Marijuana and Hemp

Do you like money? I like love money. So here is what really irks me. Our Country has a national dept of 12.8 trillion dollars, oh wait, sorry add another 4.12 billion to that because I am lazy, and I checked that yesterday. No really, we have been going in dept at a rate of 4.12 billion dollars a day since September 2007. Now let’s see, we have 308,179,195 people in the US, that means you share about 41,000 dollars of this dept. Sucks huh?

Too bad their isn’t some magical substance that we can tax but has a low cost to produce.

4 seconds later…

Oh wait there is, marijuana. Did you know that as stated by Jeffery miron a Harvard University Economist, we are spending 77 BILLION dollars a year on fighting Marijuana? Now this includes the 33,655 people that we have imprisoned at the state level, and the 10,785 people on the federal level. That’s alright though because we have a ton of room in our prisons and I guess we have such a surplus in supplies each year that we can even feed, cloth, shower, and house anybody that carries herbs around. Not to say that all of the people imprisoned shouldn’t be there, but a lot shouldn’t be. It is just a blatant waste of resources.

Let’s talk about tobacco, ahhh yes tobacco. I would say that tobacco is better for you, but, I can’t, can you? We all know that tobacco is worse for a person than Marijuana, purely because it kills over half a million times more people than marijuana does. Yet tobacco, still to this day has a very inelastic demand. We are able to sell tobacco left and right taxing on average 2 dollars per pack of 20. Now figure you can buy an ounce of premium pipe tobacco for 10 bucks, and an ounce of Marijuana is about 320 dollars. Tobacco makes about 25.1 billion dollars a year in tax revenue; just imagine how much of a chunk we can take out of our country’s dept just by legalizing a plant.

Now that you have an idea of how much money Marijuana can make for our country in tax revenue, let me enlighten you on a few things that legalizing marijuana will do for our economy.

First off we will obtain billions in tax revenues, having a product that will surely have such a high/inelastic demand will result in the creation of numerous businesses and numerous jobs for the people in the economy. Making Marijuana legal will also cause it to be harder for young children to obtain it, because the stores will card. This will protect our youth from cartels and force them to wait till they are older and can deal with the effects of the drug without hindering their education. Cartels, legalizing Marijuana will also reduce the Mexican drug cartels profit by over 50%, this will cause most cartels to go out of business, in turn California’s economy will improve drastically and the only deaths caused by marijuana will be no more. And finally, HEMP. Our country spends millions of dollars a year to import hemp, not because Europe has the competitive advantage in making it, it is because hemp is made from Cannabis Sativa (Marijuana). As a country we are not allowing one of the most universal, economically valuable, and natural resources that has the potential to save our economy to be used. Hemp can make paper, non toxic diesel fuel, food (hemp oil), clothing, cosmetics, non toxic paint and cleaners, and building materials. On top of that Hemp actually adds organic matter to soil when grown, requires no chemicals during cultivation, and has more fiber yield per acre than any other known source. It just baffles me that we have such a valuable resource that has no bad side effect besides making you eat more, and we not only aren’t even using it, but we are hindering the production of hemp, a plant that has potential to not only take the place of some high production/ health cost products but would also allow our country to become more organic and pure “instead of killing trees we can kill hemp”. Hemp takes 3 months to grow up to heights of 18 feet; it takes trees years to do that. I just wish that our country would realize that we would save billions and raise billions for our economy with something that is cheap, inelastic, and beneficial to our economy nationwide.

P.S. this is a short description of all of the economic benefits of marijuana/ Hemp. So here are a few things that I would talk about but don’t have space to.

. The cost of producing a product out of what we do now vs. out of hemp.

. All of the prescription drugs that cause death and are addictive that marijuana can replace.

. Cartels and specifically how legalizing marijuana will stop them, and how drastically our economy will benefit from them being gone due to legalization.

. The negative external effect of making a PLANT illegal has on the people of this country, and how making it legal will aid in the reverse of these negative external effects.

Here is to wishful thinking,

Marc Denslinger