Joe_Cavalry All Day Every Day

When it comes to my point of view on the legalization of Marijuana I believe that there is no reason what so ever for it to remain illegal.

I'm not going to go into detail explaining what many have already said, about the medical uses, stress relief, etc, but when it comes to the profit that could be made this way, an enormous amount of opportunities open up.

First thing that comes to mind with the legal sale of Marijuana is tax. Why have a tax other then sales tax? Hell, why not? Are you not willing to pay that extra amount to be able to legally smoke? Is that extra tax not worth being able to sit in clear view and toke it up without worrying about going to jail if you're caught? Of course it is!

Realistically, we could add the Cigarette tax from each state onto a package of Joints. 4 average rolled joints at $10 + tax. Sure, you're getting slightly less than a dime's worth, but again, that extra amount is more than worth it.

If marijuana was to be considered for legalization, and lets say they were to use Texas as the Beta-State, a package of 4 joints would cost $11.41 after tax. Lets say Joe goes through the average dime in about 2 days. That's 178 dime bags in a year. As of now that would cost him $1780, and it would cost $2030.98 if it was legalized and taxed. That is $250.98 more than he would normally pay for a slightly less amount of weed. About .1 gram per package to be exact, on average.

That is $250.98 in profit to the government, in 1 year, from 1 man. That means slightly under 4000 people (3985) would allow the government to make a profit of one million dollars.

Did I mention that is in addition to the money saved yearly on arrest and court costs? Imagine this... 6458 (adjusted for the California cigarette tax) people in California smoke marijuana once it has become legalized. That's $1 million in profit, in addition to saving the $100 million that it is estimated to spend yearly on arrest and court costs. I'm failing to see the problem with this idea.

On a large scale, I think I read somewhere about 10% of the American population admitted to smoking marijuana. The last estimated count was about 303.8 million people in the US, so 30.38 million have admitted to regular use. The average tax on cigarettes around the US is about $.53 per pack, at even just 1 dime per week, equals to an average profit of $837.27 million dollars annually.

This estimate does not include the millions of Americans who did not admit to their regular use, nor to the hundreds of millions that would be saved on arrest and court costs.

In addition, think of all the new job openings of adding several large scale marijuana plantations. Hundreds of job possibilities open up, allowing the percentage of jobless adults to decrease. Hell, make a few new college courses about Marijuana History, Growing Marijuana, the Cultivation of Marijuana. Easily opening up new job opportunities for people to strive for. Sure, it's not the perfect job, but if you can convince people to go to school for it, and make a college degree required to work on the plantation, I bet it would convince hundreds of students to return to school with their career choice in mind.

All of these are just estimates and I have no way of knowing any exacts. But as my estimates are reasonable, and pretty close to being exact with the information I've researched, even if it didn't provide an adequate source to replace paper products, or medical uses, or any of the other dozen + things that marijuana is useful for, the profit in taxes and the annual savings in court costs and the job opportunities more than justify the legalization of marijuana.