LEGALIZE, TAX CANNABIS

Kudos to The Herald for printing the truth about cannabis (hemp and
marijuana). Cannabis should not just be legalized for medicinal use,
but it should be taxed and regulated for use by adults.

Considering how much safer and healthier cannabis is for people, if
just one person stopped drinking and instead became a pothead, we
would have a tremendously better society, in my experience with drunk people.

Arresting over 700,000 people a year for cannabis is just a huge
waste of our tax dollars. We need to separate cannabis from the black
market and put it into a safer, regulated, legal market for adults.
Parents who think that this would make cannabis more readily
available to their children just aren't talking to their children.
Since the 1980s, federal drug surveys have shown that cannabis is
"fairly easy" or "very easy" to obtain every year by over 80 percent
of high school seniors. Could cannabis really get any easier to
obtain for our children than it already is today?

Drug dealers don't card, after all. And drug dealers are more likely
to push harder drugs on our children in any event, as more addictive
substances are also more lucrative. Moving cannabis to a regulated
market changes things dramatically for the better.

For 70 years now, we have increased penalties, built more jails,
incarcerated more of our neighbors, yet cannabis availability remains
constant, and consumption remains fairly constant. If we want to keep
drugs out of the hands of children, and we all agree on that, then we
must put their supply into a transparent, legal market that can be
monitored and regulated.

Anthony Lorenzo

Sarasota