Floridians will soon vote on whether there is a constitutional right to sell recreational marijuana (Amendment 3). Elite Democrats who control the Palm Beach Post urge peasants to vote “yes” on this amendment. The same newspaper also reports that elite Democrats in Palm Beach per se have voted to ban marijuana sales on their island (elite stoners would need to tell a servant to drive to a working class or welfare neighborhood to get weed, just as in Maskachusetts).
Ballotpedia:
The initiative would legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 years old and older. Individuals would be allowed to possess up to three ounces of marijuana (about 85 grams), with up to five grams in the form of concentrate. Existing Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers would be authorized under the initiative to sell marijuana to adults for personal use. The Florida State Legislature could provide by state law for the licensure of entities other than existing Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers to cultivate and sell marijuana products.
Smart and Safe Florida is sponsoring the initiative. The campaign reported $61.28 million in contributions. Trulieve, a marijuana dispensary company that owns medical marijuana dispensaries in Florida, is the main contributor.
One weed shop had tens of millions of dollars of loose change to kick in, hoping to make a 10X return if the amendment passes? If the measure succeeds, cronies of the state government (the current approved dispensaries) will make huge profits partly due to the fact that it will still be illegal for a stoner to grow his/her/zir/their own dope. My comment on X:
That is beautiful logic. Marijuana is wholesome enough to be sold by the Miami Vice-style bale on every street corner, but the person found with a single plant must be imprisoned. Queers for Palestine is actually easier to understand.
I thought that unlimited calling was great because I would save 50 cents here and there on phone calls to friends. It didn’t occur to me that I would be getting 50 spam calls every day once the cost of making a call was cut to $0. Similarly, I was in favor of marijuana legalization in Massachusetts because I wanted tax dollars preserved for government functions other than enforcing marijuana laws. It didn’t occur to me that weed shops and their advertising would be omnipresent, thus changing the day-to-day experience of living in Boston or Cambridge (or looking at billboards on the various highways).
I hope that this fails! Does that make me anti-Weed? No. I would be in favor of a law that
- eliminated medical marijuana (so that kids aren’t exposed to the idea that marijuana is healthful, which would have been risible to 1970s stoners)
- allowed people to grow their own marijuana if they so desire, so long as the plants are inaccessible to minors
- prevented marijuana businesses from advertising; people would have to find them via Google Maps and similar
- required communities to establish zoning rules for where marijuana stores could be located (preferably not in strip malls where kids would be likely to go)
- made it easy enough to get into the marijuana business that nobody could make tens of millions in profit simply by being a government crony
Separately, let’s check in on the old-fashioned purveyors of drugs, i.e., those who don’t claim that their product is healthy. “TD Bank hit with record $3 billion fine over drug cartel money laundering” (CNN):
TD Bank will pay $3 billion to settle charges that it failed to properly monitor money laundering by drug cartels, regulators announced Thursday.
The fine includes a $1.3 billion penalty that will be paid to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a record fine for a bank. TD also intends to pay $1.8 billion to the US Justice Department and plead guilty to resolve the US government’s investigation that the bank violated of the Bank Secrecy Act and allowed money laundering.
The US Department of Justice said in a statement that TD Bank had “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its procedures of monitoring transactions. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news late Wednesday.
In one instance, TD Bank employees collected more than $57,000 worth of gift cards to process more than $470 million in cash deposits from a money laundering network to “ensure employees would continue to process their transactions” and not declare them in required reports, the DoJ said.
Aside from handling drug cartel money, what’s been management’s focus at TD Bank?
On Instagram they want to make sure that “every woman wins”:
On their Diversity and Inclusion web page, veterans are highlighted as a victimhood group in the same cluster as sacred Black female, and LGBTQ2+ (not 2SLGBTQQIA+? The “2” in LGBTQ2+ stands for two-spirt, I think, but somehow the Native American Queers end up last rather than first. White women in the L category displace the Native American victims as with most quota-based programs).
On YouTube, their executives are on a diversity, equity, and inclusion panel:
(They also sponsor a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Council in another YouTube video.)
As loose followers of the legalization in Calif*, it becomes another entitlement program when the farmers start losing money. The retailers seem to make all the money.