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Libertarian

End Marijuana Prohibition … and All Other State Aggression

This gorgeous pro-marijuana-legalization video will only take three and a half minutes of your time. It succinctly and passionately makes the case for ending marijuana prohibition. You’ll want to pass it on to your social network.

Let’s face it, marijuana is natural. It is a plant, a very valuable one. It is the source of many, very useful, things. There is no reason to ban (or tax) it. It is not even like cocaine, which comes from the coca plant but is concentrated and mixed with nasty substances such as gasoline and cement. It is simply a plant and is usually consumed in its natural state.

Sure, legalized profits from marijuana sales could be used to fund hospitals, playgrounds and schools as depicted in the video, but not via taxation. Taxation is theft; it’s just like in the video where violent people roll into town and destroy all the goodness enabled by the flower. In real life, as well, government agents drop bombs on marijuana crops and otherwise violently impede its voluntary use by consenting individuals. But that’s what taxation is, too: violent people making threats if you don’t comply, and using your property against you and other innocents if you do.

The video is dead on when it shows state violence morphing hospitals into prisons, marijuana patrons into jittery caffeine addicts and drunk alcoholics, pot self-medicators into frustrated pharmaceutical users and peaceful free markets into violent black markets. If this is so obviously the result of state intervention into the marijuana market, is it such a stretch to realize that it’s also the result of state intervention into any other marketplace?

By George Donnelly

I'm building a tribe of radical libertarians to voluntarize the world by 2064. Join me.

3 replies on “End Marijuana Prohibition … and All Other State Aggression”

I see no reason to disparage coca or cocaine (especially when I’m not sure if you know what you’re talking about) nor do I see purpose to treat marijuana as special when the whole gamut deserves no infringing legislation. Marijuana doesn’t need rationalized, because there was never a rationalization for state interference in the first place. It doesn’t need its virtues heralded, even though it has many.

The coca plant would be used ‘naturally’ just as marijuana if the plant itself wasn’t treated under federal and/or state drug enforcement agency jurisdiction more severely and the market made it available, where it would probably be chewed or brewed. Cocaine, like any drug, can (and will) be adulterated, and different types of compounds sought entrapped in whatever biological or chemical vessel they may be found it demand different solvents for extraction. It’s rather unfair to not only shit on hydrocarbon solvents (probably trying to tie our feelings about the colloquial notions about gasoline, such as inhaling it or getting it on the skin is detrimental, or that buying gas fuels al queda, blah blah) but also trying to attach that stigma onto the drug itself, for which an appropriate extraction leaves little to no trace of the solvent (whether gasoline, and maybe you meant kerosene, is the best or even an appropriate solvent is another question; how does the pharmaceutical industry get cocaine, anyway?)

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