Wow, it's been a while. Let me just unload everything that's gone on recently. I finished up the applications that matter for my summer programs, and am kind of freaking about because it looks bad for me getting into anything. There's been great fun at school as well, with midterms, papers, labs, and a general lack of sleep. I am tired. Cry for me.
So let's talk about pot. Pot should be legal. Period. It cannot kill you, and has a generally pleasant effect on people. I have no idea why it is illegal. Legalizing marijuana especially could help balance the budget, and then we could reduce the load on the cops and the prisons.
But is this going to happen soon? I doubt it. Presently marijuana use is medically acceptable in California, but there are still problems with the federal government as a whole. And even legalization for medical purposes hasn't found very wide support outside of California - initiatives in other states have failed miserably. But even this medical use nonsense isn't enough to do anything, it's only a very small step in the right direction. After all, cocaine is still used for medical purposes (albeit sparingly), and we're hardly on the road to legalization there.
The far extreme on the marijuana issue is in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in Northern California, largely populated by hippies. Apparently there, marijuana is 'decriminalized', which means that nobody is going to arrest you for smoking pot - but it's still technically illegal. One the one hand, this will let you smoke all the weed you want without going to jail, but that won't help where we need it most.
You're giving the middleman marijuana revenue to drug dealers still, which is great if you deal but pretty much sucks on the whole. What the country needs is a new source of income - marijuana tax. Most of the overhead for something like pot comes from the fact that it's illegal anyway, drug lords and whatnot. How many times does pot change hands before you buy it, anyway?
Dealers have their suppliers, who might be dealers themselves. I'm not in the drug business, so I can't say - but what I do know is that everyone takes a cut. You could probably instate a several hundred percent tax on marijuana, and for the average smoker, the price would go down. How much would you pay for a carton of joints? Cigarrettes only cost $20 a carton, and marijuana is definitely in the same league. You can grow it easily domestically, and it wouldn't take long for huge pot plantations to crop up everywhere.
Plenty of increased domestic business, including research and development would be needed here, along with huge spending on advertising coming out of virtually nowhere.
Look at the drug business now - no advertising, the fear of imprisonment, the fear of addiction or overdose, interactions with shady people in shady parts of town - and still a booming business that continues no matter how much money you pit up against it in law enforcement. It's a fruitless battle, everyone knows that.
But if all of that money from drugs went to the government...holy shit. It's really astounding. The republicans could build big guns, give tax breaks and appease the liberals with social spending. We could even bribe the Turks to let us put our troops there.
When will this all happen? Not in the foreseeable future. The Green Party in Berkeley netted maybe 15% of the votes in the best of all possible worlds. Tack on the Libertarians and you've got maybe 16%, and those are the only two "large" parties advocating drug legalization. The pendulum of American politics needs to swing far to the left - maybe Pelosi being the President or something like that.
These are the days when I wish we could just be Amsterdam.
Thank you again for your interest in our REU Program in Biomedical
Engineering. As you know, the deadline to apply was Monday, March 3rd.
We received 348 applications for the program. As indicated on our
website, we expect to notify all applicants of their status by April
1st.
If you have decided to withdraw your application for any reason, e.g.,
you received and accepted an offer from another program, please let us
know immediately.
