Ex Dame Pansi wrote on Nov 18
th, 2011 at 5:32am:
I knew a man who smoked Marijuana for a chronic back problem, he swore by it. I have no problems with anyone growing a couple of plants for discreet personal therapeutic use. The mother of the teenagers next door probably wouldn't want her kids to know about it, that's why I say discreet.
I'm not informed enough to know if it should be legalised for recreational use, but it's probably no worse than tobacco and fast food, so I'd most likely vote yes if I was asked. Although state revenue would suffer, isn't that what it's all about?
Tobacco is responsible for 40 preventable deaths per DAY in Australia; there is not one recorded death directly attributable to Cannabis anywhere in the world.
State revenue would probably improve if Cannabis was legalised.
This
paper indicates the cost of drug policing, prosecution and detention, on a national basis and concludes "Since about 1,500, 000 drug offences were prosecuted between 1976 and 2000 at an average cost per drug offence of $8500 in $1998A, this suggests that about $13 billion (in 1998 dollars) was spent on drug prohibition in the period between 1976 and 2000" or once you factor in inflation about AUD$15-17b!
How many hospitals would that build?
In 1998 the value of the Australian Cannabis market was estimated to be AUD$3.2b, (close to $4b in AUD$2011)
"During 25 years of the War on Drugs the value of the cannabis market increased by an astonishing 7500%"
"Because Prohibition is a supply side solution, all that is achieved by increasing the amount spent on drug law enforcement is to increase the price of the drug, so the value of the black market rises as a multiple of drug law enforcement. For example, if we reduced the amount spent on drug law enforcement to almost nothing (that is, if we abandoned prohibition), the price of drugs would fall to a level where the black market
would collapse. Like all products, the price of illicit drugs is determined by the costs involved in getting the drugs to market. In a situation of prohibition, most of that cost is created by drug law enforcement. "
"Conclusion
Between January 1976 and December 2000, Australian governments spent in the order of $13 billion prosecuting about one and a half million drug offences with the purpose of reducing drug use. However, drug prohibition did not reduce illicit drug use; instead it created an enormous black market, spiralling prison populations and a plague of heroin overdoses. The futility of prohibition was demonstrated even in “successes” like the marijuana drought of 1977, which created the conditions for the heroin plague, and the heroin drought of 2001, which led to the current methamphetamine plague. On the two occasions they have occurred, droughts have only acted as incubators for a new drug plague. Prohibition is a cure that makes the disease worse. It aims to stop the use of drugs, but instead, it glamorises drug use. It aims to morally improve the drug user, but instead, it corrupts society. Under the rule of morals improvers and “War on Drugs” advocates like Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Sir Robert Askin, states like Queensland and New South Wales descended to levels of corruption that made their police forces a public scandal. Rather than being suppressed by the police, the drug trade thrived and became the lucrative fiefdom of corrupt detectives and their close
friends; so that, even though more people went to jail for drugs each year, every year there were more drugs on the street.
At the start of the War on Drugs, free market economist, Milton Friedman, declared that the failure of prohibition was inevitable because of corruption as officials succumbed to the lure of easy money: Said Friedman: “So long as large sums of money are involved—and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal—it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope.” 22
As this paper shows, money spent on drug prohibition simply acts as a multiplier for the drug market, increasing the amount available for perverting officials. It is this capacity of the black market to corrupt the gatekeepers that causes prohibition to fail year after year. The result is the entrenched system of corruption whereby the drug trade continues under the protection of corrupt police. "
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Patients seeking relief from a number of ailments are forced to smoke Cannabis as it's the most cost effective means of inducing the benefits. 1 ounce of hash oil would provide sufficient pain relief for chronic pain for 2 weeks to a month, but it takes 1 pound of quality cannabis to produce that oil at a cost of between $3000-$4000.
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