California seems on the brink of financial collapse despite the booming native industries of Cinema and Personal Computers, two of the United States’, indeed the world’s most indispensible prosthetics. Like its mirror image in the waters of the Pacific, Japan, California also represents the leading edge of its continent’s innovation in fashion, technology and inflated economies. What’s in that water?
California has also carved out a niche in the illicit appreciation of a certain specie of nature’s bountiful variety by cultivating and harvesting some of the most kick assed cannabis in the world. It is also on the forefront of getting the pain relief it is to medical patients made worse by prescription drug relief. And therein lies the rubber stamp paid for by every industry whose products fear loss of sales when replaced by a natural plant anyone can grow.
2/26/09
State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) introduced legislation this week to legalize and regulate the commercial production and sale of cannabis for adults age 21 or over. The proposal – Assembly Bill 390: The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act – is the first bill ever to be introduced in the California legislature that seeks to tax and control the sale of cannabis.
As introduced, AB 390 would raise over $1.3 billion in annual revenue by taxing the retail production and sale of marijuana, according to financial estimates provided by the California Board of Equalization. An economic analysis by California NORML estimates that a legal, statewide retail market for cannabis could generate additional revenues totaling some $12 to $18 billion dollars per year.
The noncommercial cultivation of marijuana for personal use – defined as ten plants or fewer – would not be subject to taxation under the proposal.
Could the modern recession have the same affect on prohibition of cannabis as the one seventy years ago had on alcohol? Seeing how it is a financial decision it seems likely. Anyone who smokes more than ten plants can provide will rescue America. Finally, we have an executive decision to let another variety of nature go back to living naturally. I wonder when they’ll get around to realize it’s a good way for humans to live as well.
2 comments:
It's not likely that Ammiano's bill will pass this year, but it is the first time that a bill has been introduced in any state legislature to legalize, tax and regulate cannabis for those without a medical recommendation.
More critically for those in need of medicine, the federal government has stopped raiding California dispensaries which comply with state law.
old attitudes die hard but they do sometimes die. And the Feds have a lot more to worry about of late.
Post a Comment