Riker

How Hash Will Reverse The Recession:

6 Good Reasons Why Americas Grass Will Bring The Cash By: Christopher Riker America is growing greener and greener every day, and Im not just talking about solar panels. Pot is shaking off the dust of prohibition smear campaigns, police exploitation, and of course, conservative disapproval. An October Gallup poll shows that a 58 percent majority of Americans believe that pot should be legalized. Thats a good thing for marijuanas activists. A new Quinnipiac University poll indicates that if medical marijuana makes Florida's ballot next year, it could pass with an unprecedented 82 percent of the vote. This same study finds that voters also favor outright legalization of the drug. Gallup first started asking this question in 1969 to a much different audience. A mere 12 percent favored legalization then; but what has transpired over the course of 44 years and 46 percent? Marijuana has been California's biggest cash crop since medical cannabis was approved for use in 1996, generating sales estimated at $14 billion a year. Every year, more of that money is legally being spent. Gallup reports that over 38 percent of those polled admitted to having tried it at least once. Thats a lot of pot. There are nearly 318.2 million people in the United States today. By the numbers, approximately 121 million Americans have tried some weed before. According to federal U.S. law, all 121 million of us deserve to be in jail. I hope you think orange is stylish.

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2 For the lawmakers in Washington and Colorado, however, green seems to be

the color of choice, and whether you want to count the extra revenue, or want to ogle over the picturesque flowers grown by American botanists in licensed facilities, marijuana is prominent and you no longer have to go to Amsterdam to get it. Marijuana, on and rolled up in paper, makes sense for Americas new, Googleeyed market. Todays world is thirsting for more opportunity, and I can name six great reasons why marijuana is the missing link to smooth sailing from the woes of the worst financial crisis since October of 1929. 1. You are the company you keep. Nobel Prize winners are usually respected in their fields. The marijuana market is the new free-market boom for Americas middle class to thrive off. To prove that, weve seen even former financial contemporaries of Ronald Reagan, one of the U.S.s most revered Presidents in resounding support of legalizing marijuana, like Milton Friedman. He leads a list of over 500 economists from universities like Harvard, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others reporting on the costs of marijuana prohibition, as well as the potential revenue gains the U.S. government stands to make by legalizing and taxing its sale. Before his death in 2006, Friedman was quoted saying, There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I havent even

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included the harm to young people. Its absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes. 2. The Land without anyone free, and a Home behind bars. To Friedman, marijuana policy was a problem with a solution rooted in humanity. Lets be clear: Prohibition is a failure. Subjecting our citizens to lawheaded bill collectors is simply prolonging the political Im sorry process. By not actively working to change faulty marijuana policies, we are knowingly decreasing the value of our independence. According to the Fed, almost 2.5 million people are locked up at any one point in time. A demi-demonic machine so large and autonomous employs nearly 800,000 people. This pleasant statistic easily ranks the U.S. as the most incarcerated country in the world. Its not what you would call a recent a trend either. Looking at records of prisons past, you will find that the United States has had the highest incarceration rate since 2002. The reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. Federal and State correctional bills cap out at about $74 billion, annually, according to the bureau of Justice Statistics. Ending prohibition enforcement would save $7.7 billion in combined state and federal spending, the report says, while taxation would yield up to $6.2 billion a year. Thats $13.9 billion in net earnings per year. Perfect.

Riker One adult out of 100 American adults is behind bars and one out of 32 is on

probation, parole, or in prison. For far too long, the assumed philosophy was that mass incarceration works. Tough-on-crime, watchdog political candidates have been wooing voters with promises of sentencing laws exponentially more crippling to the average citizen than the laws of decades beforehand. God forbid youre Black or Spanish. Young Black males, in particular, make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. prison population, compared to their population in the community. One in every three black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life. Before we let our Black friends have all the fun, one in every six Latino males, and one in every 17 white males, in the current incarceration trends of our fine, wire-tapping, e-mail reading, full-body scanning judicial culture can see themselves behind bars, according to the Fed. 3. Its taxable revenue that can be grown anywhere. Libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute theorizes, based on their research, that the federal legalization of marijuana would offer a large new revenue stream. These statements are qualified with the assumption that legalized marijuana would be taxed similarly to alcohol and tobacco, making the income earned by pot producers subject to standard income and sales tax. If every state produced the revenue that California did every year, which is lofty, the Fed would have $700 Billion of new taxable revenue each year to work with. This recession needs to end and marijuana isnt hurting anyone. Why not

Riker let pot be the new wheat? Wheat as a crop has defined American culture by its vast abundance and wide use. 4. The cannabis industry is thriving. According to their website, thecannabisindustry.org, the National Cannabis

Industry Association's is a national committee made up of the leading businesses and organizations in America's emerging cannabis industry. The NCIA is the nations only trade association solely for cannabis professionals. NCIA works to defend and advance the industry on the national stage. The Medical Marijuana Industry Group, founded in 2010, can be found at mmig.org. A smaller organization, MMIG looks to provide the regulatory framework for Colorados young medical marijuana industry, while serving as a responsible resource for policy makers and medical marijuana patients alike. What these organizations show, is that the cannabis industry, in all of its facets, has enough thriving members to create multiple associations of different companies for the advancement of this industry. Plainly speaking, there are plenty of companies making a lot of fucking money. Theyre making so much money, that theyre willing to pool some of it together to make resources more readily available. Hemp is a plant from the cannabis family closely associated with marijuana. Marijuana: Cannabis indica /Cannabis sativa, can contain high concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) which is the psychoactive component of marijuana, along with a vast collection of other cannabinoids. Hemp, however, contains only trace amounts, 0.9 percent or less of THC, but contains the active cannabinoid

Riker known as cannabidiol (CBD), while the weed we smoke to get high can have

anywhere from 10 percent, to 30 percent THC content. Hemp is therefore unable to produce the high that we all fear so much. Hemp is a sativa variation that has been used by humans even longer than smoking pot itself. Its used to provide hundreds upon thousands of raw materials and produced items, including the production of fibers and oil seed. However, it is a very valuable and versatile raw material that is considered illegal to grow and produce in the US. Its cultivation makes the production of such products like paper, textiles, rope, bio-fuels, protein powder for humans, bird seed and many other products, including biodegradable plastics. It is generally considered environmentally friendly because it requires little or no herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. According to Medical Marijuana Inc., Industrial hemp has over 55,000 known uses and Americas savory black market for pot has been estimated to be worth about $110 billion. The more legal medicinal cannabis marketplace has been estimated at $1.7 billion last year. The cannabis market is fragmented. Although over 30 of the worlds top industrialized countries allow hemp to be grown, it still remains illegal in the US. Why? Forced morality from propaganda, like Reefer Madness, created stigmas back in the 1930s to protect the paper industry, which looked to be dead in the water as the hemp industry boomed, even then. Thanks, America!

Riker 5. Most arguments against legalization arent empirical. Its not hard to Google search, negatives of marijuana legalization. The results you will find are generally frustrating. The reason is that you cant find people arguing with accepted legitimate reasons on why legalizing pot is a bad idea. What you can easily find are statements like, I am absolutely against the legalization of marijuana. Period. There isn't an argument in the world that will change that. Have you ever argued to play a new game, other than tag, with one of your close childhood friends? Theres always that one kid isnt there? Lets call him Jimmy. No matter how many reasons you give him that playing Cowboys and Indians kicks ass, compared to tag, he would fold his arms and say, Im still not playing. If Jimmy doesnt play, then youll have an odd number of Cowboys and Indians, and thats not fair. Those arguing against marijuana quickly cite addiction numbers, even

though marijuana is considered to be the one drug in which its users do not have any of the physical or mental addictive qualities you see in hardcore drug addicts, or perfectly legal cigarette smokers. Ok. After reality sets in that the whole country is not going to get high, the next argument against legal weed in the United States is, of course, the children. We must protect the children from the crippling evils of pot. There isnt one, and I really mean not one statistic to support that youth use of marijuana will rise, pending legalization.

Riker The inverse actually seems to be true, according to regulatemarijuana.org.

Those arguing against pot will quickly let you know that teen use of marijuana in the United States is rising. Youre right, it is. But before we close the book, lets read the entire story. Imagine if you never finished reading Goldilocks after she found the porridge that was just right. Now, Goldilocks is the most innovative home invader in porridge history. The truth is, Teen use in the State of Colorado, a legal cannabis State, is exponentially declining. Why? The facts are out there and the mystique of smoking pot is taken away in some fashion. Most teenagers want to rebel. It is inherently fun for a teenager to do the exact opposite of whatever the syntax of the request of their parents was. For example, my mother once yelled at me for not finishing my plate, saying I was wasting food. YouTube was in its infancy and I decided to make a video with my friends of us solely wasting food. We blasted cannons of Coca-Cola and Mentos, boomeranged bananas in the ocean, and played baseball with whole potatoes. 6. Weve already dipped our toes in the water. Eighteen states along with Washington, D.C. have already made medical marijuana legal, while 10 other States, including Florida, are currently considering legislation to legalize medical marijuana. In Washington and Colorado, its legal for everyone but the birds. America is the one place where its citizens should not worry about federal law disparities. Weve been dropping the ball as a nation with marijuana for over ninety years.