Belgian brewer InBev makes a bid to buy Anheuser-Busch for $46 billion. That’s a $46 billion company that was once banned in America for producing a product that a bunch of puritanical religious fanatics touted as evil. Do I really have to spell it out for you? Hint: This bud’s for you – and I’m not talking about Budweiser! One might have thought and reasonably expected capitalists in the “land of the free” to have figured this one out by now.
Legalize it and tax it.
Anonymous
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2008.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
I’ve always found it amusingly stupid that we can get high on addictive nicotine from a weed that grows wild, but not get high on non-addictive THC from a weed that grows wild. We can get stupid on alcohol and kill 50,000 a year, beat the shit out of your neighbor and your wife while drunk, but we can’t slow down, lay back, chill out, enhance our sex lives and actually save lives with cannabis…DuPont wanted to make hemp rope hard to come by so that it’s synthetic rope would have increased market share; it put a lot of money and propaganda into that endeavor. Pot was legal before that. The Emperors New Clothes Syndrome comes along in many different stupid venues…
Will the ‘folks’ ever wise up? Well, at least a third of us routinely tell the ‘man’ to stick it…and toke up. Chronic is the largest underground enterprise in the US of A…
Pass the Bud…don’t Bogart the joint.
At the same time the American Medical Association is proclaiming that pot has no medical value, Big Pharma is in a frenzy to bring dozens of new, cannabis-based medicines to market:
Big Pharma in a Frenzy to Bring Cannabis-Based Medicines to Market
Big Pharma is busily applying for — and has already received — multiple patents for the medical properties of pot. These include patents for synthetic pot derivatives (such as the oral THC pill Marinol), cannabinoid agonists (synthetic agents that bind to the brain’s endocannabinoid receptors) like HU-210 and cannabis antagonists such as Rimonabant. This trend was most recently summarized in the NIH paper (pdf), “The endocannabinoid system as an emerging target of pharmacotherapy,” which concluded, “The growing interest in the underlying science has been matched by a growth in the number of cannabinoid drugs in pharmaceutical development from two in 1995 to 27 in 2004.”