ... _tax_rates

That is an amazing arbitrage opportunity :shock:
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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