pot report

[fsagertyaef]

The legalization of marijuana has been a longstanding issue in the media ever since it was made illegal with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Cultivation of marijuana or, more properly speaking, the hemp plant, was outlawed because of the threat that it showed to the cotton industry and the lumber industry, both of which had a very large influence over the federal government at the time.

Before 1937, marijuana was available over the counter, and was known as American cannabis. It was sold for a variety of purposes, including some of the same ones that doctors in a few states can prescribe medical marijuana for today, such as pain and nausea. Today, it is known to be effective for people with AIDS, glaucoma, anorexia, and many other illnesses. It controls nausea, reduces pressure inside the eye and stimulates the appetite. A lotion made by soaking marijuana in alcohol helps people with herpes to control their sores. Such a remedy is one of the first known medical uses of the hemp plant. It is easy to extract an antiseptic from the leaves to make into some sort of lotion using a fat such as butter, an oil or alcohol. The leaves are still used in some countries as a bandage. Cannabidiolic acid, one of the cannabinoids in pot, can be extracted from premature buds to make a powerful disenfectant.

Including its medical purposes, there are over 25,000 different uses for marijuana or the hemp plant it comes from. Among such products are laundry detergents and bio-plastics that are stronger than steel. The fibers can be used to make drywall that is almost twice as durable as sheet rock, the most widely sold drywall in the country. Marijuina is still the largest cash crop in the world; the only thing that produces more money then marijuana world wide is arms trading.

So why should the ban on pot be lifted? Well, there are hundreds of reasons, but I am only going to go over a few. The medicinal ones already are known by most people, so I will not cover them as extensively, but there are many other reasons why it should be legalized.

Taxes are one of the biggest reasons. It is estimated that in California alone, a $1-a-gram tax could yield $1.5-$2.5 billion. dollars a year. Not only that, the state would save over $150 million a year on various aspects of law enforcement. There also would be more sales tax and income tax revenues from increased tourism, and from enterprises such as coffee shops that also would sell pot, and head shops selling marijuana, papers, pipes and other paraphernalia. Sale of medical products, from painkillers to disinfectants and ointments, would generate additional millions in revenue. With the leaves and buds used for medical and recreational purposes, that leaves the stalks for industrial uses such as making clothing, rope, biodegradable cleaning products and even bio-mass fuels. The hemp industry, including marijuana sales, could bring in an estimated $13 billion a year and generate countless jobs.

That is just one year, and that is just one state out of 50. Nor is California the largest pot-producing state. That distinction goes to Kentucky, which in 2000 produced marijuana worth more than $2 billion to growers, to say nothing of the profits made by middlemen and street-level dealers. Other than sale of a few drug dealers’ seized property, the government gained no revenues, and in fact spent a great deal more trying to suppress the marijuana industry. Think what the United States’ economy would be like with over $100 billion dollars a year extra coming in from sales taxes and from taxes on the incomes of the industry and the hundreds of thousands of workers who would be employed legitimately in it: We could keep our after-school programs and afford to add a few. We could reduce the number of police or reassign them to solving serious crimes, because we wouldn’t need one on every corner, looking out for people wearing Bob Marley tee shirts.

If marijuana were legalized, its potency and purity could be overseen by the government: No more kids dying because someone put PCP in their harmless pot, or “graduating” to crack because pot bought on the street has been sprinkled with it to increase sales by boosting its effects. The government could regulate what went into it and make it even safer.

Our prisons would no longer be overflowing with “criminals” who had done nothing more than use a harmless substance outlawed for illogical reasons. With fewer inmates, we could keep the murderers and rapists and child molesters where they belong, behind bars, not being let out of overcrowded jails before trial, as has happened in Marion County, because someone else was busted for selling weed. The American Bar Association’s annual report on the state justice system is basically one long plea for an end to the drug laws that imprison thousands of users annually. It costs an average of $20,000 a year to lock up a minimum-security prisoner, and some states still have a mandatory two-year sentence for possession of less than 1 gram of marijuana. Thus, it costs Nebraska, for instance, $40,000 of taxpayers’ money to lock up someone caught smoking a joint, to say nothing of the costs of catching and trying him, the income taxes he won’t be paying.

The agricultural benefits of growing various types of hemp would be amazing. Its fibers can replace much of the wood pulp now produced by clear-cutting forests that have taken decades to grow. It has been said that before Europeans came to North America, a squirrel could have traveled from New England to the banks of the Mississippi River without touching the ground once, but today we are running out of trees to cut down. One acre of hemp can provide as much pulp for paper as up to four acres of forest, and can be replanted and harvested two to four times a year, depending on climate. It needs no pesticides and requires no fertilizers. Even without crop rotation, it can be grown in the same place for up to two decades without depleting the soil. Hemp fiber also can be used in clothing, from tee shirts to heavy coats, and producing the raw material requires no fertilizer. In contrast, growing cotton consumed more than half of all pesticides used in the United States in 2003, creating health hazards for workers and their children.

Drywall is not the only construction product that can be made from hemp. French archeologists have discovered bridges built with a process that mineralizes hemp stalks into a long-lasting cement. Extracts from the seeds can be used for many things such as lubricants, varnishes and tanning lotions (dozens of which proudly display marijuana leaves on the bottles). However, the most promising uses may be in replacing a major portion of the petroleum now used in plastics and fuels. Hemp oil can be substituted for petroleum, similar to using soy-based biodiesel, or in other bio-mass fuels. The hurd, the non-fibrous heart of the plant, can be burned as is or processed into charcoal, methane or gasoline. Hemp charcoal can be burned instead of coal in the today’s electric generators, with much lower pollutant emissions. Hemp methanol makes a clean-burning, cheap and efficient automobile fuel that could replace millions of gallons of gasoline a year.

Despite its countless other uses, it is illegal to grow any form of the hemp plant in the United States, and seems likely to remain so for awhile because of the public’s fears.

People say, won’t everyone become addicted if marijuana is legalized? That seems unlikely. In countries where it has been decriminalized, that has not been the case. For instance, only 25 percent of Holland’s adult population smokes a joint or more a day, and of that 25 percent, only about one person in 10 uses enough to interfere with daily life. Yet the Dutch make millions of dollars a year from tourists drawn to a country where they can legally enjoy a pleasure outlawed in their homelands. Not one death has ever been attributed solely to smoking marijuana. (It takes 40,000 times the amount a human needs to get high to kill a mouse, according to one study.) Yes, there are a few people who are allergic to it, but no reports of allergy-linked fatalities -- something that cannot be said of peanuts, which now are banned from many school lunch rooms because their mere scent can trigger severe allergic reactions.

Tobbaco-related illnesses have killed dozens while you were reading this report. Alcohol use and alcohol-related accidents kill thousands a year. And yet one of the safest, most useful plants known to mankind is against the law.

So why is pot still illegal? Only because too few people have stood up together and said they want cannabis to be legalized for consumer products, for medicines and for fun.

For more information, call NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, at 202-483-5500, or go to www.norml.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

if you see anything that is blatently wrong please correct me

[quizywig]

If marijuana were legalized, its potency and purity could be overseen by the government: No more kids dying because someone put PCP in their harmless pot, or “graduating” to crack because pot bought on the street has been sprinkled with it to increase sales by boosting its effects.

mixing chemical drugs with weed as a method to graduate or gateway to harder drugs is more of a myth than a reality.

the graduation from weed to harder drugs happens( and only in a very very small percentage of users) when people, usually younger or easily lead go to there local dealer looking for a bit of a smoke for a party, the dealer says no weed but ive got these pills and you'll have an even better time. then its just a road to destruction.

decriminalising it and seperating weed from hard drugs will go along way to stop this.

 

i really hate the gateway theory of drug use, if there is anything to it, the gateway has to start with cigarettes and alcohol and maybe coffee, you wont find a heroin addict who hasnt used or abused at least one of those 3.

[fsagertyaef]

im not saying its a gate way drug

 

im saying ive had a friend get shit that was laced with something and they wound up throwing it away because they couldnt figure out what it was and it wasnt just bud

 

gateway theory is bullshit everyone knows it

 

you never gotten a bag when you went out and bought it from someone that had something mixed in it i know ive seen it havent had it happen but ive seen it at least hich is why i mentioned it but not directly

Edited July 28, 2005 by fsagertyaef

[F420]

Birth is a gateway drug.

[fsagertyaef]

i guess in a way yeah it is but i never though of it that way

[Pickle]

The leaves are still used in some countries as a bandage. Cannabidiolic acid, one of the cannabinoids in pot, can be extracted from premature buds to make a powerful disenfectant.

 

disinfectant

 

Are you American? if not fretilisation, decriminalisation and legalisation are spelled with an "s".

 

Don't forget the value of marijuana products as a healthy source of food.

 

Very good indeed. Proper referencing, a bit of re-organisation and editing to keep the readers attention focused and hammer your points home and a bit more padding and you'll have something worthy of high marks at university. You have done a great job there. :thumbsup

[fsagertyaef]

spelling is my biggest problem and i knew there would be a few that got past my editors i know i left out food i'm trying to get more info on different ways but i have a reasearch paper that i have to get done b4 the weekends over also so i kind slaked a little bit on this one but i am planning on doing one more edit on it if anyone has any ideas on other things that should be included please post food source i honestly don't know that much about how it can be done its high in protein yeah pot seeds can balance out a vegetarians diet (already give my g/f seeds to eat) but what else can you think of any wayss to pound my points home a little bit them in harder and thanks man most people just say yeah good job or at least the people i have shown it to

[Pickle]

Well, i'm not going to claim to be an expert but i know people are generally lazy so when you are serving them up information making it easy to digest is a good idea.

 

Give it a beginning, middle and an end. Start by looking at the whole doccument and tell the reader what they are going to read about, eg: alternate uses for cannabis products other than the widely accepted medical uses, next describe what the best available information is telling us about cannabis products and their beneficial properties, and last, sum up the whole document by guiding the reader through the conclusions that can be drawn from the information that has been put forward.

 

Try making your paragraphs more focused on delivering a single piece of information, this will make the reader grasp the more subtle aspects (not too subtle though) of what you are telling them and makes it easier to organise the information you are giving the reader. This will help in padding out the whole document as you are leaving the next piece of information for another parragraph. Read through each paragraph and ask yourself if you could have "said it better" or if you missed anything that you wanted to get across.

 

I don't have any sources of material on cannabis foods, i just recall information about the high protein content, high yeild to land degredation ratio and that it can be made into a healthy oil that can be used for many other things besides food.

 

Like i said, i don't claim to be an expert but i find the two best ways to find out if what i am writing is to read it out loud to see how it sounds and get someone else to look at it. i gave this a bit of thought but if there is anyone out there that realy knows about writing essays, feel free to stomp all over what i have said, i would much rather be shown to be wrong than have someone think i'm right and be disapointed.

 

That having been said, i gave this a bit of thought because it's good to see so much energy being put into something worthwhile. What you have done is a great effort and you ought to be proud. Good luck with whatever you are doing with this doccument.

[Tom]

spelling is my biggest problem and i knew there would be a few that got past my editors

Try copying it into word and using the spell checker, Pickle has the right of it too, presentation and readability are very important. You need to be able to back up every statement you make with facts as well.

 

[fsagertyaef]

thanks for the input

 

first tom on spelling my mom is a copy editor for the biggest paper in the state i still cant belive a word got by her well everyone fucks up once and a while but she has been doingit for 36 years now

 

 

next while i would normally agree with what you said about the normal paper construction

 

i was try to stay away from it to a certin extent on this paper

 

i didnt just want this to be a random make pot legal so i can get high paper trust me ive written a few of them but i wantedsomething a little less mainstream so i made my ending paragraph first to make sure i could have a strong ending (its not great still :angry: ) and then

 

i went and tried to shove as much info as possable into every sentece and not clog it up and still let it flow if you know waht i mean its a kinda easy paper to read and there are onlya few sentences in it that dont tell you something

 

theres a limit to my paper length i cant do more then 4 and im coming close to that i would like it if i could make it about 7 maby 8 but oh well the teacher has a few hundred students and doesnt want to read a lot of shit but oh well fuck it ill make it 4

 

my question to yu guys what should i use as padding and and referncing is needed i coudl throw a few of the places i got my info but personally i would rather a reference page which annoys me becasue i would have to back up every sentences besides my i think its my 3rd paragraph and a coupe other sentences i could always just do a reference page

 

and what would you guys say about more padding like what???

ill also throw a few things in there about it being a great sorce of protine it also has a lot of your fatty acids i know a few things but the thing is i wont write somethign i cant back up easily i could have made a paragrah but my numbers would have been messed up like i know seeds have a higher quality oe proten but a lower amount then soy but i dont know the ratio

 

any one have a good report on how hemp can be used as a food sorce

 

also does anyone know where i can get good long reports on pot everything but someone that doesnt know shit to the things that would keep tom up at night thinking if ou know what i mean