Ongoing #9

Cannabis taxation: a win-win all round, Richard Branson tells MPs

I wouldn't want to brag, but I've been saying this for years. I could have let the MPs know this for half of Branson's hourly rate because when it comes down to it, what actual reason is there to ban a naturally-occurring plant? Although in my head I've long been a fan of the "take the warning labels off everything and let what happens happen" idea I can kind of understand why certain drugs have been given the tag illegal.

Some of them need ridiculously small quantities to get you to take the ridiculously large quantities that will eventually consume you whole, and so with a bar to entry that low it's surely not worth the risk. But it's a traded-off risk, not an avoided one - the people who still want it will still get it, and they'll get lesser quality from dodgier people who've had to support nastier events than you'd care to think about as you're tucking greedily into your crack rock.

So the argument seems to be danger but putting aside the little matter of the zero cannabis overdoses that have ever happened in the history of the world, since when were dangerous things outlawed completely? They are usually a government's biggest money-spinners - tobacco, alcohol, cars and the petrol to go in them (which I guess is only dangerous if you're a hippie who likes breathing oxygen). Not to mention the life-threatening properties of knives, matches, bleach and water which are very easily accessible by any idiot with the capacity to blunder into a way they can cause injury with them. To someone who has basic faculties those items can be useful rather than a big sticky mess, so it becomes about risk and in this regard marijuana has been proven to be the lowest of the low.

But if they won't listen to evidence, reports, professionals, reports by professionals, public displays of their illogicality by professionals, are they going to listen to the guy with a big sack of money? Oh yeah, they might just do that, it's in their bloodlines.