Mile High City Wants 4% Tax For Getting High

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Denver: Mile High City Wants 4% Tax For Getting High.

With so much going wrong in the country, Charlie Brown - No not that one, but Denver's District 6 City Councilman, Charlie Brown has taken up the fight against the evil, highly addictive narcotic called marijuana. Sometimes referred to as Marijane, Wacky-Tobacky, Grass, Weed, Bud, Chronic, and Cush. It's not a pretty place once you travel into the deep dark underground where the marijuana addicts commit their violent crimes and sell their own children into prostitution so they can feed their weed habit. Some say that marijuana is 10 times as addictive as heroine and methamphetimine combined. However, those same people are completely and utterly full of shit.

I have been amazed at the narrative that is being spoon fed to the media by law enforcement, anti-marijuana activists, and local politicians looking for the next "vote winning" cause. However, someone had better let Councilman Brown know that across this great land of our, majorities of Americans are in support of legalizing marijuana above and beyond medicinal use. As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't give a flying fuck in a rolling donut who smokes weed as long as they don't jump behind the wheel of a car while their high like society requires of alcohol consumption.

Is anyone really prostituting themselves to support a marijuana habit? - I can't imagine anyone pawning their VCR for a dime bag.......I'm not running to the defense of Marijuana Dispensaries and hope that they will go away someday. But hopefully that day will be when every American has the right to add marijuana to their herb garden right next to parsley, rosemary, and tyme.

Yet here in Los Angeles, running a meth lab or smuggling cocaine is becomming easy and more lucrative with city and state law enforcement so focused on marijuana. Has anyone ever noticed that no matter what the circumstances are surrounding an arrest or a raid on a medical marijuana clinic, or an illegal indoor grow, the Mexican Mafia or Cartel is always inserted into every news story strictly for propaganda purposes.

In California, some highschool boys created a marijuana garden in the hillside above the athletics field of their high school. It was discovered and abated by the police and at the time when it was unknown who was responsible for the grow, it was speculated by law enforcement on secene that the "techniques being used in the grow and the spacing of the plants" may as well have been signed "Sincerely, The Mexican Drug Cartel."

Really? - The Mexican Mafia is running illegal outdoor marijuana gardens in the middle of a 75% white, upper middle class suburban comminity? - Are you sure about that Detective Flatfoot? - Of course once the responsible parties where discovered to be 3 teenagers, 2 of which were honor students, not a single word about that was printed in any newspaper that reported the original story except for the community newsletter that is given out for free.

But wait! - Don't you want to hear the story about one of the three teenagers and how he saved a kid from drowning in a backyard swimming pool? - Or the other young man that has only missed 2 days in nearly 4 years of highschool? - That's good, right?

I think the answer to that is: Nope! - If we can't tie it to the God Damn Mexican Mafia, then fuck it! - Who in the hell want's to read about white boys who grow thier own weed, especially if they go to school everyday, maintain gpa's of 3.0 or above, and save drowning children in a single bound? ... But I digress.....

Anyway, I don't want to nail Councilman Brown to the cross over the issue because he isn't that far over the top like a few local leaders out here in my neck of the woods. It's just that when it comes to marijuana, if your out there spinning your bullshit for political purposes, I'm gonna call you to the carpet over it because here's the bottom line.

You legalize marijuana and the Mexican Drug Cartels stop comming north to use organized gangs to peddle thier marijuana. Then the police can focus on the real evils of society when it comes to illicit drugs. You know? the kind you have to manufacture that could actually make someone to resort to prostitution and violence to feed a habit.

Councilman Charlie Brown wants to establish a broad raft of regulations on the businesses. The Post editorial board is weighing in Friday on the statewide problem of a lack of regulation of medical marijuana, and in doing some research for the editorial, I chatted with the councilman about his plans.

"I don’t think we stop people from having access," Brown, just back in his office after visiting a dispensary, told me. "But we do need to have some oversight."

Brown says that the situation has gotten completely out of hand. Huge numbers of people who likely aren’t at all suffering from anything other than a desire to get high are getting permits for medical pot meant to go to people with a "debilitating medical condition."

Not that I have the slightest problem with someone wanting to get completely baked out of his mind. (Though I also make the buzz-kill assumption that personal accountability and responsibility are to prevent the smoker from acting lawlessly or becoming a drain on society.) The Post supports legalizing marijuana and regulating and taxing it like alcohol, and so do I. The drug war is a goof and you’ve heard the arguments. But using the medical-marijuana law as a back-door path to legalization is not the solution.

Councilman Brown says the "legitimate" dispensary owners he’s talked to desire reasonable regulation. They’re tired of being treated like second-class citizens catering to stoners when they’re really just trying to provide solace to the truly sick and suffering. So what’s he want to do? Brown would seek to apply the Denver sales tax on medical marijuana sales and a 4 percent tax "on edibles sold at dispensaries and consumed off-site."

(I just love the humor behind that one: A munchies tax!)

He would charge a dispensary applicant "the same as if they were applying for an adult cabaret license," or an application fee of $2,000 and a yearly license fee of $3,000 thereafter. Dispensary applicants would have to get a full FBI background check, follow state laws that liquor stores follow, including how close a dispensary could be located to a school. And applicants under Brown’s proposal would have to be more accountable to neighborhoods. "Perhaps we need a ‘needs and desires’ hearing similar to liquor," he says.

Finally, Brown is concerned about the consumer. He wants to make sure permit holders get quality weed grown right here in Colorado and not from some gun-toting Mexican drug cartel that could be treating the dope with God knows what. I’m not sure I get the "adult cabaret" business. That seems to assume that legitimate and lawful permit holders are still doing something uncouth. Wouldn’t any regulations for pharmacies be the more analogous application? Brown says he expects to have a draft of his legislation by late next week.