World Weed - The WTO葉he stoner's new best friend

[cyberpj]

Original message World Weed - The WTO葉he stoner's new best friend

"The irony here is difficult to overstate. The same WTO that most stoners love to hate may someday be the organization that guarantees their supply."

World Weed
The WTO葉he stoner's new best friend.
By Tim Wu

Tim Wu is an associate professor at University of Virginia Law School. He teaches intellectual property and international trade.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2115008

[wtbymark]

1. we already have a trade sytem- it works

plus the majority of high quality marijuana in the world comes from the US, this guy doesn't know a thing.

[cyberpj]

3. But those who will want to export will still want into the HUGE US market

"The economic incentives to bring a WTO complaint are clear. For Canadian and other marijuana exporters, the American recreational and medical weed market is the big fatty. Americans smoked 1,047 metric tons of ganja in 2000預ccording to U.S. government estimates, worth $10.5 billion. (The White House estimates that the average smoker goes through 18.7 joints per month.) Every afternoon, at 4:20, millions of bowls light across the nation預nd what country wouldn't want a piece of that?"

[evil_orange_cat]

2. I grow my own ;)

[D-Notice]

4. We have a simple choice:

either keep it (& all other drugs) illegal, unsafe & in the hands of drug-dealers, or make all drugs legal, safer & regulated...

What is the better choice?

[Fovea]

6. No, that's not right.

Even though some nations are ambigous on opium, for example, and America is also ambiguous about meth, the result unequal enforcement because of corruption is not the same as the effect of ambiguous legal status because of different community standards.

There are no communities I know of that allow sanctioned self administration of either substance in question.

The better choice is to re-approach substances with real, known physically harmful properties, such as opioids and tobacco as being outside the pale of the WTO, and inside the sphere of the UN.

Some states might ban liquor, or marijuana for domestic consumption on moral grounds. But if you accept the mandate of the WTO, states that do so, should by rights pay a price to do so.

No state should be sanctionable for refusing to sell smack. Pot OTOH...

Also. if a state wants to sell smack, or tobacco, it should be entirely domestic sourcing, outside the scope of international agreements. There should be no internationally regulated trade in these goods.

[Fovea]

5. Cannabis prohibition

is the lynch-pin of our whole system of domestic social control.
It would take a paradigm shift of seismic intensity to allow even the WTO to alter it.

What would the new stigma and boogie-man be? It would have to function as a spur to the moralists, as a mechanism for keeping minorities down, and providing a massive un-tracable revenue stream for the economy.

[firefox]

7. The jig is up on cannabis prohibition

This was up at cannabisnews.com on March 17th-- http://tinyurl.com/6ga25

Prohibition is a world wide phenomenon led by a cult mentality- http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/cohen.church.html and http://tinyurl.com/3j3zs They do not let reason or popular opinion affect their call for eternal prohibition.

The argument this guy makes could also be made with the Sherman Anti-Trust laws in regards to cannabis as medicine. It is anybody's guess as to how much Free Cannabis would do to pill profits. It certainly is reasonable to think that one-quarter of all pharma sales would be erased with Free Cannabis.

But there is no intellectual support for cannabis prohibition. You do not have people donating money, outside of the taxpayer billions, to drive cannabis off the planet. It is just the opposite and if there were not a tyranny to our laws and government, people would be out on the corners preaching to end this godawful prohibition at the top of their lungs.

But because prohibition is dying and has no sound defense of its existance in a real free country, what this guy says might the out when the prohibitionists know that the murder, robbery and insanity cannot survive.