36th District Representative Mary Lou Dickerson is once again calling on the state legislature to legalize marijuana. House Bill 1550, which was introduced this morning, would legalize the use of cannabis for adults age 21 and over.
Rep. Dickerson says that legalizing marijuana could generate $400 million per biennium for the state.
?Subjecting cannabis to a licensed, regulated system would not only improve public health and safety, it would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for health care at a time when Washington?s budget is being decimated,? said Dr. William Robertson, founder of the Washington Poison Control Center.
Under the bill, cannabis would be sold through state liquor stores with growers applying for a license through the Liquor Control Board. The LCB, according to a press release, has a 96 percent success rate in preventing alcohol sales to minors.?Drug cartels and black-market dealers have made it easier for kids to get cannabis than alcohol,? Dickerson said. ?The Liquor Control Board has a proven track record of shielding kids from its products. I?m confident our bill will break the back of cannabis crime-syndicate profits and make it possible to preserve vital health services across Washington in these very difficult budget times.?
In 2010, Dickerson submitted a similar bill, HB 2401, which didn?t make it past the Committee on Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness.
Bravo, keeping it illegal is insane but how does this clash with the Feds backwards ideas?
We are too into the prison industrial complex in this country. We need to teach people in the early years, instill in them the benefits of education and hard work and make a plan for prisoners getting out of prison to have marketable skills and a second chance.
Bravo, keeping it illegal is insane but how does this clash with the Feds backwards ideas?
We are too into the prison industrial complex in this country. We need to teach people in the early years, instill in them the benefits of education and hard work and make a plan for prisoners getting out of prison to have marketable skills and a second chance.
The feds can do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean we have to spend on our money on enforcement, however. They can go bust street level guys with their Federal cash.
legalize it
This neglects the extra savings that we’ll see above and beyond this, I presume, from not wasting money chasing after people for marijuana laws.
And the cost of imprisoning drug users.
Shes got a point. As a kid, its much harder to get booze than drugs.
This bill may be just a symbolic gesture at this point but someday marijuana will be legalized. Not this year, but someday.
I sure hope not.
I sure hope not.
Find out who the Mexican mafia is paying off, here in the U.S, and the problem might just be solved. Then, the California growers can sell it legally and we can tax. Not very complicated.
“The war against drugs provides them [politicians] with something to say that offends nobody, requires them to do nothing difficult, and allows them to postpone, perhaps indefinitely, the more urgent and specific questions about the state of the nation’s schools, housing, employment opportunities for young black men?i.e., the condition to which drug addiction is a symptom, not a cause.
They remain safe in the knowledge that they might as well be denouncing Satan or the rain, and so they can direct the voices of prerecorded blame at metaphors and apparitions…
The war on drugs thus becomes the perfect war for people who would rather not fight a war, a war in which the politicians who stand so fearlessly on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful need do nothing else but strike noble poses as protectors of the people and defenders of the public trust”.
Lewis Lapham