[420 Girl]

The medical marijuana industry has already put $11-100 million in the state treasury, depending on whose numbers you use. In Marijuana Inc. Thursday night, CNBC reported California “collected more than 11 million dollars in sales tax revenue, 300 thousand from just one Oakland dispensary alone." Americans for Safe Access in California say their estimates are “one hundred million dollars in sales tax revenue” per year could be collected by the state from marijuana distribution points, or dispensaries, in the state alone.

It is hard to get accurate numbers as to how many dispensaries there are in the state today and how much revenue they bring in, because of interference from the federal government in the last eight years.

“Part of the problem is the federal government has been continuing to exercise federal law in California,” said Kris Hermes, of Americans for Safe Access, headquared in Oakland. “In the last couple of years we experienced a significant number of raids on dispensaries, over a hundred throughout the state."

He says DEA agents “closed down a number of businesses. Then others open and want to avoid scrutiny.”

In areas where the crop grows, the DEA is putting people out of business and out of work with its Airborne Search and Destroy squads destroying our cash crop and its agents raiding dispensaries, where cash and medicine seems to just disappear.

“$10 billion dollars spent in 2008 by DEA battling marijuana trade,” the CNBC report Thursday said.

Trying to give both sides of the story, Marijuana Inc. told of diesel spills and herbicides they've found at illegal grow sites.

If the marijuana industry had the freedom to operate legally, they could establish environmental standards and hire legal security guards, so all the reasons the feds give for continuing to raid farms and homes are moot when you just make it all legal.

So let us build a legitimate industry in our state around this product that gazillions of Americans enjoy using.

Stop denying California its right to tax revenue from its biggest cash crop.

Collect fees and taxes up front instead of handing wads of cash back and forth to conduct a billion dollar industry.

The cable channel original program Marijuana Inc. tried to tell law enforcement’s side in an attempt to be fair and balanced, but arguments DEA reps and a couple local sheriffs gave against the marijuana production in the CNBC report were not arguments against marijuana production but really more reasons for legalizing the drug.

The DEA points out they've found guns in marijuana grow areas, and felonious thieves break in on people who have indoor gardens to steal the crops. All that proves is the value of the product - and that if it were legal, manufacture, production and distributiion would not be mired in the black market. The crime in today’s marijuana production is that it is still a crime.

Hmm. Maybe the DEA wants to keep conducting raids because of all the cash and free medicine they can grab in the process.

It’s time to get rid of the last of the real criminals, the guys who have been running the US government for the last eight years, including the entrails still hanging out, left over from George Bush's Drug Enforcement Administration.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...marijuana.html