By snoadmin
Every day California legislators putter around the issue of decriminalizing marijuana is another day spent squandering economic opportunities. Facing another year of deep budget deficits that will negatively impact education, labor and social services, the state can hardly afford to let this potential cash crop disappear in a plume of smoke.
State lawmakers have taken a zigzag approach in dealing with the issue ever since California voters passed Proposition 215 in 1996 to allow compassionate use for people with medical problems. For the past 13 years, though, Sacramento has been doddered around considering legalization.
Among several bills slogging through the political arena is State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s AB 390. Ammiano’s bill would not only legalize pot so people could grow, sell and possess, it would create a literal recession-proof revenue stream through taxation.
This should be a prime time to both push for legalization and to place controls — such as minimum age requirements, tax tables, university research funding and regulatory distribution policies — on the plant.
The U.S. Justice Department issued a directive in October that med-pot users and distributors in states with compassionate use laws will not face federal prosecution as long as they are in compliance with state laws.
The American Medical Association switched direction last month and urged the federal government to stop categorizing marijuana with heroin by removing it from Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act.
There are currently 13 states that allow medical marijuana and New York and New Jersey are likely to follow suit. California was the first, but if it doesn’t act to further decriminalize weed, it will be at the back of the tractor in turning marijuana into a profitable venture.
For example, because of its transition into a medical marijuana cultivation region, the tiny town of Hayfork in Northern California has seen its real estate prices rise from $3,500 per lot to $50,000 over the past five years, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Michigan is already leading the charge toward turning marijuana into a viable industry. Med Grow Cannabis College near Detroit has a fully developed curriculum for a five-week program to help budding entrepreneurs develop cultivation and business strategies. Medical pot has been legal in Michigan for less than a year.
California has its own ganja university system — Oaksterdam University — dedicated to the business end of marijuana. The progressive two-year-old college’s curriculum includes horticulture, canna-business, methods of ingestion, political science and biology.
California’s tax chief estimates the state could earn $1.3 billion or more per year in taxes, and the number of jobs that could be created would make an enormous dent in our unemployment lines. The estimated taxes from a product that grows so cheaply could fill the entire California State University budget hole.
With all of these indicators showing that laws should be eased on pot, law enforcement pros are resisting legalization with all of their might, even when it teeters on abusing power.
For instance, the Los Angeles City Council was primed to pass a medical pot ordinance last month and L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley told them he would vehemently continue raiding and prosecuting med-pot dispensaries regardless of any ordinance.
Legalizing pot would also resuscitate our flailing agricultural systems by opening the fields to the hemp industry, with its many potentially beneficial byproducts.
In a state that prioritizes its prison industrial complex over higher education and employment, it’s time our elected leaders wake up and smell the hemp by taking an economics class at “Ganja University.”
