Robinson Crusoe, you asked  “What’s the plan.”

The plan is to :

• Launch Belize’s marijuana industry in a way that it can bring investment dollars to Belize but remain 100% in the hands of the Belizean people and its profits in their pockets.
• Take measures to ensure that legalization has the greatest possible impact on our tourism industry.
• Reduce marijuana use among youths by giving them financial reasons to abstain as well as by making abstinence the smart and cool thing to do.
• Use marijuana legalization as an opportunity to address the more serious problem of alcohol abuse among Belizean both adults and youths alike.
• Use permit fees from the proposed legalization structure to
  • Provide a safety net for persons who fall victim to substance abuse
  • Provide seed funding for new spin off industries by
  • Providing interest free loans for Belizean entrepreneurs,
  • And most urgently, invest in violence reduction

This would require permission from the government.  For this, we’ll need to get people to

1)    Start Liking the Page

• For that to happen we’ll need to start promoting it but I don’t know if it’s ready for that yet. Some of the material may be a little too aggressive like maybe even the profile image. Essentially we need to stat curating it, not to mention adding information.

2)    Start Sharing the Content

• When people see content that speaks to them, we need them to share it. Not just with their friends, but more importantly with people in decision making positions, their area representatives, their ministers, their pastors, their grandmothers. Most of all, we’d like people to share things to the page of the Government Press Office. We want to engender more two way communication with government.

3)    Leave Comments

• Encourage your friends, whether they’ve ever consumed cannabis or not to simply leave comments on the page expressing why they support legalization. That’s all.  I’ll forward them to the government along with my proposal.

Youth Marijuana Consumption

Anti-marijuana laws have not deterred our youths from consuming marijuana. The unluckier ones will end up with criminal records or just used as punching and stomping bags by the police.
The unluckiest ones will, according to research presented by Louis Wade, increase their risk of mental disorder.
With the legalization structure being proposed here, we could address this concern in two ways:
1) We could set up a trust fund for dealing with those incidents as they occur as they inevitably must, if the research is reliable and given the current prevalence of marijuana use among youths. We could collaborate with NDACC by having that be the agency that refers persons suffering from marijuana related mental illness for assistance by the fund.
2) We could reduce the current prevalence of marijuana of among persons under 21 by giving them a reason to abstain, while
3) Appealing to the selfishness of both dealers and parents who might have otherwise have sold under the table or turned a blind eye.

Marijuana Law Enforcement Is Grossly Prejudicial

Anti marijuana laws exclusively punish lower income persons and youths since they are only ones who get caught smoking marijuana, though there are Belizeans and even expats of all income brackets and ages who smoke marijuana as well.

Europeans and Americans alike come here in the hundreds of thousands on vacation and consume marijuana every year. But I can only recall a couple of cases in which tourists really faced penalties.  Living in San Pedro I heard many stories of visitors being shaken down by police for bribes when caught with drugs. All in all, however, tourists are not significantly affected by the laws as long as they’re not blatant, like strolling down the beach smoking as one repeat visitor who got a little too comfortable  was idiotic enough to do.