KINGSTON, Jamaica – Jamaica is considering the legalization of marijuana, a drug revered by members of the island’s large Rastafarian population who say smoking it is part of their religion.
A seven-member government commission has been researching possible changes to the Caribbean nation’s anti-drug laws, which some police complain are clogging courts and jails with marijuana-related cases, a government official said Friday.
You could have fooled me.
Marijuana should be a lot legal, just cause so many nice people do it. Not cocaine though. That’s just trashy.
And expensive.
whatever grows naturally should not be verbotten.
Let’s unclog our courts as well.
Jury duty sucks. All those people.
whatever grows naturally should not be verbotten.
I wouldn’t mind seeing troopers out digging up and burning all the ragweed they can find. Wouldn’t mind that at all.
B.Moe
did it ever worked , my friend?
Never.
I have witnessed governmentally sponsored total destruction of plantations in Uzbekistan(USSR) done from above and on the ground.
Nothing changed, but the price of crap just went up….
A friend of mine said though that when she started her own business she gave up her marijuana. She says she really misses it. It’s not real helpful now though cause she’s so busy. I think that’s very sensible. In Jamaica though it would probably prompt a lot of entrepreneurial activity, legalizing it. Cultivation and distribution and branding and marketing and lots of extra tourism. Also they hate gays something fierce. Stoned gay pot tourists wandering around Jamaica. This can’t possibly go badly.
Yeah, HF, and look at Dutch people, they are still members of the NATO and are our allies in WOT, notwithstanding the possibility to legally smoke that nature’ product literally in every watering hole, any red light establishment and even fancy restaurant.
I know, I was there…
Nope. Like crabgrass and dandelions, it keeps coming back.
Word of the day: Ragweed
I thought the Dutch were walking some of that back. Amsterdam is crawling with tuberculosis. I’m not sure if that’s related, but ick, they kinda are in my head anyway.
That has been kind of a running joke of mine for years, I used to get hayfever really bad, and back when I smoked dope it would piss me off to be sitting with around with no reefer, miserable with hayfever watching cops burn a big patch of pot. It seemed much more reasonable for them to burn the ragweed that was causing my misery.
Together, common ragweed and giant ragweed account for most of the hay fever experienced in North America in the fall. Symptoms of hay fever are sneezing and runny nose, along with itchy eyes.
In Jamaica though it would probably prompt a lot of entrepreneurial activity, legalizing it.
That was tongue-in-cheek, right? My point was that you can’t swing a dead cat in Jamaica without fanning a cloud of pot smoke. Although, and this is kind of interesting, one is safe as long as one is within the confines of a resort area. Every employee in the place is dealing, and not just pot, either. I don’t know how repressive the cops are in country, but they can’t be too repressive. Peter Tosh’s home is a tourist stop, and they grow it there. Everyone who visits gets a cup of weed tea.
Oh, no. To be for real honest I know less than nothing about pot smoking in Jamaica.
My sister got married there. In the wedding video, you can see a boat close to shore with a guy yelling he had pot for sale, because it’s not legal to sell on land…
My parking garage at work is a lot Jamaica, really. It seems the computer programing company people are where that’s coming from mostly, but something’s going on level 6 a lot too.
on on I mean
You do know that heroin and cocaine grow naturally, along with ricin and strychnine, hemlock, nightshade, etc. Your rule would only make antibiotics illegal.
antibiotics can be grown can’t they? maybe not effective ones anymore.
Penicillin and streptomycin are the only ones that come to mind. Still useful, but I’d hate to be limited to them.
So I guess the only question is whether there’s ragweed in Jamaica. If not, I’m moving.
It probably took me ten years to transition from “legalize pot only” to where I am now, which is “legalize everything.” Keeping cocaine illegal would keep Central and South America at the tender mercies of druglords, organized crime syndicates, corrupt governmental institutions, right-wing militias and fucking Maoist militants. Not to mention that keeping cocaine illegal keeps the mafia in business, and gun crime high.
Same with the other shit. We keep it illegal, we keep racial profiling and no=knock raids, civil forfeiture, and gangs. No thanks. We’re better off legalizing and letting Darwin run his course. After all, it’s not like we really have a choice about Darwin; Even though they’re illegal, these drugs are everywhere, even in our prisons. Darwin will out in the end regardless.
But it’s just so trashy. For real.
I like my cocaine just a little on the trashy side.
There. I said it.
Cocaine and hay fever. That’s not trashy that’s just funny.
Either way, you have a runny nose.
The problem is that with America as it is right now, legalizing drugs wouldn’t mean what people seem to think it would mean. Instead of drugs being completely unavailable legally, it would be as legally available as a combination of Oxycontin, Psuedoephedrine, and Cigarettes. You’d cut down on the black market a bit, but you’d still have no-knock raids and the like. After all, “won’t someone think of the children?”
True, Civ — one of the arguments for legalization is that if it’s legal it can be taxed. And of course nobody in the entire history of mankind has ever tried to evade taxes, right? What they got Al Capone on, that was aggravated jaywalking, wasn’t it?
Argh! There’s a background colour specified in the textarea, but no foreground colour! The system has naturally assumed tyhe default text colour – and white on white doesn’t look very nice if you know what I mean… So sorry for any typos.
happyfeet…….
Just because a lot of nice people do something is no reason to make it legal.A lot of people exceed the legal speed limit, but you can’t make it legal to exceed the legal speed limit (hang on that’s not a very good example now, is it?…)
OK Consider the Crusades then. A lot of nice people travelled to foreign lands and smashed everything in their path… I don’t think that it should be made legal jsut because it was a popular pastime among nice people.
Another weak example… Where’s a lawyer when you need one
OK now… Without looking for further info on this… I’m imagining that one of the main reasons why it smoking dope would still be illegal in Jamaica despite the religious flavour IS:
This size of the place. If legalizing marijuana flooded the tourist industry, the crime rate might go down on paper but I have a suspicion that the _violent_ crime rate might go up:
– physical competition between entrepreneurs come drug lords
– influx of tourists who are about to leave the country anyway, have impaired judgement, and may just think that they can do whatever they want to whoever they want whenever they want.
Travelling to a small island nation to abuse what in your own country is considered a harmful, dangerous, illegal thing… Probably wouldn’t put the first-time user in a very positive state of mind.Hey, I imagine most of the tourists would be quite well-off, and not accustomed to it (or else why and how could they travel there) and maybe there would be some immigrant workers who were looking for a new life without that inconvenient law against the screwdriver in their psychological toolchest.
For tthe tourists at least I aimage that having the first experience trapped on an island of “criminals” could be quite distressing all of a sudden with their minds half shut down.
Panic!
Unaccustomed to it, would they be taking the time to contemplate the nature of reality, and to carefully evaluate the possible consequences of every major and minor decision? No, I think they would be statistically very likely to run around stabbing and raping people.
I’m not saying that drugs are bad, let alone recreational drugs, let alone marijuana.. I’m just saying that the a joint revolution in the tourism and recreational-pharmaceutical industries there could create a very dangeous context for the unwary traveller.
If you were visiting Jamaica for the first time, and it was legal…. Say you were by yourself, even if just for the evening, and you decide to try some. You take it out and pack it in the uh…. paraphernalia which you had picked up at a local head store, and you take a big hit.
Nothing happens.
You take a big hit.
Nothing happens.
So you take another and another, and still nothing happens, you’renot stoned.
So you get up to make some coffee and then HOLY MOSES you’re all of a sudden TRAPPED ALONE on this TINY, REMOTE ISLAND and stoned out of your mind with nobody there to help!
Theen you remember (mistakenly of course) that Marijuana is currently veVERY HIGHLY ILLEGAL – you do not wonder how you wound up with it if it is such a terrible thing, but you decide you have to do whatever you can to remedy the situation before the police arrive to torture and interrogate you.
But the room building doesn’t seem to quite site firmly on its foundations, and with your eyes half shut you wander over to the window and plummet to your death, landing on some poor, innocent Jamaican below and instantly killing them along with yourself.
People are always going to be doing stupid things like that. I do stupid things all the time (sadly not because of any unusual substances) and I reckon that the remote and unfamiliar context of Jamaica could provide a disastrous and tragic end for the nervous and shy tourist?
Bah, just my two cents.. Do with it what you wil.