Roberts, Chris. “Bad Medicine: Why marijuana advocates oppose an initiative legalizing pot.” S.F. Weekly ,ProQuest 19 May. 2010. Web. 19 July. 2015
Chris Roberts is an investigative journalist and writer from San Francisco, California and the author of Bad Medicine: Why marijuana advocates oppose an initiative legalizing pot. In the article, published by New Times Media LLC in May of 2010, Roberts reported that the cops and medical marijuana activists has met eye to eye about what the effects of legalizing marijuana would have on tax. According to the medical pot advocates, he emphasizes how cops don’t favor the issue because it deals with dope and how it would create new criminal penalties for marijuana use.
Roberts claims that California has recently crafted a law that treats marijuana as a more or less equal to alcohol while increasing tax revenue to 1 billion dollars. Roberts mentions how the Tax Cannabis 2010 would make it a crime to use medical marijuana in front of a minor by penalizing the user with fines and incarceration. The punishments are strict in order to encourage those to stray away from marijuana use. The fines are up to $1,000 with a 6-month county jail confinement in addition to the 3 to 7 years of state prison sentence. This illustrates the debate of the legalization of marijuana among the cops and marijuana medical advocates.
Although Roberts mention the costly affect of marijuana legalization, he also mention how 700,000 individuals question the legalization of marijuana while signing a petition that goes against the legalization of marijuana. He especially mentions Dennis Peron to give a point a view of a person who has prior experience with the laws involving marijuana. He coined the name “Kevin Reed of San Francisco’s Green Cross” to specify a individual who signed a petition, giving credibility upon the subject of matter that had the majority of the population questioning the topic of legalization of marijuana.
Roberts included a researcher named “Jeff Jones” and a “University called Oaksterdam University’s Richard Lee” to show what results they concluded from the over-reactor on the topic. They discovered from the cops and marijuana medical advocates, who are against the legalization of marijuana, that they believed the legalization is meant to remove the felonies instead creating more felons in the process. The people Roberts included in his article believed that the mandatory minimums provided by the law now would help the law enforcement officers shift focus away from the marijuana issue.
I think you should try writing this differently and with the stem templates used in “they say/i say” because that will really help you formulate your arguments more effectively, in the future. Other than that, I feel that California is more advanced in their approach to marijuana regulations. It’s kind of like it’s own country, if you think about it. That’s just my opinion, but they way they are going about it in your paper is good and I feel that eventually, as a country, we will advance to this level and legalize the drug with strict laws attached.
This is interesting. With the new regulations going to be needed after legalizing marijuana, there won’t really be as much freedom as people think there would be. Being fined and imprisoned for up to 6 months for smoking in front of a minor, really? People drink and smoke in front of kids like nothing, some of course in the privacy of their own home but that’s just as bad if not worse. So maybe it would be better to leave it illegal.
I agree that if marijuana were to become legalized for recreational use it should have these regulations. But again, that’s just me, it’s like saying “Hey we legalized pot. Oh not what you expected? Well you didn’t specify!” Ha, but in all seriousness, I do agree that marijuana should be treated like alcohol.
When marijuana will be legalized people will be regulated by the law in the aspect of using it. People will still break the law and as a result jail time will be a way to enforce authority. There wont be enough freedom in terms of recreational use.
i found this article very interesting. i think that this law is a little extreme, however the idea of smoking marijuana being sort of a private thing does make sense. i do think that if this law were to be but in place kids would be sheltered even more than they already are.
This article provides a good point. When marijuana becomes legalized, regulation against it would be sure to follow. However, the regulation mentioned about the use being private and non compliance resulting in jail time and fines is pretty extreme, due to the fact that enforcement will likely not be issued as smoothly as it would be expected to.