Forgive me if my visions are a bit clouded. I’m from the one country that does allow most soft drugs (Holland), by doing so it has allowed the “shady people” to built a semi-legal network. You can sell marijuana, but you are not allowed to grow more than 5 plants. The so-called grow shops encourage people to grow way more than that. A new kind of criminal now buys or rents buildings to arrange a network of small criminals (often teens) to seed acres of marijuana plants in attics. This is then sold to the legal coffee-shops. And the earnings are quite substantial. Since stealing power allows them to act unnoticed and is cheap.
So what we know here is that a coffee-shops, in one way or another encourages illegal activities. The demand for marijuana is big, but you can’t built a legal company selling marijuana. Like philip morris does for cigarettes. Because you’re not allowed to have a field of marijuana.
Then you may only buy marijuana when you’re over 18. Still I deal with teens that stand 2 feet outside their school, on school property. Smoking marijuana. The amount of students that do this in their breaks is so large there’s no point in telling them not to do it. And this is a well recommended school.
Although I sound pretty negative about it, the same can be said about alcohol. I am ok with marijuana. It should be legalized, wtf it’s a plant! But there are so many consequences so it should either be legalized in a commercial way,normalized like a bottle of vodka.So the employee at your local supermarket can ask your ID. Or stay illegal. Coffeeshops have to do this, but they rarely do so… They are not afraid of a ticket, they buy themselves out of any fine.
Then there’s drug tourism occupying half a country’s police force, instead of dealing with real things. But well…
I’m not trying to convince you or anybody to think that it’s all bad. I merely lay out the findings of a country with decriminalized soft-drugs. Before you legalize this, there should be a lot of thought put in to it or it leads to more and harder to tackle criminal actions.
lol and it all started with a really simple question…