22nd Century Group Inc (XXII)

[rocketeer357]

Get financially real: comparing the tobacco industry to the MMJ industry is like comparing Harvard to a one room log school house. The prisons of America aren't packed with tobacco offenders at 220k per year of taxpayer money. The MMJ industry doesn't contribute huge amounts to federal and local governments across the country. The populations of Columbia and Mexico haven't seen over 100,000 deaths due to cartels fighting to control tobacco sales.

It's never been a question of danger with MMJ or tobacco: it's a moral question underpinned by a puritanical-christian ethos which hearkens back to the absurdities of prohibition. Danger is a relative concept and few would question that both MMJ and tobacco (along with booze and all other drugs) are dangerous. But the danger and the true damage done by outlawing these drugs rather than regulating and financially benefiting from them has been historically documentable; legalization does not equate to endorsement. You don't have to smoke pot to see the benefits of legalization (though it helps!!!).

And as for addiction, big tobacco has been allowed to pump their products with additives to foster addiction and has spent 100's of millions in defense of their products even while they knew that they were in the wrong. With MMJ, many lontime pot smokers would concur that after years of smoking weed, it does indeed require a massive personal effort to break the addiciton....to ice cream and Doritos!