The Marijuana Issue

USA Today recently reported that legal pot's future is in a haze, thanks to President-elect Trump's nomination of a staunchly anti-marijuana lawmaker for attorney general. "Good people don't smoke marijuana," said Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions in an April Senate hearing. That view from the nation's incoming top cop, a sharply different tone than President Obama's, has cast a pall over an industry that's recently celebrated a watershed moment. Voters in eight states relaxed their marijuana laws on Nov. 8, raising to 29 the states that now permit medical use of marijuana, and eight with legal recreational laws on the books.

Here's D. Macris, the Executive Director of the Atlanta-based Movement for Marijuana Legalization. Marijuana legalization isn't about potheads getting stoned.  It's about creating new industries, new jobs, new revenues, and new regulations with this abundant natural resource.  You have the idiot potheads, the guys with the dread locks and the tattoos and the people look like they have drug problems. This is more than that. We are college educated, we have all started and run successful businesses, and personally I see this as an opportunity to make a lot of money. When I say us, I mean the American people. We can divert funds from inner-city crime organizations, international cartels, and give the money to licensed businesses that are regulated and American. We have problems with the Chinese copying stuff. They cannot copy this. If you let loose marijuana in China Communism will fall. If those people get stoned they're going to say wait a minute, I'm not going to work for a bowl of rice.