Catering to a Market: Legalizing Marijuana

The future of business is always going to be innovation. In order to have something successful running, a person is going to have to think outside the box. We live in such a fast and changing time, a society that has information at its finger tips, that we forget how many basic and simply things can change the quality of life and make people some serious money. One of the slogans we often hear from politicians is how they want to reduce the crime rate in their country and/or community. Maybe they can take a lesson from countries such as Holland and Canada; even places in the United States like Oakland, Denver, and looks like now Portland. Portland, Oregon might just be the next major city in the United States to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana (see to the right). This new ballot being called “Measure 8” would allow possession of less than one ounce of marijuana for people that are over the age of 21 (at the current moment, possession of less than once ounce is considered a misdemeanor violation). This new legalization of marijuana in Portland, Oregon can tend to a market that already exists. The city can cater to the market and make itself a good amount of money that can be used to pay for things ordinarily would through taxes. This way the city, and hopefully later the state will encourage people to spend more money and in return do a nice helping to the economy.

This has proven to be successful in Holland with its coffee shops in Amsterdam that sell marijuana and hashish with a cup of joe. Marijuana is not illegal in Holland and yet their crime rate tends to be low when it comes to drugs. At the same time, legalized marijuana created a closer community among its people and a sense of freedom to expand their mind. This summer among other places in Europe I happen to be in Amsterdam and talked to a few lawmakers and they were very proud of their laws. Not only did it create business they said but also decriminalized a lot of innocent people that would otherwise get time for smoking something better than a cigarette if a person were to do a cost-benefit analysis.

In cities like Oakland, having medicinal marijuana is a great thing to help people and eliminates having to deal with a shady drug dealer. People end up getting arrested for medicating the natural way (see picture to the right); a police officer in Oakland said, "Working the streets, I legitimately witnessed sick people self-medicating with marijuana and drug dealers taking advantage of the." Having to register with the DMV, the city automatically makes money on a license fee and gathers a data base of marijuana smokers in the area. In order to be able to get a Cannabis Smokers’ Card, a person needs to be over the age of 21 and have a written prescription from a doctor. Some of my friends have Cannabis Smokers’ Card for mood swings or ADD, and they always tell me how much easier it makes their lives dealing with an actual business .

Opponents of legalization of marijuana say that it is a bad idea to legalize marijuana because of the message that it would be sending children and health issues, "There's no F.D.A.-approved product, to my knowledge, that's delivered in a smoked form," says Mr. Gust, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. But what kind of message is being sends to children when their parents come home from work and get drunk to forget about their busy day? There is no way that a city or state will make the mistake of making alcohol illegal again because of all the money they would lose out on from the money they make from taxes and the C.R.V charge. Or how about the message a kid get when his parents or parent that is very loving, caring, and supportive gets arrested for such a petty crime. The police and DEA in Oregon have been bringing scrutiny to the program. The federal agency has been subpoenaing names and personal information of the program members and the police has been conducting grow raids all over the state. Hopefully Portland will jump on to the bandwagon and legalize marijuana.

Rosepipe: A Crack Pipe By Another Name

The drug trade is a dangerous but yet very profitable arena for business that is dominated by territory and lacks any government regulation. The only thing in the way becomes competition which usually results in casualties or the government watching over the back of its citizens and waiting for them to make a mistake. Along with crack cocaine dealers supplying the drug and runners that sell it, a new planer had entered the drug trade. These players are owners, managers and clerks of some local convenience stores. All across the country franchise gas stations and mom-and-pop stores have been selling a $2 item that is very often used as a crack pipe (see picture to the right). The product is a 4 inch long glass pipe the width of a ballpoint pen with corks closing each end. Inside this object is a fake rose with a bud as small a nail on a pinky. They go by the name “rose tubes” or “love roses" and they are used to smoke crack cocaine. Local convince store owners knowingly sell "rose tubes" to drug addicts in their community

The average person assumes that these rosepipes are meant as a simple and quick gift a guy might buy for his girlfriend while he is in the store getting something else. But the typical rose buyer is a man that buys a 40-ounce bottle of beer and a Chore Boy scouring pad which he later uses as a screen for his newly made “stem," a street name for a crack pipe. Some store owners know exactly what these rosepipes are used for. In 1998, an Arizona clerk told an Arizona Republic columnist that she know the rosepipes were used for crack pipes, “addicts bought them regularly she told them. In order to dodge the laws that prohibit the sale of drug paraphernalia, workers at the convenience stores were told not to sell rosepipes if the customer referenced them as 'crack pipes', the code between the buyer and seller became asking to buy a flower."

A case in Palm Beach County targeting a Mr. Beverage store tried a clerk on charges of selling a rose, along with a copper scouring sponge to an undercover officer. The jury heard an audiotape of the officer asking the clerk if he could purchase a crack pipe. The clerk corrected the undercover officer by saying “We don’t call it that. We sell roses.” The clerk’s attorney argued in the clerk’s defense that the undercover officer pointed to items in the store during the buy, which became “leading” his client. The clerk was later acquitted. In April 2000, the Michigan Liquor Control Commission told merchants that “love roses’ or “rosepipes’ do qualify as narcotics paraphernalia and any licensee who is using, storing, exchanging or selling them will be cited with an MLCC violation. But Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics magazine in Minneapolis said that the rosepipes create a “muddy” situation for store owners. “Simply selling a store product that is not used as it was intended, I don’t think a store owner has an obligation to stop selling it,” she said. Children have sniffed glue to get high for decades she also noted. Should stores stop selling glue?

Gordon James Knowles, an assistant sociology professor at Hawaii Pacific University did research on the crack cocaine scene in Honolulu’s Chinatown while studying for his doctrine in 1996. From the addicts he observed and interacted with he learned that the addicts bought “crack kits” from convenience stores. For $8.50, the store owner pulled out a brown paper bag with a 4-inch glass tube and some copper mesh. The tube was rose-less and the kits were stashed under the counter in a hidden location. In his publication “Deception, Detection and Evasion: A Trade Craft Analysis of Honolulu, Hawaii’s Secret Crack Cocaine Traffickers, Knowles wrote “Legitimate businesses are shown to have capitalized on crack addiction by marketing and distributing drug paraphernalia related to crack cocaine consumption.”

With store owners (see picture below) that indefinitely know what rosepipes are used for are immigrant convenience store owners that have no idea what the street culture in Ameirca is like and mimics a competitor convenience store's supply thinking that if his competitor has this product in his store it must make money for him. In that situation, the store owner was lacking in information but if he purposely bought rosepipes knowing that they are later going to be used as crack pipes, the store owner is doing something wrong. What separates him from being in the drug trade? Gas is needed to drive a car just like an object is needed to smoke crack. Rosepipes have become a glamorous crack smoking device in the streets, instead of using a light bulb that the addict screwed off a porch light or a soda can. Even though this surfaced almost 10 years ago, stores continue to sell them and the cases go back and forth from court to court. The best way to get stores from selling them is by having residents’ protests against the product and boycott the stores selling drug paraphernalia. This can be achieved through awareness programs stemming from the internet; pop-up ads or banners exposing this issue. To magazines ads similar to anti-drug and tobacco. And television commercials like the The Truth or quick public service announcements.

Pharmaceutical Companies: Legal Drug Dealers

Doctors are supposed to help people get over an illness that they are battling; perform check-ups so that we know our health is alright; even though we live in a capitalistic society where it is all about competition and increasing profits, certain professions need to not take a business oath and remember why they initially wanted to become that profession. Doctors these days are making a lot of money from pharmaceutical companies; these companies invite doctors on trips to places like Hawaii, and all the doctors have to do is tell a patient about that pill that the company is trying to sell. Some pharmaceutical companies even hire medicine marketing firms like TarketRX; their job is to come up with symptoms that each medicine could treat so that the pills could be marketed to a demographic.

Paroxetine (better known as Paxil in the U.S.) is an antidepressant. It is licensed only for adults, but doctors are allowed to prescribe any medicine if they think it will help their patient(see picture to the right) ; a practice called “off-label” prescribing; around 7,000 children a year were on the drug in the UK; and many more in the U.S. Many teens that take these antidepressants end up committing suicide because the drug ends up increasing aggression in the young adult. The new cholesterol lowering guidelines are proving to be a windfall for statin drug manufacturers like Pfizer and Merck: most news articles and medical advice concerning the new guidelines recommend drugs—and drugs only—to reduce cholesterol level. As a result, the guidelines are perhaps better described as profit generators for pharmaceutical companies. 6 out of the 9 panelists that issued the new decision about cholesterol levels have received grants or consulting payments from statin drug manufacturers; the panelists get paid “consulting fees” and grant money, the guidelines are arbitrarily lowered to a level that suddenly puts millions more Americans into the “high cholesterol” categrory simply by changing the definition, the popular press runs headlines screaming that millions of people should now suddenly be taking statin drugs for life, and the drug companies receive a windfall in sales and profits. The doctors are getting “consulting fees” for doing nothing more than signing a blank piece of paper, the researchers are getting “grant money” to carry out research that almost always supports the drug companies, and the mainstream media is receiving billions of dollars in ad revenue as long as they keep pushing drugs to customers, both in advertising and news content.

The problem is that none of this has anything to do with real health. Prescription drugs simply don’t make people healthy; they mask symptoms, and these statin drugs have a bewildering array of dangerous side effects such as sudden death, loss of sex drive, osteoporosis and hormonal imbalances. Prescription drugs are not needed to be healthy; the whole system of promoting these drugs is an unprecedented con being perpetrated on the American people. In fact, the system is downright criminal; the FBI should be investigating and prosecuting the players of this industry, using the RICO laws designed to bring down organized crime (see picture to the right). The economic logic of the medical-industrial complex is straightforward, prescription drugs and high-technology medical devices account for a growing share of medical spending; both products are expensive to develop but relatively cheap to make so the profit from each additional unit sold is large, giving their makers a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to persuade doctors and hospitals to chose their products. Hospitals and doctors need to remember the reasons why they became doctors; if they wanted large payoffs, they should of become politicians; doctors should only prescribe medicine that they really think is going to be helpful, not the most profitable.