USATODAY.com - Drug agents can't keep up with pot growers: "CAMP's critics equate the program with Prohibition in the 1930s.
'Look at the amount of economic value we're destroying,' says Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. 'This could be legally taxed and regulated and we could all be making money off it. We never saw this lawlessness until there were drug laws and CAMP.' NORML estimates that Californians' pot consumption could yield at least $250 million a year in sales taxes.
Gieringer also says that, despite the government's assertion, there is no evidence that Mexican cartels are involved in the cultivation.
Roger Rodoni is a cattle rancher and registered Republican who has represented a conservative district in Humboldt County — conservative by local standards, anyway — on the board of supervisors since 1997. He calls CAMP 'an exercise in futility.'
'It's a vast expenditure of public funds that for all practical purposes does no good,' Rodoni, 65, says. Demand for marijuana keeps growing, and CAMP has done little to stem the supply, he says. As evidence he points to a drop in the price of 'the quality stuff'' from $6,000 a pound a few years ago to $3,000 today.
A June report for Taxpayers for Common Sense by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that despite billions of dollars spent on marijuana suppression — nearly $4 billion by the federal government in 2004 alone — usage is about the same as 30 years ago."
Tax! Revenue coming in from sin! It doesn't matter how much sense it makes, how much money could be put to other uses, the users might be having fun and this must be stopped!
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