fiscal discipline is the fundamental predicate of a free society:
The problem with anything, a certain amount is OK. But there is a tendency to go to extremes. And all of a sudden, if there's advertising and legitimacy, how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation? The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.
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Discipline's a funny word. It can mean strength of will or punishment, depending on the use, and the user. Brown's using it in the first sense, of course. But there's a punishment aspect in its use that's pretty widespread, and still going pretty much unchecked and unquestioned.
Talking about "medical" marijuana, in all but the minority of truly medical instances, is so flagrantly hypocritical as to be farcical.
This isn't the necessary hypocrisy of the inescapably compromised - for instance people who think it should be legal but deal in the underground - it's the hypocrisy of those who lie to protect themselves from exposure to legitimate criticism of their unethical greed.
Brown knows the game is to keep the money moving upward - massive amounts of it, with no discipline beyond the enforcement and protection of that upward flow. And that enforcement is primarily centered on the illegality of the weed, and the prosecution and incarceration of enough low-level sellers to keep the big players comfortably fed.
It's a real simple thing, weed is expensive because everybody along the supply chain is risking punishment, from the user to the wholesaler. Marketing it with government "controls" has meant that the illegal price stays pretty close to where it was before there were any dispensaries, or licensed outlets. Taxes! Big time!
I haven't seen any stats but I'm certain neither Colorado nor Washington have seen anything like a price drop toward a reasonable "free market" number. A number representing competition, production costs, and distribution costs without the artificial inflation of illegal risk. It's going to stay at or near the illegal price point, because that's where the money is.
We're talking about a plant you can grow in your own backyard or garage, harvest, and dry in your laundry room.
Fiscal discipline my ass.
As somebody on twitter snarked, it sounds like he's hyping cocaine instead. Alert, competitive, got it.
No small factor in the Wall Street predations of the last couple of decades, coked-out greedheads.
So why's there concern about "some of the potheads", basically meaning most of them?
How about a mediated culture whose central message is "C'mon feed every base impulse you get that can be gratified by buying something"? And we'll bombard kids with that message until they sing it like the national anthem
How about a culture whose primary noise is "gimme that", whose central philosophical question is "What's on TV?"
And the tragic fact of the still unwritten story of all that counter-culture yada, hey that's history, let's move on.
Anyone old enough to have shown all those kids a sensible, responsible way to bring weed into their lives, especially in place of the seriously more dangerous use of alcohol, anyone who could have lead by example, and showed any willingness to, was hounded and driven out of any visible leadership. The only example acceptable to the powers of that time was damage and punishment. The carnage of that moral failure is met with a shrug, and the business of business just keeps rolling along.
Kids started smoking pot, the authorities reacted like they were being attacked by their own children, and now when the battle's clearly over, and most of the country wants legalization, we get "sorta legal" instead, and no recognition whatsoever of why there's a problem, what caused it in the first place, or what to do about it.
Aside from "Just Say Kind Of". And "Show Me The Money".
We're not even going to get into Brown pimping California to Netanyahu.
