California to legalize and tax marijuana

[Wakeupcall]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhjvcMmGpM0]YouTube - Geraldo - California To Tax Marijuana?[/ame]

Interesting movement over there at the moment... It could be a hige tax cow that everyone who smokes it would be glad to pay!

[stewiegriffin]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo"]YouTube - Children[/ame]

[ivnryn]

It is already legal (medically) in California, and that has had no effect since it is illegal federally. General shops aren't going to sell it if there is a change of federal action.

[evercloserunion]

The economic arguments for legalization are particularly strong in today's climate.

[20000miles]

I think Germaine Greer had it right when she said that cannibis will be made legal not for our benefit, but for the benefit of the government.

Prohibition ended in the US becuase incomes taxes were falling becuase of the Depression. The government needed a new source of income. Alcohol provided it.

Nothing changes.

[Mr.De-Regulation]

whether of not there was a weed tax, it would still create jobs and revenue. Anyway, I hope legalises it. Like tomorrow would be handy for my lazy weekend.

[darkhorse]

They are making a big mistake in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the connection between the use of marijuana and mental illness. Good luck to them...

[evercloserunion]

They are making a big mistake in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the connection between the use of marijuana and mental illness. Good luck to them...

It's far from overwhelming; anything I have seen is pretty inconclusive actually.

[stewiegriffin]

They are making a big mistake in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the connection between the use of marijuana and mental illness. Good luck to them...

Overwhelming ? links?There only one person overwhelmed by mental illness here mate . Youre a classic delusional sociopath.

[JCSkinner]

They are making a big mistake in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the connection between the use of marijuana and mental illness. Good luck to them...

Oh dear, not this again. I thought I'd dealt with this comprehensively on the series of recent drugs threads.
There is NO accepted connection between cannabis and mental illness, no matter how many times the Daily Mail may tell you there is.
There are suggestions, made on the back of a small number (2) of tiny studies, one of which was done in Sweden a LONG time ago, that there MAY be an exacerbating effect of excessive cannabis usage on the incidence of schizophrenia among adolescents.
However, many medics reject even those suggestions that excessive cannabis use is a factor even in increasing incidence of schizophrenia among those ALREADY GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED to the illness. And ALL of the medics accept that it has no causative factor among the rest of society who are not predisposed, nor to post-adolescents who are outside of the normal age band for developing schizophrenia.
Similarly, there is NO evidence of people jumping out of windows while stoned. And those few examples of people who committed violent crimes in psychotic incidents following intake of cannabis invariably already had mental issues AND invariably had taken alcohol too.
Ongoing prohibition has prevented medics from properly examining the effects of cannabis. But they have been able to demonstrate many beneficial properties of intake for people suffering a wide variety of illnesses. Which is why cannabis is legally provided by medics to sufferers of those illnesses even in the most-prohibitionist of jurisdictions.
And those people, many living in California, are all obviously being medically monitored, and incidents of cannabis-caused mental illness among that large and growing cohort have not arisen.
In other words, there isn't ANY evidence that cannabis causes ANY mental illness, much less "overwhelming evidence."