 It's a pleasure for me to be here with you today and I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here via Skype. I love Loyola. I want to St. Barnum's University which is also Catholic and our sports mascot is also the Wolf and of course I love New Orleans as well and Loyola has one in my opinion has one of the best undergraduate economics departments in the country so it's really is great to be here with you tonight. On this topic which I think is very very important because all indications are that marijuana is going to be increasingly legalized around the country for both medical and recreational uses and this is a pattern that's existing not just in the United States but it's also emerging around the world so we need information about this topic in terms of dealing with it because demographically and politically we're moving in this direction and my point of view is that that's a good thing. The issue of the origin of marijuana prohibition is an interesting one because it's sort of dark and mysterious. It was previously mentioned about the movie Reef for Madness but that was a movie a propaganda movie that was made by the government itself. There was no actual significant social uproar about marijuana in the United States in 1937 when marijuana was effectively prohibited by attacks. They enacted the Marijuana Tax Act and when they had hearings before Congress there was no really negative statements made except by the government itself and actually at that time the American Medical Association spoke out against the marijuana tax act and prohibition because it was a legitimate medical you know resource that doctors used and the veterinarians used in particular in their practices on a regular basis. My father was a pharmacist and he had anti-glass jars. It said cannabis sativa and cannabis indica which are two of the main forms of marijuana so it was very a very legitimate useful product and that's why I like to start my presentation with the distinction between the sort of legitimate uses and the illegitimate uses where the legitimate uses are to both marijuana and hemp both products are cannabis products and both were effectively illegal by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Prior to this hemp and marijuana were a very important resource in the economy. Columbus used hemp produced sails and ropes in order to get from the old world to the new world. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on paper that was made from hemp and so this was a very important product humans have been using it for over 5,000 years for a variety of purposes and I'll list out some of those. Hemp and marijuana can be used for you know things like sails, ropes of all sorts. It can be used as food, protein powder, it can be used as fuel, it can be used as biodegradable plastics and so it has a whole lot of commercial purposes that it can be used for. There are a lot of medical uses for marijuana and hemp and studies have been just released within the last couple years which indicate the strong possibility that of course marijuana is used for glaucoma, pain relief, anxiety, eating disorders, all sorts of medical uses in hemp and the cannabinoid CBD that have it indicates the possibility that can be used to shrink and eliminate brain tumors in children and it reduces or eliminates epileptic seizures in children and it also eliminates a couple of different types of leukemia cancer in the blood and the research is really just starting here and most of the government research money of course has been for years used to try to determine negative consequences for marijuana consumption and almost none have been looking at the possible benefits of medical marijuana which are significant both for the THC version and the CBD version and so there's a whole host of legitimate uses that will be very beneficial for the economy. Most of my research however has been directed towards the illegitimate or recreational uses of marijuana and basically of course we know full well that there's a lot of people who are smoking pot in various forms out there and one of the things that I've been able to show with my research is really the exact opposite of this notion that you start with marijuana and use it as a gateway drug the more powerful and more potent more dangerous addictive drugs up to heroin and what I've shown is that the more the government enforces prohibition the more resources they allocate in terms of law enforcement the military and so forth the greater the penalties the greater the fines all that encourages the smugglers to bring in the easily concealed more potent versions of drugs and so what it started out in the 1960s and 70s is that marijuana became much much more potent and between the early 70s and early 80s the potency of marijuana during that phase of the war on drugs went from one half of 1% to 5% and of course now it's much much more potent because smugglers and dealers are encouraged to condense these drugs to the smallest possible package and when marijuana when it's difficult to condense marijuana into a smaller package smugglers from South America and Mexico switch to things like cocaine then crack then heroin and of course in more recent years crystal meth which is produced locally so you avoid you know the coast guard the border guards and all that you only have to avoid the local sheriff police and then of course now drugs are coming in from around the world that are being chemically where they treat the molecules that the other people talking about the other speakers and they essentially you know avoid detection that way and when people who use those new synthetic drugs show up the emergency room there's no effective test to determine what they've taken and how strong a dose they take it and so the war on drugs has actually made drug use much much more dangerous more potent more dangerous more addictive and we've seen the number of emergency room visits and overdose deaths escalate and then bump over into legal prescription drugs where oxen and vitamin are now killing more people than heroin and cocaine so this whole notion that war on drugs is gonna make us healthier it's just completely wrong the whole idea that the war on drugs is gonna make us safer by eliminating crime is just ridiculous because what we've seen is these drug dealers these cocaine cartels street games that distribute drugs at the consumer level are all over the most major sorts of violence in society and you know it's not that we haven't tried for prohibition or we haven't taken different approaches to war on drugs whether we haven't arrested enough people or confiscated enough drugs the police and law enforcement have been incredibly successful in catching people confiscating drugs of doing all that that's the problem is that the more they do that the more the dealers and smugglers have to turn to increasingly concentrated dangerous forms of drugs and you know the outcome of their success of arresting people is that they're destroying lives in the process they're separating families they're putting breadwinners in jail they're breaking up families that when you get arrested for possession you may end up in jail may end up in prison but even if you don't you've got a record and you're gonna have a hard time getting a job you're gonna get you're not gonna get seen in loans so it's very disruptive we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people every year to get arrested for you know the possession of marijuana and this is all very much to the negative not only does take a lot of work for us and take a lot of family but it also ends up saddling the taxpayer with a huge bill to support those people in prison and you know in the process this word drugs has been a major detriment to our civil the government the government's military is not supposed to be involved in police actions but they are the government is not really supposed to be able to search people without a valid warrant but they do and there's a whole host of legal life liabilities that the drug war has foisted so not only are we less wealthy less safe and look healthy but we're less American as a result thank you very much