LDs At Their Best: Legalise Cannabis/Ban Smoking

Good grief is there no end to this misrepresentation of what I posted.  The smell issue relates to intercepting people before they get into a car or in control of safety equipment.

You want it legal, we get that.  But please debate it fairly.

Yes same here and seconded.

I have no personal interest in it being legal or illegal. I will never touch the stuff again even if it is legally given away.

My interest is in reducing the harm that cannabis can do and all the evidence and logic thus far, backed up by my own personal experience, is that the law stops very few who want to take it, but many of the harmful effects of it are made worse by illegality, from the opportunities provided for the proliferation of criminal gangs to the lack of regulation of supply, and from a total inability to operate age restrictions to a complete inability to have any direct control over prices. But we have gone over all that much earlier in the thread without such points being effectively addressed, with whataboutery, double standards and trivialities like the smell used as desperate deflection tactics

Fair enough. I can't deny those issues but it's a balance of risks.

You mentioned tax. California seems to have highly taxed it while Canada has gone for light taxation and I can't refute your suggestion that the UK would keep the price high through taxes.

This data from Canada is interesting (but doesn't prove or disprove anyone's position) health-infobase.canada.ca/cannabis/

Were cannabis to be legalised - and this is a hypothetical point rather than an argument for or against legalisation - one of the primary aims would be to put most if not all of the street dealers out of business. If the legal supplies are more expensive than the illegal ones right at the start this will not happen. So initially the legal supplies would have to be no more expensive than the illegal ones and probably even slightly cheaper in the short term in order to put the dealers out of business as quickly as possible. Once they are out of the equation, THEN we start ramping up the tax as has been done with tobacco. In the medium to long term we will end up with the street dealers gone and cannabis more expensive than it is now, with taxation providing useful funds to finance anti-drug abuse initiatives. Push prices too high of course and there would be the risk of illicit suppliers re-entering the market. There is already a bootleg tobacco smuggling operation run by criminals in place. A big fly in the ointment potentially though is the ease with which high quality cannabis can be grown at home. You can brew alcohol at home but it cannot match the quality of branded drinks. Home grown cannabis potentially can match what is being sold.

In the final analysis, reducing demand tends to be far more effective than reducing supply. Back when I was young we often found our way to drink and drugs out of boredom. In this internet age fewer young people seem to be finding their way to drugs or heavy drinking, because the internet itself gives them plenty of other options so they are less likely to be bored. So giving people better alternatives than getting shitfaced is likely in the end to be far more effective than trying to limit the supply of what gets them shitfaced.

Thank you.