Just listening to all the people joining the legalization bandwagon makes me cringe. The easily swayed group of lefty gen-x wannabes has now taken to the ‘popular’ opinion as they tend to do. Never having faught a war or done anything other than popularize thick rim glasses and pointless artsy terms such as faux pas they don’t really see the whole picture. They have a chic house party with people wearing scarfs, rocking skinny jeans and asymmetrical hair waxed frocks talking about how awesome the new Feist record was all the while discussing how we need to stop the violence.
Of course, violence only impacts them as they take the Skytrain to work reading Dose or 24 while they are fed their opinions by a free newspaper. Never taking a second thought or even harkening back to their days in University when they studied art literature or history or some other bullshit commy course to open their minds.
Why yes, they say, let us legalize all drugs so we can stop violence. I have no reason really, just that it is what I heard and all my friends are saying it because we’re apathetic bums. Oh, wait I have a couple good reasons… maybe through some magical act of god gangs will just dissapear, oh wait wait, I have another one…. the government could make money from the taxes! Yes, lets tax it, lets tax the crap out of it.
Hearing the Mayor of Vancouver on radio this morning say he was in favour of “regulating and taxing the crap out of it” makes me think… hmm, you must just be a political tool. He stated that he heard that California proposes that they can make $50 per OUNCE for taxes. So they predict something like three billion dollars in additional tax revenue from this. “OMG, I need to hit up twitter and make my useless opinions heard,” now they say… so much money for the government you think. *WRONG*
Currently the street price of an ounce of marijunana goes for approximately $130-160 CAD. Now if you think that someone one day who has a good supply is going to just switch over to paying $180-210 for basically the same product you are kidding yourselves.
Like it or not, the laws of Capitalism apply to everything, and if you want a market to change you need to have a product that is better and less expensive, otherwise drug dealers/users will not change their suppliers.
It reminds me of Animal Farm. Even if the gov’t finally legalizes drugs (which they won’t) they will get greedy with taxation to justify the fact they legalized it for profit reasons and not moral reasons. And as the greedy little piggies get their mits on the profits they will ever want to keep pushing the boundaries to offset the stupid spending on the Olympic garbage keeping prices of gov’t drugs too high, therefore , drug dealers, gangs and users will continue to buy from their friendly (potentially gang related but non-violent) grower, and the gangs will continue to shoot each other to get a bigger piece of the action.
Maybe one day, government officials will shoot at each other, until then…. Stay classy San Francisco.
*Winner of the Rant Award 2009*