Interesting Fortune cover story on the move towards marijuana legalisation:
money.cnn.com
"... New Mexico hopes to have the nation's first state-licensed medical marijuana farm and distributorship up and running by the time this article is published. New Mexico's law was enacted two years ago, but state officials hadn't dared implement it until Attorney General Holder blew the all clear in February.
This is the sense in which President Obama's understated pledge not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws potentially achieves for that intoxicant what the Twenty-First Amendment accomplished for beer, wine, and booze during the Great Depression.
Repeal, remember, simply returned to the states the right to decide whether to permit alcoholic beverage sales, and, if so, when and how. If a state permitted sales, it could also enforce minimum- age requirements, limit store hours, set zoning restrictions, and levy taxes. If it prohibited sales, it could bask in righteousness but exercise no control over the traffic that would occur anyway.
Over time nearly every state fell in line behind the tax-and-regulate model...
"...Assuming a national consumer market for marijuana of about $13 billion annually, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has estimated that legalization could be expected to bring state and federal governments about $7 billion annually in additional tax revenue, while saving them $13.5 billion in prohibition-related law enforcement costs.
In California, where the fiscal crisis is so grave that the state has had to issue vendors more than $1 billion in IOUs, a Field Poll published in April showed that 56% of the state's population favored legalizing marijuana, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to call for an "open debate" on the question. A legalization bill has been introduced in the state legislature, and the state board of equalization has estimated that if passed, it would bring in $1.4 billion in new revenue, a seemingly conservative estimate.
It's even possible that legalization would reduce national health-care costs, by easing demand for costly pharmaceuticals.
In the most recent issue of O'Shaughnessy's, one doctor reported that his cannabis patients had either stopped or cut back their use of "analgesics of all kinds [including] Tylenol, aspirin, and opioids; psychotherapeutic agents including anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, anti-panic, obsessive-compulsive, anti-psychotic, and bipolar agents; gastrointestiminal agents including anti-spasmodics and anti-inflammatory medications; migraine preparations; anticonvulsants; appetite stimulants; immuno-modulators and immunosuppressives; muscle relaxants; multiple sclerosis management medications; ophthalmic preparations; sedative and hypnotic agents; and Tourette's syndrome agents."
"Medical marijuana is God's little joke on the [marijuana] prohibitionists," says Richard Cowan, 69, a longtime legalization activist who claims he's smoked almost every day since 1967..." |
