Garda now admit state has lost war on drugs

Spiritual wrote: »

So your reasoning must be that they are not ignorant of the facts, this being the case they are then showing no regard for the problems they are causing society by funding the drug dealers.

Spiritual wrote: »

I have always voted for the idea that the Government hires mercenaries and they wipe all the drug gangs in the country off the face of the earth.

Problem here is that the drug gangs are probably better armed.

MagicSean wrote: »

Stick to reality then. The reality is that every time you pay a dealer you willingly contribute to organised crime. Whatever about the rights and wrongs of prohibition this fact will not change. And as you increase their power you increase their grip on the market and make it more and more difficult to legitimise the industry. That's the reality.

MagicSean wrote: »

And where do you think your friend gets it?

Your second paragraph is true of course. It changes nothing though.

MagicSean wrote: »

And where do you think your friend gets it?

How cheaply could pot be grown with advanced farming techniques? One potential data point is Canada’s industrial hemp industry, where production costs are about $500 per acre. If the kind of mid-grade commercial weed that accounts for about 80 percent of the U.S. market could be grown that cheaply, it implies costs of about 20 cents per pound of smokable material: Enough pot to fill more than 800 modest-sized half-gram joints for less than a quarter!. Those numbers are probably optimistic, since in practice recreational marijuana is grown from more expensive transplanted clones rather than from seeds. Even so, the authors note that “production costs for crops that need to be transplanted, such as cherry tomatoes and asparagus, are generally in the range of $5,000-$20,000 per acre.” That implies costs of less than $20 per pound for high-grade sensimilla and less than $5 a pound for mid-grade stuff. Another way of looking at it, suggested by California NORML Director Dale Gieringer, is that we should expect legal pot to cost about the same amount as “other legal herbs such as tea or tobacco,” something perhaps “100 times lower than the current prevailing price of $300 per ounce—or a few cents per joint.”


This would make pot far and away the cheapest intoxicant on the market, absolutely blowing beer and liquor out of the water. Joints would be about as cheap as things that are often treated as free. Splenda packets, for example, cost 2 or 3 cents each when purchased in bulk.


These data either bolster or undermine the case for legalization, depending on your point of view. On the one hand, despite the apparent widespread availability of pot even under prohibition, it seems likely that radically lowering the price would lead to a much larger increase in consumption than people have in mind. On the other hand, it seems that you could tax the hell out of marijuana and still leave consumers better off than they are today. An extraordinarily high tax, of course, would spark tax evasion.

Right now, people smuggle marijuana across the U.S.-Mexico border for profits of about $20 an ounce, so a tax substantially higher than that could be tricky to enforce. Still, a $20/ounce tax would be about triple the per-weight taxation of cigarettes, while still leaving mass-market weed extremely affordable. Unfortunately, marijuana taxation is not a game-changer for fiscal policy terms. Federal cigarette taxes bring in about $10 billion a year. Even heavy pot smokers don’t smoke nearly as much as cigarette addicts, so even at triple taxation we’re talking about low single-digit billions in revenue—not nothing, but hardly transformative to the overall budget.