Quoted from rpforpres

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/06/ron-paul-barney-frank-marijuana-/1

Ron Paul, Barney Frank team up to legalize marijuana

Quoted from Hack

Sombody: You obviously don't know anyone who smokes weed. Six grand a plant?!? This is marijuana, not crack cocaine. You'd be VERY lucky to get a pound of product per per plant. And that's if the plant is roughly six feet high and dense. More like an ounce per plant, if that. And because it's grown outside instead of the hydroponic product coming south from the Akwesasne reservation(where most of this region's weed comes from via the mafia in Montreal), you won't really be able to sell it to anyone but your friends for much more than about $150 an ounce. One plant might make you $500 if you're lucky with a bountiful harvest and don't get caught in the process by the po-po.

I'm surprised all you tax-sensitive people haven't brought up the fact that these pot plants were discovered by state police helicopter, which consumes roughly $1,000 of fuel per hour. Now how many hours did it take to find this cache? And is it better that they yanked these plants so that more can come in over the board via hardened smugglers? Figure they paid two state cops to spot these and probably flew for over four hours. We're also not counting the flights they flew where they didn't find anything. Now arguably, these plants being seized with no arrest means who ever was growing them will probably go an even more illegal route to get their weed, thus fomenting a criminal element that would otherwise be lacking in this equation. So we pay more than $4,000 in fuel, the salary of two state police pilots(not cheap by the way) and then the salaries of at least four Rotterdam cops to hike into the forest to grab these things(and you know that took a full day's worth of work).

So...how is that war on drugs going?

Quoted from Hack

senders - Daylillies ARE taxed. It's called sales tax. Sure you can go out into the woods and find one no problem. But if you want a nice one, you're going to have to go to someone who raises and hybridizes them. It's the same thing with marijuana. Just look what's happening out in California.

Let me put it another way: Thousands of people across the region have gardens. Many grow a cornucopia of vegetable that make their summer eating great. But hardly anyone sustains their vegetable needs through what they harvested during the summer. Even fewer maintain a year-round green house. Thus you don't see Neil Golub sweating over the sustainable food movement. He knows that eventually, enough people are going to need his produce that it will be a lucrative enough business to sell it in his store.

If you legalized marijuana, you'd have a similar dynamic. Some people would grow it for their own consumption. Most others would rely on industry to produce it. But the one thing that would be all-but-stamped out is the black market for it. The price is kept artificially high(no pun intended) because of the risk involved in cultivating or smuggling the drug.

New York wouldn't balance the budget on legalized marijuana, but studies have already show that it would be a cash crop that would rival some of the state's top agricultural crops. That's what hurts the most when I see my tax dollars go to pay for some cop's fun romp through the woods to rip up something that would naturally grow there anyway.

People need to wake up and stop this nonsense. The funny thing is, the tax-savvy live-free-or-die Tea Party morons don't seem to care about this type of waste, even though it hits their platform on two levels(government intrusion and government spending). But I'll be damned if one of them gets up and stumps for legalized marijuana. Funny how that works...

Quoted from GravelGertie

I much prefer a nice single malt Scotch, others may enjoy this type of activity.