Marijuana news: Colorado governor warns other states about legalizing pot

Marijuana news: Colorado governor warns other states about legalizing pot




Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper told a group of reporters at last week's National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C., that he'd been approached by a half-dozen other governors about legalizing marijuana.


Arguing that the war on drugs had been a major failure, "a disaster," Hickenlooper said of legalization of marijuana, "This is going to be one of the great social experiments of the 21st century. But going out and getting tax revenue is absolutely the wrong reason to even think about legalizing recreational marijuana."






Marijuana, he said, "doesn't make people smarter, doesn't make people healthier," and puts young people especially at risk. He said the state would use the first $40 million in revenue from the sales of the drug for school construction, but after that the money will be used to study the effects and protect young people who may be harmed by the use of marijuana.






"We're going to not use this as a source of revenue to help education or expanding health care," he said. "We're going to use it in health care where it will relate to marijuana activity … I don't think governors should be the position of promoting things that are inherently not good for people."


On Feb. 24, the U.S. Tax Court in San Francisco is due to hear Canna Care's challenge over whether the IRS can impose the hefty tax demand under a 1982 law intended to close a loophole that allowed a Minneapolis cocaine and methamphetamine dealer to claim tax deductions for a scale, his apartment rent and telephone expenses.






In the case of Canna Care, the IRS has refused to accept $2.6 million in business deductions for employee salaries, rent and other costs after auditing 2006, 2007 and 2008 federal tax returns for the north Sacramento dispensary. However, the IRS did allow the dispensary, which handles about $2 million in medical marijuana transactions a year, to deduct the costs of the marijuana itself.






The IRS has used the Reagan-era tax code, known as 280E, to seek tax penalties against numerous California dispensaries under the argument that their business expenses constitute support of drug-trafficking operations.


And late last week, the Epilepsy Foundation endorsed medical marijuana as a treatment option. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that leaders of the foundation called the choice to use medical marijuana "a very important, difficult and personal decision that should be made by a patient and family working with their health care team."
“The Epilepsy Foundation supports the rights of patients and families living with seizures to access physician directed care, including medical marijuana,” the group said. “Nothing should stand in the way of patients gaining access to potentially life-saving treatment if a patient and their health care professionals feel that the potential benefits of medical marijuana for uncontrolled epilepsy outweigh the risks.”



http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/02/marijuana_news_colorado_govern_1.html

Someone should remind Governor Dumbfuck that marijuana has been around long before it was legalized, and has always been readily and easily available to anyone who wants it. That will never change. But of course we all know this.

I wonder if they sell alcohol in CO?

I wonder which construction company will be building those schools and who will be profiting from studying (again) the effect on kids. They're already stealing the money