Legalize it!

 I found this podcast to be very interesting in the fact that marijuana is such a huge issue in mostly California and other states. Fourteen states have adopted marijuana laws. But in California marijuana is its largest cash crop. Marijuana is a significant industry believe it or not. In LA there are 1000 stores that have marijuana that you can buy but there are people who want to shut down the stores because they dont think marijuana should be legal. Right around the corner from Connecticut, New Jersey is fourteenth state where medical marijuana is legal. 

The two men who were doing this podcast asked an libertarian to come in and talk about the illegal and legal crack that is going on. His name is Jeffery Miron who is an Harvard journalist and is talking about weed, which kind of shocked me, but ill take it. One question that the guys had for Miron was how much would marijuana cost if you were to legalize it? Miron said that if we legal drugs they will get really cheap. When he said that it really shocked me because i thought that if it was legalized then more people would want to buy it so the dealers would raise the prices, but that was just the opposite. Miron said why would the price go up... all your doing is planting a tree, a weed plant.

There are two sides to this argument. Both sides make the argument that drugs will become cheaper if people legalize it. If you make drugs yours self then the cost of the drug will decrease a lot. thousands. The people who want to legalize marijuana say if pot is cheaper more people will end up using it. Exactly so make it cheaper!

Miron said that if you bring the prices for marijuana down then it will not go down 1000 times. 

Miron also made a good point that compare marijuana to actual legal things like coffee for insistence. So retail coffee compared to farm priced coffee will be more expensive than the farm coffee, which kind of made me think why? Well Miron said that retail coffee costs more because of transportation, insurance cost, distribution, advertisement, ect. 

The mark up between illegal drugs and legal retail things is that illegal drugs have a higher mark up for example, cocaine is 2-5 times more expensive than in an legal mark. Heroin is 15-20 times more expensive. whereas coffee is only a benchmark. Miron says that the price would decrease but not as much as people say. 

            1. Drug enforcements aren't as good as you think they are in making the drugs cost. Tons of people out there are wanting to make a profit just like in anything you sell. 

           2. If people are bringing in heroin for example illegally people wont have to pay taxes so they will be saving money in the end.

Another ecnomic argument is that we should legalize marijuana because it will make government money. Or save money on law enforcement and put a tax on it. The government could raise up to 1.3 billion dollars if marjiana was legal but Miron says that thats false. he did the math and he said that it would be 1/10 of that. we would only make 100 million. 

In end i believe that people should be able to do what they want if their not hurting other people. So after listening to this i believe marijuana should be legal.