THEREFORE they will be able to move CASH money out of their stores TO BANKS, resulting in fewer "smash and grab" incidents ... aka, "Hyundai meet storefront of weed shop."
Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it.
Thanks for the link. I'm not a marijuana advocate, but from that article it sounds pretty plainly like so many other stories of law enforcement effectively stealing cash because they can, and are often instructed or incentivized to do so.
Well-known to expert GeoGuessr players as a convenient way to quickly tell what country you're in on a random rural road, as different countries use mysteriously consistent different bollard styles even when their road surfaces are otherwise almost identical.
Edit: reminds me of my neighbour who dropped his motorbike because a car pulled out on him from a fuel station. I asked how fast he was going, he said with absolute conviction he was doing no more than 5mph.
When I told him that was too fast he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
Oh my god. As someone who can't see well enough to get a license, but somehow can see bollards just fine as a passenger: If you can't see them, you shouldn't be fucking driving.
I’m a bit late responding, but thanks for accepting that you are unable to drive.
As someone who hits the road most days, whether in a car or on a motorbike it’s absolutely crazy to witness the state of affairs going on on the roads.
My uncle, who isn’t far off 80, but very fit and healthy has given his licence up this year after some pressure from family - I’ve been in the car with him driving and he isn’t safe, he can drive for sure, but he isn’t fast enough to respond to a bad move by others, nor if there is an accident ahead.
I’ll be personally removing my mother’s car when she is unfit to use it too. I don’t care what it costs in taxis or public transport, I don’t want her risking someone else’s life, nor her own, over the ability to get up and go immediately, rather than wait 10 minutes for a driver.
I’m grateful that they are willing to accept this and agree, I’d like to think my mother has another 10 years or so in her at this stage, but the moment it’s clear she’s not fit, that vehicle is gone.
It's not really a matter of accepting it or not - my eyesight is poor enough that I couldn't get a license if I tried.
I was also lucky enough to grow up in a place that provided generous benefits to people who couldn't see well enough to get a license - free public transport and 50% subsidised taxis. Having access to this mitigated the loss of economic opportunity significantly. Where I'm living now I don't get those benefits, but I'm in a position where I no longer need them.
The ones I've seen in the Detroit area seem to mostly be in areas zoned industrial, which typically means single story, stand alone buildings with few "eyes on the street". Going to guess Michigan has restrictive zoning requirements for marijuana businesses that keep it out of the public eye.
> Going to guess Michigan has restrictive zoning requirements for marijuana businesses that keep it out of the public eye.
It's up to each city/county if they allow any stores at all and their own regulations / licensing.
A recent change a lot of shops seem to be going through is removing the "lobby waiting area" (so 2-3 shop "in private") and just adding more shelves and display cases while building up a huge line. Never liked the farce before (and probably a holdover from when they were medical only) so its a nice change.
>"The owner says around $15,000 of products and items were stolen from the store."
It doesn't mention anything about cash.
"Smash and grab" in weed shops doesn't usually have much to do with having piles of cash sitting around (though I'm sure that might happen too) - it's the product that thieves want to steal because it's got no serial numbers, it's pretty light-weight and easy to run out with thousands of dollars worth of product, and it's easy to resell.
If there's any cash in the register that's often secondary to grabbing a few pounds of high-quality product. 3 pounds of high quality weed can be valued at $20k. I doubt there's that much in the cash register at the end of the day, and good luck getting into the safe. It's much easier to run out with 3 pounds of weed.
There's typically far more monetary value in product in any weed shop than there is cash, likely by an order of magnitude. Many of the purchases are done electronically, so there's not as much cash as you might think in most dispensaries.
How are these purchases done electronically if the stores cannot process credit cards? After there dispensaries more commonly using crypto that I don't know about?
Up to the 1990s (and probably still to this day, IDK how electronic payments have impacted this) there was a whole industry dedicated to getting cash off business premises and into banks.
For example, banks often had special "night safes" allowing small business owners to drop off bags of cash outside of branch opening hours. Some businesses would get daily armoured car visits to collect the day's takings. There were even supermarkets with a system of pneumatic tubes allowing cashiers to transfer money to the back room without leaving their stations, so their tills never had enough cash to be worth robbing. You could also get safes with a deposit slot, so employees could drop the takings into the safe, but didn't have the combination needed to get anything out again.
Assuming these all still exist, there are options for keeping cash secure, and getting it off the premises fast.
Of course, by similar logic they could store all the product in a safe out of hours. Jewellery stores manage to store loads of diamonds without getting robbed, after all...
Can't buy shit with weed. Gotta sell it. And that has time requirements and risks to you (including getting robbed yourself).
Meanwhile these are cash-only businesses, so if you're gonna steal then go for the money. Esp. since most dispensaries I've seen do a reasonably brisk business.
The poverty and gangster culture is going to stay the same so this seems like a weird kind of social take, I mean wont grifters just find another way to hurt common folk?
I mean... I can leave a 2000 USD Macbook for a toilet break in Starbucks over here without any issues and have done so regularly.
People are talking about schedule 3 needing a prescription, etc. From the financial point of view that's irrelevant; the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially (with some exceptions that I can't remember).
Schedule 1 -> banned from the financial system.
Schedule 3 -> OK to use the financial system.
How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear. The important part is that once regulations are updated weed businesses won't be restricted from access to the financial system. There may be some more regs around that access, but I'm sure they'll be worked around.
Right. At the end of the day we need to just de-list it and strike all federal laws on it. The ship has sailed and the states won, let’s just do the inevitable thing and get on with it.
If it has been illegal to sell cannabis commercially, how have cannabis companies been allowed to form and be publicly traded? I would think that federal regulation to be publicly traded would cause issues.
> How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear.
You already answered this already :)
> the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially
Schedule 1 means illegal under (nearly) any circumstance, commercial dispensaries fall under “any circumstance.” Drug scheduling is just a tiered system for classification in order to determine which rules to apply to its sale, distribution, and possession of the substance.
A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store
That's a fairly a common practice for cash only businesses, normally a different company is supplying the ATM and its cash. For example I've seen cash only ice cream shops with the same setup.
That's not what he's describing. In this case there actually is no cash or traditional ATM involved on-site. It's connected to the dispensary POS, not a physical ATM. (They often have a regular ATM like you describe also, though.)
So you do an ATM transaction, but the money goes to the dispensary somehow. I do not know how it works on the back end, but I've used it as a customer. It's lovely and can even be done over your phone.
Isn't that how a traditional ATM transaction works? You use the ATM and the money goes to the ATM owner (plus a fee). The only difference here is you get weed instead of cash.
Yes, but any ATM tells the bank that you took out $10. The bank never sees the cash and the cash doesn’t belong to the bank. Substituting goods may or may not be allowed but the bank doesn’t know about it and customers are unlikely to complain to the bank.
Signs that times are a' changing -- you can buy illegal drugs with a card now.
(Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I don't think I'd want 50+ illegally-correlated transactions on my financial record that the government could lump into other charges...)
The Silver Platter doctrine prevents your financial institutions from handing over that data unbidden, but they can do so by request from law enforcement.
which law enforcement can get, trivially, if they're prosecuting a felony.
it's just a function of time and process, and while you can dispose of plants and bury money in your back yard, you can't undo old bank transactions. 20 years later those records may not be a thing, but last year sure will be...
sure they do. for example it's illegal to be in possession of marijuana and a firearm. the purchase of said MJ would be pretty good evidence that could lead to other warrants. That's the Hunter Biden gun charge.
It's oddly not. Only to be a user or addict with a firearm. IIRC if you just like the way weed looks in your hand that doesn't make you a user, and there's plenty of reasonable doubt you're guarding it for grandma or whoever.
Of course people are still being convicted of weed and firearm, but it gets recorded as gun law violation and nobody cares, cuz left hates guns and right hates weed, so they'll never repeal it.
The worst part is that the states are quite happy to help the feds enforce this. E.g. Hawaii has both mandatory gun registration and requires a state-issued license for medical marijuana. And if you happen to have both, well:
It should also be noted that while DEA is instructed by the executive to not go after cannabis users in states where it's legal for recreational use, there's no equivalent directive issued to ATF.
It would be great if the DEA and ATF were a bit more consistent in their enforcement. Joe Rogan smokes pot and has guns, federal agents busting down his studio door and dragging him away in handcuffs (while state ones look on and clap) would do more to move the needle on drug legalization than most anything else.
What you're saying is how people generally think the law works, but it's not how it works in practice. This is easily illustrated with possession of drug paraphernalia charges. There's two types of possession, actual and constructive - but both face the exact same charge. Constructive just means something like 'could be reasonably accessed.'
So imagine you're in a car, get pulled over, it smells of weed so the cop executes a search, and he finds a pipe in the glove compartment. You're getting arrested for PDP there 100%. Even if it genuinely wasn't yours, you stand very little chance of acquittal. Beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean 'is there some other viable explanation' because there literally always is. It means is it reasonably likely that one of these other explanations is what really happened.
What you're saying is how people generally think the prohibited possessor law works, but it's not how it works in practice.
It says nothing of drug possession, only gun/ammo possession by someone who uses or addicted to illegal drugs. There is plenty of reasonable doubt that constructive or actual possession of drugs is not accompanied by use, in fact this is the case for many dispensary workers.
>922 g (3) ... who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
oh fair enough about the "user" vs possession. but my point was they could possible use this info to get a warrant to surveil you to catch you using it.
They don't need that. I was served a federal search warrant after a detective wrote an anonymous officer claimed an anonymous DOG accused me of wrongdoing.
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Even a rubber-stamp warrant process serves a point, by making the police identify who they are targeting, as opposed to targeting everyone, and deciding who to charge after the fact.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
Yes this seems to be increasingly common, at least on the west coast. The suboptimal part is that the buyer typically gets hit with an out-of-network ATM fee for doing this, so the consumer is paying $2-5 for processing per transaction.
That’s pretty small potatoes though compared to going to a bank yourself and making a transaction for cash you don’t normally have around. Maybe there’s an ATM down the block but that’s not the case for many people.
And those ATMs around the block from a dispensary (or even in the same buildimg) would still charge a fee for withdrawal anyway (as they are always a third-party ATM and not a bank one, so you get that big message on the screen about an extra fee for withdrawal).
Use a credit union or bank that doesn’t charge ATM fees; that’s what I do. Any CU-related ATM withdrawal is always free and I get 10 ATM withdrawals a month with fees reversed.
Yes, even exorbitant ones like on a cruise ship or casino. Free checks, too. And mutual funds with lower fees than Vanguard. But virtually no physical branches (most locations are brokerage offices only) so not ideal for depositing cash or getting a cashier's check... use something else for that.
The Neo-Bank I use in Germany (N26) works similarly. 3 or 5 fee-eaten withdrawals per month, but the always free option is supermarket registers. There’s a large network of supermarkets that are connected to the network, and I can generate a code on my phone, scan it, and it registers the negative value (e.g. -50 €), which I then get handed. Deposits work the same way (scan code, generate positive amount that you then pay), but at least for free accounts deposits incur a fee.
there is still a lot of cash on site due to the presence of an ATM though, and in the cash registers. the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
Often enough, it isn’t an actual ATM. You pay at the counter like you usually would using a card or an NFC payment method (e.g., Apple Pay), but the payment reader processes it as an ATM withdrawal transaction (hence an extra transaction fee of a few dollars). There is no physical cash involved at any point in this (at least not on the dispensary premises).
It feels like it is a state-by-state thing, yeah. I moved from WA to NYC just half a year ago, and I noticed it as well.
In WA, it felt like it was a pretty even 50/50 split (maybe with a heavier lean towards cash) between places accepting cash-only and those that accept debit as well (in addition to cash obviously). I dont remember any that accepted credit cards. All of this is a more recent situation though, as I still remember that just 6-8 years ago, pretty much every single place used to be cash-only. I also noticed some dispensaries experimenting with rather unconvential methods at different points in time too (e.g., Uncle Ike’s using a payment terminal for like a year that worked similarly to a regular debit card one, but it was using crypto as an intermediate medium on the backend to process the payment).
In NYC, it feels like everyone just accepts cards like usual, from grey-market ones to the legal ones.
However, I infinitely prefer the WA situation with cannabis over the NYC one for bajillion other reasons that are entirely unrelated to payment methods.
> the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
It's also the product that's the target much of the time - it's got no serial numbers and it's light-weight, and easy to resell.
My brother supervises at a dispensary. They are not attractive robbery targets at all. They have a lot of security. Like a bank, they expect the amount of cash would bring trouble if they were not prepared. Unlike a bank, they don't dispense much cash (just petty change) so they don't even have to leave much in the drawers, which are emptied frequently and dropped into a safe nobody there can access.
They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.
Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.
You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.
> Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them
This is lazy thinking.
Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.
Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.
I see why you would say that, but you probably have not met very many people who work at a dispensary, I have. My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.
He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught
You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.
What it meant was, if you work at a place with all the cash controls of a casino, you have to be stoned to steal petty cash from them. You’re going to get caught, and you’re going to get a felony over a small amount of money. Nobody sober does that.
It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.
I don’t think there is much data to be had, at least public. But I can tell you in the 5 years my brother has been there, they have had zero armed robbery attempts, and several employee theft attempts. And a quick Google about whether dispensaries get robbed frequently will show you people from the industry saying the same thing.
But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.
Why? Society doesn’t owe you acceptance for your personal choices. For the vast majority of people, smoking marijuana is an anti-social choice that makes them a less productive member of society. Why should anyone have something other than a negative opinion of such a choice?
"You judged someone on a separate occasion, so you can't object to judging people now" would be tu quoque. What I actually did was point out the internal contradiction in your stated position.
I've said a total of four sentences on the matter, none of which hinted at its importance or lack thereof to me, so it's interesting that you've come to that conclusion. Either way, my internal motivations are a non sequitur. You are continuing to take a self-contradictory position by stating that a certain behavior, namely judgment, is not "ok", which constitutes a judgment. You have offered no defense of doing so. Should I conclude that you simply believe that oxymoronic positions can in fact be correct?
No it's not. Judging people is extremely important in order to enforce social conformity and norms. It's how we as social animals maintain civilization.
Which is why if you want to steal from dispensaries, just work in security, like your brother. Who's to say he's not stealing, and simply not bragging to you about it?
I said he’s a supervisor, not in security. He’s not an idiot. He’d be caught very quickly. Cash controls are such that everyone is.
I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.
I’m not sure you even read the comment you were replying to. Click “parent” a few times and you’ll see “My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.”
The federal illegality of the weed business (and downstream effects of that illegality on working/business conditions) affects who works there, and that includes white collar employees (also investors, etc.)
I think the ATM isn't actually dispensing cash. You're doing an ATM transaction for a certain amount of money, but what you're actually getting is weed.
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
I have heard from a very reliable source that the ATMs in most weed shops on the Eastside of Seattle dispense cash because you're going to be required to pay with cash at the counter. There are allegedly a few exceptions, but the majority of shops accept only cash and the ATM dispenses bills.
Nope, it's just a regular ATM operated by a 3rd party company. You get cash from it then give them the cash. The store will also often reimburse for the ATM fee.
Business 2 owns the building and the atm, renting it to business 1, the dispensary. B1 pays the cash as rent to b2 who puts it into the ATM again. A SWAG but it's common enough in other business setups to alter costs as I understand it.
Here in Ontario Canada I can walk into a local neighbourhood cannabis store (one of many on every block, it seems) and make a purchase using my debit or credit card. I'm not sure if any of them even keep a cash float although I imagine they must, just in case granny comes in "for medicinal use". Alternatively, I could just go to the government-run web store and get home delivery through Canada Post at no extra charge.
You can in the U.S. too. For instance, in Portland we have a neighborhood shop and you can use a debit card there because each transaction is classified as an ATM transaction. All the ban ever did was making accounting and reporting more complicated, it didn't stop state legal sales or transactions.
The difference is in Canada it's actually fully legal at all levels of government, so the transaction is a normal point of sale transaction, it can also go through a credit card as a normal purchase without being subjected to the expensive cash advance interest rates, and so on. It can even be a tax-deductible and reimbursable business entertainment expense under similar conditions to alcohol.
Its super weird how america can make things half legal. In canada the responsibilities are divided up between different levels of government. None of this legal at one level but not another level bullshit.
The same is true in Canada. There are things that are federally illegal that are not illegal at the provincial level. There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws. You can have something be illegal in one town, and legal outside of it, or illegal province wide but legal in another province.
What is going on is that not that weed is 'half-legal' in the states. It is fully illegal. What is true is that the federal enforcers have more or less decided to leave people alone when the state allows the use of Marijuana. Pre 2017, the exact same thing was happening across Canada where local jurisdictions allowed cannabis use and sales, and the RCMP basically turned a blind eye. Vancouver is the most obvious example, where there was actually a decline in the number of dispensaries after weed became federally legal.
> There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
It was supposed to be that way in the US but then populists decided they wanted the federal government to do all the things the constitution said it couldn't.
If you mean provinces in Canada's context, then no, the number of provinces does not fit on one hand. In fact it barely fits on two, and that's only if you don't count the territories as well.
A bigger factor is that the Canadian prohibition was only controlled at the federal level in the first place, like all Canadian criminal law, so only the federal government had to legislate to change it. The provinces have however done lots of subsequent legislation to regulate the details (e.g. distribution channels and the exact minimum age limit) in a wide variety of ways.
Extended banking services are difficult. Finding a fdic insured bank that will do business with a dispensary is hard. The business, esp those that aren't already multinational or national conglomerates with enormous amounts of cash
I’ve done it in New York City, in a really clean and hipstery shop in park slope, Brooklyn. Paid with a debit card, the whole process felt legit and professional, that was a great experience. They also offered really fancy teas and coffees.
Wouldn't that be leaving money on the table? The bank that accepts business with marijuana vendors is at a competitive advantage to one that doesn't, no?
There is no liquor store in the country where you can't pay with a card. Well, maybe not Uncle Ted's Moonshine Shack, but realistically it's not something anyone has to worry about. Different funds may not invest invest in those thing, payment processors might charge some businesses a slightly higher premium, but Visa/MC are not gonna police your legal consumer purchases.
Hopefully this will also help internationally. Many countries are just copying what the US is doing since they run a large part of world commerce and finance
But will they be able to write off business expenses? Section 280E of the US Tax Code is, as I understand it, is the major killer for the whole industry right now.
Will they? Since it will be Schedule III, “weed stores” that aren't pharmacies distributing properly labelled drugs to people with prescriptions will still be violating the Controlled Substances Act and will probably have the same banking problems.
How? It's still federally illegal to sell schedule 3 to consumers without a DEA licensed rx and dea licensing. The banks would still be knowingly in conspiracy to transmit illegal drug money and a litany of felonies for recreational or purely state-licensed 'medical'.
Rx under DEA scrutiny is nothing like rec or laughable state controlled medical 'recommendations'. You pull that shit as a provider on controlled scripts and your charts get audited, your DEA license gets pulled.
But it does mean that it will actually, for the first time ever in living memory, be possible for someone to fully federally legally possess a THC-active form of cannabis without further Congressional action. I'm not sure if a state-legal cannabis supply chain could be fully federally legal in this context, but imagine if a pharma company goes through the FDA approval process for a THC pill and then doctors prescribe it for patients based on their medical judgment that it will help alleviate pain for some chronic condition like Crohn's disease. (I expect both of those steps to happen in practice, over time of course due to how many prerequisites exist for FDA approval, to the extent they haven't already been begun.)
Imagine a noncitizen in that situation being able to tell a border officer, or a citizen being able to tell a security clearance investigator: "Yes, I do use THC. Here's my prescription and the bottle from the pharmacy." and being confident of no negative repercussions. Wonderful progress compared to where we are now.
Very briefly. Until recent history the 10th amendment was understood to constrain the government from going outside enumerated powers, like intrastate commerce. This is why they needed an amendment instead of law to federally outright ban alcohol. Thus weed had an essentially unpayable 'tax' that got overturned by Timothy Leary
Then it was legal for like a year until feds realized they didn't need to follow the Constitution and they just outright made it illegal, no matter if it's actually interstate.
> it will actually, for the first time ever in living memory, be possible for someone to fully federally legally possess a THC-active form of cannabis without further Congressional action.
Agree with the sentiment but isn't legal marinol roughly fulfilling that niche of THC pill?
You could already get THC script, in that context this seems like a half hearted concession for flower to stall and poison legalization efforts by giving a victory poisoned with DEA licensing that inserts the nasty tendrils of the weed hating DEA into medical flower.
Fair point, yes. I was unaware of marinol when I typed that. I assume something more than just synthetic THC is being rescheduled, then. Maybe it will actually become possible to be prescribed a joint and to receive it at DEA-licensed pharmacies? Will the FDA be approving joints as drugs after clinical trials?
I think the point is that banks are no longer automatically required to reject any customer that deals with weed, because some of those transactions are going to be legal under the federal law. Which basically allows them to look the other way for all such transactions.
I know of several grocery stores without pharmacies or a local Rx license selling 1% hydrocortisone/hydrocortisone acetate - Schedule 4, 3, AND 2, simultaneously.
There is a cannabis dispensary here offering delta-8 and -9 THC products (legal in Texas because they derive from hemp) takes credit cards. Perhaps they are too small to matter while living on borrowed time, but most/all dispensaries around here take CCs.
they might not be able to see the purchases if you're in a state where you can buy booze in a 7/11 or grocery store; in that case it's just a grocery purchase. but they sure as hell can see that you have a charge from "CORNER LIQUOR STORE - $47.61 - 12 APRIL 2024" and can make guesses.
This also assumes that grocery stores aren't aggressively aggregating and selling sales data, esp. those from Membership Cards. Insurance companies would love to get a hold of that data, not only for alcohol, but things like sugar and junk food purchases. I'd bet my hat they're already doing so.
What does that matter? You can convert Bitcoin into cash. But then you can do that in an undisclosed location at your leisure instead of keeping a mountain of cash in your publicly advertised storefront location and becoming a huge robbery target.
Also, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find someone to accept it as payment, since they can convert it to cash too. And the sort of landlords/suppliers/employees willing to do business with a dispensary seem like exactly the sort who would accept Bitcoin.
All of the legit Bitcoin-to-cash orgs will report that to the IRS, and then you're back to square one: what do you do with that wad of cash? Orgs that don't report to the IRS probably aren't giving you a good exchange rate, and you're still left holding the bag afterward.
If you're going through all that hassle, it's much easier just to be a cash-only business in the first place.
No sane person uses Bitcoin as a currency because it is a fundamentally unsound ponzi scheme for suckers. I don't want my salary to be subject to the vagaries and manipulations of the Bitcoin exchange rate.
There are plenty of sane people who use Bitcoin as a currency. Making blithe moral declarations like this doesn't spark curiosity and is incredibly tired after so many years (you're not the first).
"Unsound ponzi scheme" could just as well be applied to any fiat currency. It has all the same rules (early entrants are more privileged in "the game" and can invest to out-perform younger players). It is very odd to hear people applying such qualitative judgments like this when the alternative is a currency that is actively debased by its issuers. Or do you think the inflation we've all suffered under isn't a problem?
If you don't want to hold Bitcoin or be exposed to price changes, you can set your hourly rate in dollars, be paid at the current exchange rate and immediately convert it back into dollars. The advantage of this over being paid in physical cash is that it's electronic and then you're not carrying two weeks salary in physical cash on your person for somebody to mug you.
I show up and convert cash to bitcoin, presumably losing some of its value to exchange fees.
Pay the merchant my bitcoin, who then has to convert it back to cash losing more of its value to fees so that he can pay all of his staff, suppliers, utilities, etc...
Why not just skip the bitcoin step and save time and money?
Because you don't have cash to begin with, you have money in a bank account, which you have to convert to something else to pay the dispensary. Converting it via cash instead of Bitcoin just makes it easier for you to be mugged.
To be honest, I’m far more concerned about crypto scams, wallet hacks, etc, than I am worried about getting mugged for ~$100 at the dispensary parking lot.
That seems like a weird set of priorities? If someone hacks your crypto wallet with $100 in it, you could lose $100. If someone mugs you when you have $100 in your wallet, you could lose $100 and get shot.
Crypto scams are... completely unrelated? It's like being worried about using a bank account because there are ponzi schemes that use bank transfers.
> Cash transactions require you to make change and are a target for theft. This is neither free nor zero time.
That's why I specified "for the consumer", who is typically the person that is going to make a purchasing decision.
Using crypto for dispensaries has been tried, and it hasn't gained traction in the many years that its been an option. If you introduce friction (by forcing people to transact using a novel payment form), you are going to lose customers. The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
It takes the same amount of time to make change for the consumer as the store. Or more, because now you have to wait while they make change for the person in front of you, then for you on top of that.
And nobody wants to be at a store which is more likely to get robbed. Not only do you lose your cash, you could lose your life.
> The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
There are multiple consumers. If you can get half of them to use Bitcoin, you have half as much cash on hand to lose in a robbery, and on top of that half as much incentive for someone to rob you to begin with.
Ethereum average block time is 12s (with low variance) and high chance of getting tx included in the next block. Still too long for a point-of-sale payment, but its feasible. Then there's fees that are too high on L1 (several dollars minimum).
L2s fix this (~immediate settlement, cents in fees), but it's another layer and another account for users to manage (which is annoying).
That's just because crypto shills just don't get obvious facts about reality, not because obvious facts about reality aren't objectively and provably true. That's just the way cults and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and fraud work, so stop being a shill and wondering why nobody believes or respects you, because there's a lot you don't get.
Weed being illegal on a federal level has had some interesting effects. Because of these laws, all legal weed has to be grown, processed, and retailed within a single state. So much industry and local employment has been created by the legal barriers in place.
It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
It's sometimes even smaller than states. Many waterways are federal, meaning islands have to grow their own in order to avoid having to transport weed from one part of the state to another part of the same state across a federal waterway.
> I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
Calling it: CVS and Walgreens will move into the medical market for this. You think these little shops will be able to process health insurance payments when that sector gets in on it? lol
the marlboro man has traded in his horse and cowboy hat for some natty dreads and a gravity bong. Joe Camel now sports a wook blanket and a heady crystal wrap. can't wait to see what the overly happy and diverse Newport pleasure party goers have adopted
I agree it's unlikely. THC may have some medical uses, but smoking it certainly does not.
Perhaps gummies/edibles would be covered under some circumstances -- but to be a prescription or even an OTC "medication" it has to go through FDA approval to demonstrate efficacy and document the side effects, and it will have to be manufactured to pharmaceutical standards of potency and purity, which will make it more expensive.
I think it will most likely be like alcohol: sold for recreational use, age-restricted, and not medical.
I bet that CBD will be covered very quickly, because it really does work very well for so many things, so it shouldn't take long to have enough studies clearly in support of it.
Honestly, yes you can but from what I’ve seen it’s the most useless form because it’s the cheapest: magnesium oxide. Good for laxative effects, bad for uptake. I prefer glycinate personally.
I'm not sure exactly how this works, but you can get CBD as pills with no THC in them.
(Although anecdotally the best results are obtained from taking mostly CBD with a tiny bit of THC; it appears that the latter does something that makes the former's effect more potent. So you see stuff like e.g. 20:1 CBD:THC pills around - can't get high on that, but very effective at pain management. However pure CBD pills are still more common.)
I could see them carrying CBD in pill / gelcap form. (It pretty much snuffs out my migraines.)
I don't think they'll carry intoxicating forms of marijuana, though. (I've never seen a CVS with alcohol, but that could be because of how my state handles liquor licenses.)
Walgreens sells cigarettes, cigars, basic alcohol (beer, wine, hard seltzers etc), occasionally liquor, nicotine patches & packets, and snuff. They sell OTC Narcan, and now OTC birth control. They moved into the last two items pretty much immediately upon availability.
They'll definitely look at their options for the marijuana business as they can safely do so legally.
This discrepancy had the effect of jump starting the prominence of large chinese gangs in the marijuana and fentany and money laundering business in the USA, incidentally contributing to home shortage because they bought homes in California to grow pre pandemic and in Oklahoma now.
There’s lots of older articles about California but some recent OK news https://www.kosu.org/news/2024-03-18/gangsters-money-and-mur...
I thought it was of most relevance that gangs stepped in when the comment I was responding to was more concerned with larger companies and them being Chinese is a weird detail since one would have expected one of existing gangs in USA already like those with central or South American cartels instead.
It's also made touching the financial aspect radioactive- none of the big credit cards want to have anything to do with it so all transactions are cash, which makes things more difficult/risky for operators.
Under Wickard even all-in-state marijuana trade would still fall under the Interstate Commerce clause and be subject to federal criminal statutes, regulations, and taxes.
Yep, some people tested this same theory out for firearms (or was it suppressors?) all produced and sold in one state in accordance with state laws. Of course the Feds shut that down and the courts agreed. The only reason they don't do this with pot is because they don't feel like it.
A couple quick thoughts, having worked in the legal cannabis industry (now a few years out):
- Consolidation is already happening in a lot of ways, in some cases despite state laws designed to prevent it
- Consolidation by big tobacco seems less likely than probably other major industry incumbents (in the long run, I’d bet on companies primarily oriented around alcohol)
- Federal posture since Cole (when first states legalized recreational, partially rolled back under Trump/Sessions but seemingly not as much as was feared at the time) is largely what prompted strong local laws; it’s based in analysis of interstate commerce; federal legalization could have a similar analysis without undermining existing strong local laws; the tradeoff would probably be large disparity of justice between states (on party lines)
- A much better outcome would be a central rule not just to legalize, but to more strongly incentivize justice for people affected by draconian laws in the first place. This is a pipe dream, but it should be the focus because any compromise will start with that.
Tobacco smoke killed ALL my grandparents, well, well one of them would have died from alcohol use, as he was a fisherman and they drink a lot. My uncle died from liver and bowel cancer, the liver cancer stems from alcohol consumption, or rather it's metabolite, acetaldehyde, which is _scary as hell_: It makes cancerous scar tissue of whatever it touches, thats why alcoholics die from liver failure: it becomes all scar tissue and cannot regenerate, which is part of its function (the average adult has a liver 3 years of average age). It is also what gives the alcohol buzz. He was not a heavy drinker, but only drank wine and aqua vit/liquor, 1-2 times a year he would get shitfaced -- he was a funny drunk. I miss him. I miss all my grandparnts, they were the best and did not deserve Emphysema , lung cancer and so forth. Grandma taught me soldering, welding, basic ircuitry, how to ride a bike, composting, growing veggies, all about berries in the wild and helped me save up for my Nintendo NES,encuraged mt curiosity...I would beat the crap out a tobacco exec if I crossed paths with one, a part of me wants to torture them.
I smoked for 15 years, turns out quitting was easy, once you undestood the way the addiction works, but nobody considers that they developed oral fixation from sucking on a potennt noootropic habit forming substance all day,
But then we have Silvy Listhaug (politician): Marijuana will continue to be banned because she is a mom, she told the reporter photographing her smoking cigarettes. I hope she gets lung cancer.
Personally, as a monkey with a lump of fat in my head called a brain, I think drinking fat solving solvents are a bad idea for that reason alone.fMRI scans shows white brain tissue in drinkers literally dissolves over time.
The increase in marijuana use is mostly due to 3 factors:
* Nobody is hiding anymore.
* We become more people every day.
* More & more people realise alcohol sucks.
The UK and CAnada's offcial stance on alcohol is that there is no such thing as a safe amount of alcohol consumption.
The war on drugs is going well in Norway: Cocaine & MDMA purity averages above 80%, Racemic amphetamine is cheaper than hash now, and the hash is good as anything you can find in dutch coffeeshops. ..and it is all getting cheaper at the same time. The war is being lost so bad the police have stopped issuing Narcotics stats 2 times a year as mandated and dropped it to once a year. Last year crystal meth averaged over 99% purity, 99.2%-99.6% according to Kripos Crimelab!! 5000 mafia families in Europe alone funds their organized crime with proceeds from the artificially high price of cannabis caused by the ban, legalizing and taxing it resoanbly would snuff out those and would be a massive blow to organized crime. GHB is fueling a rape epidemic here. Oh and you can legally buy poppy seed and grow them here...
'Time for them to perform due diligence and refactor their operations to take advantage of the new legal landscape to retain competitive pricing inorder for' all these small/mid sized businesses don't get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps.
If I could face consequences for using drugs, I will deny it even after being positive in a test. Of course, once legalized, I'll have no problem saying that I used in once or twice a year. Being it legal, safer and out of the dangerous black market, there will be some new users.
Same happened after alcohol prohibition: more people consumed after the ban was lifted, but consumption was safer. But rarely people that didn't consume during the prohibition went on alcohol binge after the end of the ban. They just drank a couple of beers per week, maybe even a glass of bourbon twice a year, now that they can buy and consume it safely.
Thus the stats you linked doesn't necesarily show a "massive" increase in use, but many people using it sparsely now and many people now admiting to use it that were using previously. In fact, while statista.com shows a 100% increase, the second and more controlled study shows only a ~20% increase that makes more sense (far from massive).
20% increase in consumption isn’t exactly what I would call massive.
Looking at historic trends the point where pot was first legalized for recreational use isn’t obvious. If anything the long term upward tends started long before legalization which didn’t seem to have significant impact. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
I’m surprised it’s not more personally if the numbers are accurate. A lot of pretty casual users in professional jobs were mostly not going to find a friend of a friend to do an illegal transaction with. But they’ll go into a dispensary now and then.
But you really see that reflected in the doubled number of users which is probably the more relevant number.
I have had my first legal weed experiences in the past year in New York and even the lowest THC % at the legal weed store is stronger than anything I use to get on the black market when weed was illegal.
Then there are these incredible 10mg THC infused lemonades that are amazing.
On the other hand, the novelty of legal weed only lasted about 4 months for me. Because the store was there and there was this selection I never had access to before I wanted to try different things and was smoking more than I would have normally. At the end of the day though it is all still just weed. It is fun for me but only once a month at most now.
I also don't know a single person that didn't smoke weed because it was illegal and now they do because they can go to the store and purchase it legally.
I think that the polling has doubled for users because people can answer the poll honestly when weed is legal. The idea that weed being illegal is keeping 50% of the potential weed smoking population from smoking is utterly preposterous.
If anything, what is interesting is how many people who would never try weed when it was illegal, will still never try it when it is legal. They may say it is because it is illegal or they don't want to smoke but you can't sell them on 10mg legal lemonaid either.
Sounds like you are just saying it needs more marketing. Small timers are all over social media but big timers can buy segments on news and daytime television and pretend it’s a story when it’s really an ad.
Now that it’s “legal” I wonder if that was what was holding it back before.
I'd bet alcohol use went way up after prohibition too. Both in number of people consuming, and on how much they consume on average.
I've personally known people with terminal cancer who wouldn't use marijuana to manage pain and nausea because it is federally illegal. They suffered more than they should have. Is lower use always good?
Lobbyists don't care about uncapturable black market money. The legal market has led to massive increase in legal, taxable money, so now is exactly the time for big tobacco to start salivating over the idea of capturing all of those transactions.
Denver definitely had perverse consequence. people eking out a living selling weed on the street quickly turned to... harder substances. people will get their dollar and people will get their high
> Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies), acquired a 35% stake in Juul Labs for $12.8 billion on December 20, 2018. Altria is the largest tobacco company in the United States.
Agreed -- but I think nobody knows quite how it'll play out.
I think of the thriving microbrewery scene (vs not just Budweiser et al but so-called "premium" beers from megabreweries that don't hold a candle to the local stuff).
I also wonder about the degree to which psilocybin might be following THC's path, wrt state vs federal laws....
Big tobacco means even more pressure to normalize it, globally, via UN just like they pushed it down the throat of every nation worldwide including those where its sacred plant for millenia like India or Nepal. US reversed decades of severe oppression and is leading free world (I know Canada, I know) so there is massive hope our idiots in EU and elsewhere will seriously wake up, even if in some primitive cargo culting effort.
I don't mean half-assed decriminalization here and there which still feeds very healthy criminal ecosystem and for end user of say weed doesn't change a zilch in anything, I mean same legal treatment as tobacco and alcohol, we don't prescribe that for anxiety do we, its all fun and chill and introspection (for me). Its 2024 FFS, and we see idiocy live where politicians are lying in the cameras to please old conservative folks for next elections.
I want to buy edibles, happy to pay any tax they slap on it. I want to buy a single joint, of strength and power I want to choose. Or vapes. Not some overpriced mediocre shit from paranoid desperate illegal immigrant standing in dark corners of shady parts of cities. Give that man an honest job on some weed farm or distribution system.
Yes really good point. Won’t it still be up to the states to decide what the regulatory environment will look like — eg they can choose to preserve these jobs through existing regulatory frameworks in the same way that certain goods cannot be shipped to certain states
Note, they're only planning to move it from Schedule 1 (alongside heroin) to Schedule III (alongside anabolic steroids and ketamine). So, it won't be fully legal in the same sense as alcohol.
Regardless, unless Congress does something to make it legal nationally, we'll still have the state frameworks. Just hopefully avoiding the most draconian criminal charges.
One very important thing this does is get rid of a really glaring error. As a Schedule I drug, Marijuana supposedly is completely useless, its only role is as a potential danger and that's why nobody must have any - except, we've known for many years a bunch of people find it useful as a therapeutic drug, so that's clearly wrong and the Schedule I status is an error. Perhaps there shouldn't be any Schedule I drugs at all, the idea seems misconceived, but certainly if there are Schedule I drugs, Marijuana doesn't belong among them.
Meanwhile in Schedule III it's a judgement call. Schedule III drugs like K or steroids are drugs we know are useful, your doctor can prescribe them, your hospital pharmacy has them, but we also know they get abused. That sounds much more like marijuana, and, to be honest, alcohol. Can we justify Schedule III for Marijuana and yet not for Alcohol? It's at least a serious question whereas the Schedule I status was just nonsense.
Yeah, I largely agree. Alcohol is broadly available/legal due to historical quirks, not sane regulation in relation to other similar (social impact, not chemistry) drugs. Same for tobacco to an extent.
Also booze is really easy to make. Marijuana is hardly difficult but if you ain't got any plants somebody has to smuggle them to you, whereas if you've got a bunch of say, apples, or potatoes, or berries - which are just food - the only thing that prevents you from having booze is constant oversight to ensure you don't allow the food to be converted into booze.
I can see tobacco becoming effectively a Schedule III type substance, made only when it is deemed necessary for some reason and not generally available - New Zealand tried to set off on that path, the UK is attempting it now, unlike booze (or marijuana) which has a population of people who say "Hey, that's fun, don't take that away" the smoker are almost all against smoking, they see it as an unpleasant mistake they made rather than a choice they're glad to have taken.
I think they would make so much MORE money by making it federally regulated and generally accessible... the problem is that also takes away some incentive to keep spying on citizens in the name of drugs and related bad guys.
Keeping in state doesn't help. It's still interstate commerce even just picking a plant and smoking on site non-commercially. Just walking an object within 1000 ft of a school, non-commercially, is interstate commerce.
They'll never give it up. It would mean the end of the civil rights act, and tons of popular regulatory regimes that apply to in-state only trade. And the return of in state over the counter machine guns.
Wickard v. Filburn
United States Supreme Court case
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, is a United States Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the regulatory power of the federal government. It remains as one of the most important and far-reaching cases concerning the New Deal, and it set a precedent for an expansive reading of the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause for decades to come. The goal of the legal challenge was to end the entire federal crop support program by declaring it unconstitutional. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)
> It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
To add a bit, the importance of some inefficiencies are lost when viewed strictly through an investor lens. E.g., investigative journalism is expensive and largely inefficient regarding the profitability of a newspaper. Redundant inventory/equipment is largely inefficient until low-probability events effect supply. Small businesses may be inefficient but provide economic stability to a non-urban center etc. etc.
it's another good reason to advocate for more state autonomy . prior to 80s savings & loan crisis and then financial collapse, small family run banks were thriving too
I've got my tinfoil hat on but I totally believe this to be due to the lobbying efforts of big tobacco. Purely because cigarette sales continue to decline and vaping is becoming more and more regulated and, therefore, less profitable.
But marijuana enjoys high markups, pseudoscience "health benefits", and is becoming more and more acceptable to Americans each and every year.
Can't say I've ever felt that massive corps and the people that work there are super productive. In many instances they seem less productive than government.
Even without nationwide economies of scale, Michigan regularly has businesses selling weed vape carts for <$10 apiece. I don't know how much cheaper we want the weed to be, honestly. It's already at least 10x cheaper than the cheapest alcoholic beverage on a buzz-for-buzz basis.
What SMB has the luxury of being notoriously unproductive? Economies of scale are very real and tend to make larger businesses more efficient, it's true, but you'll find that causes SMBs to be lean and mean to remain competitive.
Your implied point that prices will drop with the introduction of interstate competition and access to finance and interest by mega-corps is well taken. You are certainly correct, there.
Notwithstanding grey-market limitations, people have their motives for accepting the inefficiency of starting or staying small. Potential, for example.
There you have it, the administrator themselves saying they believe in myths about cannabis: It’s a gateway drug; while simultaneously ignoring that the drug killing people, fent has a perfectly causal gateway drug in vicodin/percs
> Jack Riley, a former deputy administrator of the DEA, said he had concerns about the proposed change because he thinks marijuana remains a possible “gateway drug,” one that may lead to the use of other drugs.
>“But in terms of us getting clear to use our resources to combat other major drugs, that’s a positive,” Riley said, noting that fentanyl alone accounts for more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. a year.
I think these 'gateway drug' believers will be pleasantly surprised. One reason it's a gateway drug is because of a line of thought like this:
1) Govt says cannabis is the most dangerous drug.
2) I try cannabis, nothing bad happens.
3) So when the govt says drugs are dangerous, they are incorrect? I guess I can't use their rating system and will have to base it on my own experiences.
There is a trust penalty for over-classifying drugs.
And then of course picking up your cannabis from the popular pharmacy chain means you never had a reason to introduce yourself to a dealer, who may stock cannabis alongside other drugs.
Cannabis isn't intrinsically a gateway drug. All the gateway-ness flows from the social structure surrounding its misclassification.
This is precisely how my thought process went back when I used to use drugs heavily.
I remember a teacher telling me drugs make hair grow out of your teeth. I figured if drugs were really that bad they wouldn't need to lie about what they do.
Not to go all Godwin but a lot of people have the same reaction to news about Trump -- for some reason, people see the need to lie about and misrepresent Trump. "If he's so bad, surely people could just list off his crimes without having to try to trick me right? Must not be so bad, it couldn't hurt to give him a turn as president."
It is a gateway drug. When marijuana is illegal you have to get it from drug dealers, who have an incentive to upsell you to harder stuff. Make it legal and that gateway goes away.
Anecdote: I've had countless dealers over 20 years in many countries and continents, not once has someone tried to sell me anything else (besides hash). It's always been some cheery barefoot guy with dreads growing it in his closet.
Now that it's legal in Germany I'm going to grow my own, and experience the (surprisingly common!) miracle of harvesting the exact legal limit of 25 grams from 3 plants ;)
In my experience, the weed dealers aren't the same dealers as the guys moving the harder stuff. If you can get meth from a guy, he can probably get you coke too. But your weed guy probably can't get you either. At least, IME with NYC dealers.
Yeah, my weed guys over the years were just some fellow stoners. The most cross-promotion I saw was for mushrooms or other psychedelics but I feel like that fits the stereotype. Once in awhile they might "have something" but I'm would be a one-off thing.
>It’s a gateway drug; while simultaneously ignoring that the drug killing people, fent has a perfectly causal gateway drug in vicodin/percs
Cannabis IS a gateway drug, indirectly, by means of social contagion. It's simply a catch-22 because the government (and media, and both sides of the political spectrum) has completely destroyed their credibility with the people.
Teenagers have had plenty of excuses, through loss of trust in the self-anointed's reputation of exaggeration, to (rightly) assume the government is
outright lying or masquerading the facts about all substances.
So when artistic pieces of blotter paper of unknown orgin start making appearances in high school's around the world in 2014, students had 0 reason to believe they were dangerous; after all, "cup of orange juice man" had already long been debunked.
Many kids have died, directly because of this DIS-education.
Oxy/Hydro's are the actual gateway drugs; recreational/unfettered use, alongside the constant social pressure, will (nearly always), cascade into more dependent use of more potent opiates, then opioids.
When fent-laced pills finally starting working their way into the aging supply of real Percoset in the hills of Appalachia, three generations of drug addicted families had already resigned their fate to a long, painful retirement of addiction.
By the way - these same, ("simple, flyover, farmer, uneducated" by blue/'learned'/democract) people trusted their government to get hooked on these, remember?
If it is a surprise to you that the vast majority of Americans distrust the DEA, FDA, or CDC, or CNN, or even FOX then you have never left the conform of your post-modern urban hell-scape.
Or, he's a savvy guy talking to the people who do still believe it's a gateway drug, and deftly explaining to them why this is good without trying to tell them they are wrong.
Great news. A very sound move. Indeed, marijuana is much less dangerous of a drug yet considerably harmful in cases of chronic use in unreasonably high doses therefore should be controlled some way. What seems problematic nowadays is teenagers smoking too much. Also the idea of stoned people driving cars sounds scary. To me it seems it should be as available and legal as alcohol and cigarettes are, no less, no more.
What I'm curious about is how marijuana availability links to consumption of other drugs including hard drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers and antidepressants. I hypothesize it may decrease these.
> Cannabis users perceive their driving under the influence as impaired and more cautious, and given a dose of 7 mg THC (about a third of a joint), drivers rated themselves as impaired even though their driving performance was not; in contrast, at a BAC 0.04% (slightly less than two “standard drinks” of a can of beer or small 5 oz. glass of wine; half the legal limit in most US states), driving performance was impaired even though drivers rated themselves as unimpaired.
> This awareness of impairment has behavioral consequences. Several reviews of driving and simulator studies have concluded that marijuana use by drivers is likely to result in decreased speed and fewer attempts to overtake, as well as increased “following distance”. The opposite is true of alcohol.
I'd be more weary of people under the influence of anger, benzos, or other psychiatric drugs.
In my experience, cannabis is a performance enhancer in these cases, increasing awareness rather than decreasing it. After all, it does improve ADHD symptoms.
There are studies. I think it's simply that ADHD tends to have anxiety at its root or at least it's a major component. Cannabis is also procognitive in appropriate dosages.
ADHD does not have anxiety at its root. ADHD is an executive functioning disorder. It can certainly cause anxiety, and I could see weed helping with that (though I've heard mixed reviews about treating anxiety with weed).
As an ADHD stoner that's never had any cognitive benefits from weed, I'd be very interested in reading about the exact conditions where that occurred in others. Please do share those studies if you can find them.
I find it far more likely it has not been studied to the degree alcohol has been, and as a larger sample of users is tested these results will change.
I’ve heard every drug under the sun affect adhd for people lately, so I don’t know if that’s a divining rod for truth.
Had a guy say Fentanyl really helped his adhd… hm okay. I think our definitions and condition criteria need to separate into more discerning terms for a lot of medical conditions
Ethanol is a poison, what, outside of prejudice, would make you find it more likely it's simply a lack of studies? Maybe it simply hasn't reached me, but I never even heard about cannabis being chiefly blamed on a car accident, mind you, people can drive recklessly sober, but, again, if anything cannabis is going to make them be more cautious. For one, surely you have heard of the "paranoia" that cannabis users often get at higher doses, where they feel distant objects are closer than they really are.
After reading through that paper, it's pretty clear the authors were thorough in their research. They're referencing many of dozens of studies with many thousands of participants.
You mention that "results will change", but given that it's a lit review, I'm not sure which results you're talking about. I'm sure you read the contents of the link, so I'll ask directly - which study in particular did you find issue with? What do you think they did wrong?
I am friends with a researcher at a drug and alcohol lab at a major state university. Obviously alcohol is bad but he's pretty clear: marijuana absolutely impairs. The functional difference is marijuana users will drive slower and be more cautious but they are still not 100%. He said if you gave drunk drivers more practice drunk driving they'd also improve! Not enough to make them safe however.
There's also the two different strains - they have an effect on why marijuana studies have conflicting results. The researchers source bad weed because the IRB has made it impossible.
I understand it all 'looks' solid but the sourced weed, the difficulty of finding quality participants before legalization, and the IRB has led to some interesting data. I think it will take more time, society is not there yet.
Alcohol studies get tons of funding, and have been studied for years and years. nearly 40ish? Weed didn't earnestly get looked at until the 2010s. Mushrooms have conflicting results according to him, and he's seen Kratom fail every study he's tried, and he tried a great deal to find some proof with that.
The culture around driving in the US is the problem. Many states will hand a license to pretty much anyone over 18 with nothing more than basic reading comprehension and eyesight required. Contrast this to say, the driving culture of Germany. There, everyone (not only minors) must undergo a rigorous training that is both broad and deep in scope. In addition to everything you'd expect, they also learn vehicle maintenance, basic first aid, performance driving skills (like the kind you'd pay to learn at a racetrack in the USA), and above all else, a deep respect and appreciation for the importance of following the rules of the road, leading to rigorous adherence to driving laws and etiquette that many Americans would find borderline anal-retentive.
However, the result is that I get to tell you fun facts such as the US interstate highway system having a higher rate of accidents and a higher rate of accident fatalities per vehicle-mile traveled than the Autobahn, in spite of the fact that hundreds of vehicles are hitting 180+ mph (300+ km/h) on a daily basis over there, while American highways mostly tend to be limited to 55/60/65/70/75 mph depending on state and road type.
Heck, even the US adopting more of a Dutch/Belgian model would be better than what they use now. The bar to get a license is so low in the US that it's not really surprising how many people die in car accidents over there.
I say all this as an American who got their license the day they turned 16. I will never forget that during the driving exam, I was given the option to skip the parallel parking section in exchange for 1 point off of my score. The alternative was, if I hit a cone marking the edge of the course, I would fail outright. Of course I took the point off and walked out with my license! This was suburban Dallas in 2010? Funny enough, in 2013 I moved to Kansas and worked in a downtown area where parallel parking was basically a requirement. I took me about 2 months to get comfortable navigating into any spot on the street without rubbing my tires or being insanely crooked. Now that I live in Europe, I'm glad I had that experience because it's served me well regularly ever since.
I think that also sounds pretty scary. Seeing the state of drivers in the UK, without knowing what they’re under the influence of, if anything, it’s a pretty damning sight.
There is probably some form of bias here, as I don’t remember all of the good drivers, but not a day goes by where I don’t see drivers wandering into other lanes, performing dangerous undertakes, lane changes, or generally being terrible drivers, and you have to wonder why.
A lot of phone drivers, for sure, a lot of ignorant pricks too, but I’d bet on a lot of inebriated drivers given their conduct.
Example of a shocker I had today, I was turning right out of a resi street, a car with no indication stopped to let me out on my right, but it wasn’t safe (very tight, little visibility) so I waved him along. I stayed there for appx 30 seconds until I realised he wanted to turn into the street I was pulling out of. He didn’t indicate once. Just a completely wild disregard for any form of road etiquette, not to mention the Highway Code.
I’ll report it from my dashcam, but I doubt anything will be done by my local police force.
I think we need far more stringent fines and forced retests (along with removal of licence if they can’t meet the standard of a learner) for anyone committing a road traffic offence or blatantly breaching the Highway Code out of sheer ignorance.
A typical stoned driver is someone who drives half as fast as the speed limit allows. That's how the cops spot them usually.
I'm not saying that this should be legal or that it's okay to do it, but it's really much less of a problem than one would think. Certainly much less so than drunk driving.
Coming from a longtime marijuana friendly state, I've noticed that it has also lowered the stigma of other "hard" drugs. Since weed is no longer the socially-acceptable illegal drug, others like cocaine has taken is place.
I've long wondered if this will be a trend across the country.
This makes sense when compared to other legal drugs. Alcohol is only seen as a problem if you get shitfaced in public. Cigarettes were/are the more acceptable form of smoking when compared to cannabis. Now that the line for cannabis is moving, it makes sense that something else will come take it's place.
The real question though is, will more or less people who try cannabis now that it's legal, know when to stop experimenting when offered harder drugs? The fact that we don't see 15 year olds making bathtub moonshine leads me to believe that there is a limit somewhere for most people. Cannabis has not been difficult to get in the US for decades if you have even a modicum of self-determination. If everyone who has abstained until now suddenly gets the urge to try cannabis, I doubt that will totally destroy that self control after a few hits. Just like many people can go to a bar and know when to stop drinking even though there are likely somewhat inhibited by the drinks they have already consumed.
The smell from marijuana smoke lingers and travels in a way tobacco smoke does not. Most people other than users find it significantly more offensive than tobacco.
I was disagreeing more with your second sentence, however as for the lingering, I also disagree. I have a couple contractors who were working in my warehouse and smoking skunk weed the whole time. (I know, I know, but they do good work.) The smell was gone the next day.
But you smoke a cigarette in an enclosed space and I’ll still smell it in a couple days. I think it must be the tar and other additives, and now I kind of want to find someone who smokes natural tobacco to come do it and see if I’m right.
I don’t care about a car or home destroyed by tobacco use. Those are easy for me to avoid. Sitting on my porch and nightly taking in the smell of weed from a neighbor 50 feet away is a different story. That doesn’t happen with tobacco smoke. The smell of marijuana travels in a way tobacco doesn’t.
It’s hopeless. Both Washington DC and New York pretty much constantly smell like weed even though people are not smoking on the streets. Its not a particularly bad problem and doesn’t bother me but I could see some people being bothered by it.
We don’t regulate where people can smoke tobacco because of the smell, we regulate where people can smoke tobacco because of the health impact of secondhand smoke.
Hmm, I’ll be sure to tell the people I know with health problems from secondhand smoke that they’re wrong then, and that they should just get over themselves.
> What I'm curious about is how marijuana availability links to consumption of other drugs including hard drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers and antidepressants. I hypothesize it may decrease these.
There are so many different points of view on that topic... I think that debate will go on and on
While no impairment is obviously ideal, I'd much rather share the road with someone who's had a few puffs than someone on a cocktail of legal psychoactive prescription medications like antidepressants, SSRIs, amphetamines, hypnotic sedatives, etc.
From the article: "Then there’s the United States’ international treaty obligations, chief among them the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which requires the criminalization of cannabis."
Ah, I see. Somehow I doubt that if the US announced it would withdraw from this treaty, to be replaced by an amended version, we'd be invaded immediately by all our (former) allies and be driven straight into the sea. Like, I'm sure there are governments even more obsessed with cannabis than we've been, but like, they'll have to get over it sometime.
Yeah the irony here is that it's been the US making the most trouble on this topic. Border agents were pretty difficult for a while, and in theory they can still ban you for life for admitting you have consumed it here, even though it's legal.
I don't consume it really, but if I did I'd never pay for it online with a CC processor or anything that goes through an American data centre. The US is way too crazy about this stuff, and an overzealous border control agent armed with information he shouldn't have can ruin your whole day/week/life.
On one hand I'm very happy with all the recent policy changes coming down from different federal agencies, but on the other there's a very high likelihood that they will all be reversed a few months from now if/when a new administration takes over. That is always the downside of executive rule. With Congress unwilling/incapable of acting though I guess this is the best we'll get.
This kind of rule should be made by an executive agency, empowered by a congressional delegation of that rule-making power to that agency.
This is just the same principle as private organization boards of directors delegating the minutia of running the organization to the executives and their teams. If you think it would be madness for hiring decisions on individual contributors to be made by board votes, then you should support the delegation of rule-making authority to executive agencies.
Yes, it means that changing the executive might change the rules. Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire. And voters remain free to replace the executive the next time around, if they want to see different rules. These are all features, not bugs.
There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.
> This is just the same principle as private organization boards of directors delegating the minutia of running the organization to the executives and their teams.
It isn't, because the board can replace the executive leadership at any time, whereas the President can only be replaced every four years and isn't elected by the legislature whatsoever, bypassing checks and balances.
The proper way to delegate minutia to an administrative agency is to have them propose rules that Congress then votes on. The rules might be a thousand pages long and 99.9% uncontroversial, so those rules get rubber stamped, but controversial changes have to go through the political process because it gives Congress the opportunity to refuse.
> Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire.
But that's not how it works, because now you've inverted the default. Before you needed a majority of the House and Senate and the President's signature in order to make a change. Now you need all that to undo the change a President makes unilaterally -- implying that the President would veto it and the legislature would need a veto-proof majority. It's not the same thing at all and is handing too much power to the executive branch.
> There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.
There is value in allowing the executive branch to remove bad rules unilaterally, in the same way as the President can veto a bill. Allowing new rules to be created without the appropriate process is tyrannical.
I believe it would be a violation of current electoral law for electors to fail to cast votes as apportioned by the results of their state's general election.
In my view, being detached from the outcome of the general election in a state isn't the problem with the electoral college currently (though maybe it was in the past).
Rather, the problem is that the all-or-nothing apportionment of electoral college votes within most states often creates outcomes that wildly diverge from the national popular vote. But I think the idea of splitting up the general election vote tallying by state is a good one, because I think running one giant national vote would be more of a contentious logistical nightmare than it already is.
But if it were up to me, all states would apportion their electoral votes proportionally, and each state would get a lot more votes. That is, say California is allotted 10,000 "electors" and 57.25% of their votes go to one candiate, 39.67% goes to another, and 3.08% to a third, then the electoral college votes would be 5,725, 3,967, and 308, respectively. This would reach outcomes extremely close to a national popular vote, while still using the electoral college in a way that is no less ceremonial than it is today.
See the 2016 election with a number of faithless electors for the most recent example. Some states require electors to vote how the people vote, but not all.
Also, Maine and Nebraska don't always give all the electoral votes to the same candidate. I'm not sure the process in those states, though.
I don't really have much of an opinion on how the election could be better, but there are some interesting ideas.
I wrote my comments specifically with Maine and Nebraska in mind. They don't do exactly what I suggested with a proportional apportionment, but it's closer to that, and better for it. If every state did what they do, the electoral college would be a non-issue.
You typically see flip flop rulings on issues that half the country actually does not support.
Abortion is probably the biggest issue and that's because a lot of the country does not support it and this has not substantially changed in over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Another contentious issue has been gay marriage but support for that has only risen over the years (although much more slowly), so generally that is another issue that I don't expect much flip flopping on:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-hol...
> Abortion is probably the biggest issue and that's because a lot of the country does not support it and this has not substantially changed in over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
I'm sorry, am I reading the data incorrectly, or your comment incorrectly?
> Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?
the wording of the questions aren't good, but the states that have recently banned it certainly seem to be catering to the 13% who say illegal under all circumstances, due to the extremeness of the actual laws passed
before Roe was overturned I would have considered myself pro life because I don't believe in late term abortions, but with the new legal landscape I've become effectively pro choice because the new laws are so extreme that they ban life saving health care that has little to do with the life of the unborn
The studies ask questions of people seeking abortions who ultimately can't because the law prohibits their abortion (usually because they waited too long).
One interesting finding of this study is that a big reason people wait too long is because getting to an abortion clinic is just too hard. In the Roe world, in some very large states like Texas there were just 1 or 2 abortion clinics for the entire state.
Late term abortions have never really been very common. That's because as you get later in the process, just doing a c section and adoption would generally be the more preferred route. When they do happen, it's pretty much always due to non-viability of the fetus.
And, this isn't directed to you, but another fascinating part of the turn away studies is that it's fairly common for people seeking abortions to be in long term relationships with children. For those people, financially supporting another child isn't really an option and adoption is really socially taboo. (Imagine explaining why you aren't pregnant anymore and why you don't have an infant child).
> One interesting finding of this study is that a big reason people wait too long is because getting to an abortion clinic is just too hard. In the Roe world, in some very large states like Texas there were just 1 or 2 abortion clinics for the entire state.
This is part of the strategy against abortion. Make unreasonably short abortion windows (six weeks is often before many women even determine that they are pregnant) coupled with restrictive regulations designed to make the process as difficult and long as possible including multiple visits and mandatory waiting times. Throw on top of that the attacks on the few places which provide these services and you've got a situation that makes it extremely difficult for anyone not wealthy to get a legal abortion.
I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.
The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.
We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.
The silent majority, given the numbers cited above and general consensus.
>I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.
Ditto.
>The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.
The "clump of cells" term is equally as provocative as "baby-killer"; remember to emphasize with both positions. Neither are wrong.
>We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.
Correct. But to clarify - there isn't one "player" controlling the strings (if only we could be so lucky,) but warring ideological/political/corporate oligarchs that have consolidated power as an emergent phenomenon of self-interested parties.
This settles into a duopoly, with periodic swings depending on macro-level events, as naturally both sides align with a "good" and the other "bad" in an all-relative social moral grandstanding power contest.
90%+ of abortions are essentially birth control.
The moral, social, political, biological, religious, physiological, cultural, and constitutional subjectivity of the matter juxtaposed against the objective nature of (current) (nominal) child-birth is easily the most difficult topic to reach common ground between the most vocal extremes.
All the while, most people agree late-term, medically unnecessary abortions are abhorrent.
Yeah, but based on the guiding principle of democracy (govt by the will of the people), you'd hope to see them do that immediately instead of waiting years and years to do it when it is most strategically advantageous. I know politics is gamey like that by nature, but it sucks to see. The lag time between a policy becoming overwhelmingly popular and it actually being implemented is often long enough to radically alter the course of millions of peoples' lives.
While this is true, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At some point, we decided as a nation to only care about politics during election years. Participation rates for local elections is near an all time low. If people were more involved with the process, I would imagine that we would see more movement in Congress as a reaction to the will of the people.
My point was that they could be doing what people want for the entire duration of their term, rather than in the last few months. To use an analogy, it's like a student getting bad grades all year and then doing a bunch of extra credit assignments when they're worried about failing the class.
Is also partly the fault of voters for being so darn susceptible to recency bias. Do a lot of good at the start and then reach a lull and everyone's gonna hate. Timing can and has cost elections.
You obviously haven’t been paying attention as these rule making processes started literally years ago that’s how much red tape there is to get through.
And even if what you are saying was true (it isn’t) isn’t that the entire argument for democracy in the first place? “Politicians make good policy because they want to get re-elected” is how we should hope things work.
America should have a long hard look at why it takes so long to do something that would have been considered "reasonable" by most of the country 15 years ago.
I think it's the same with a lot of things that the American government grapples with, they only do it when there is a politically expedient reason to do it. Whether it's reducing student loans, outlawing noncompete clause, or marijuana, elected officials don't really seem to do anything helpful unless there's a clear advantage for themselves or their party.
I’d rather the regime let Assange go, and pardoned Snowden. Allowing something most states already allow is weak sauce as far as populism is concerned.
do you know how many poor people get caught up on mj charges every year in this country? not to mention this will lead to prior charges being expunged from people's records. but sure let's prioritize those two guys.
Very short sighted thinking. If they beheaded Sam bankman fried there will be a clear message to not commit financial crime, and the aspiration and motivation would almost zero.
The gesture of the freeing these two brave whistleblowers is much more important than you think. Noam Chomsky calls this censorship flak of his five filters.
> If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation.
I can only remain bemused at how some people weigh things; 300,000 people were arrested in 2020 for possession of marijuana [1]. There is nothing short-sighted about wishing the free so many people of the misery of being under the same thumb (the penal system) that you bemoan for Assange and Snowden.
It’s interesting that you chose to omit the more recent stats, as well as to notice that under the proposed change those people could still be in trouble for illegally possessing a controlled substance. But even then, it’s not just “2 guys” we’re talking about here. It’s 350 million people who are being illegally spied on and lied to. Dropping the charges against Assange and Snowden and apologizing to them would be a good first step on fixing all that.
> The exact figure was 227,108 arrests. Of that number, 92% were for possession only. This number is a slight jump from 2021 when the FBI reported a total of 219,489 arrests for marijuana.
Your point being what? That 220k arrested is a dramatic improvement over 300k?
Weed offenses do not not precedent over unlawful spying, espionage and the countless more lives it would save for their actions. Unfortunately those people are overseas and you seem dismissive of the American evils such as collateral murder. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw
SBF was willing to repeatedly take double-or-nothing bets at 50/50 odds even though the expected utility of each bet is the same as not betting at all and the combined odds of bankruptcy very quickly asymptotes to 100% with increasing rounds.
Literally beheading him won't put off the next person like him. His current punishment is probably enough to put off anyone sane.
Assange isn't a whistleblower just by founding WikiLeaks any more than Musk is a brain surgeon by founding Neuralink, he's the figurehead.
Manning and Snowden get that title, but not Assange.
No he was not. You think he'd repeatedly do Russian roulette with half the bullets? He had the odds with him with his legal advisors.
Madoff's sentencing is why SBF's parents taught him to disregard the law. If you don't understand the idea of figureheads being important, what would happen if the president was shot, or if Dali lama was chosen by china? America would still keep going as would tibetan Buddhism. The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone. HN is a platform and I'm sure we'd still exist without it, assange definitely does deserve credit.
""""The whole time that we were dating, he was also my boss at work, which created some awkward situations," she testified, according to The Wall Street Journal. Describing Bankman-Fried's attitude toward risk-taking, "Ellison recalled on the witness stand how Bankman-Fried once spoke of a coin-flip scenario where if the coin landed on tails, the world would end. But if the coin landed on heads, 'the world would be twice as good.' Bankman-Fried [said] he would take the bet if there were a chance of making the world better, Ellison said."""" - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sbfs-ex-girlfrie...
> what would happen if the president was shot
Judging by all the presidents who have been shot, at most an airport gets named after them or a statue gets built.
> The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone.
"Seems"? Plenty of new ones listed on the Wikileaks website.
> assange definitely does deserve credit
For what? Snowden went to… a newspaper. Didn't need Wikileaks. Plenty of whistleblowers did the same before Wikileaks. It's a new brand, but not a new thing.
> He regrets that WikiLeaks is no longer able to expose war crimes and corruption as in the past. His imprisonment and US government surveillance and restrictions on WikiLeaks’ funding wards off potential whistleblowers. He fears that other media outlets are not filling the vacuum.
Democrats will dangle the possibility of marijuana legalization to entice voters to turn out for the election. But I doubt legalization will actually happen; I'd be delighted to be proven wrong. I'm just too jaded, I guess.
It's already been legalized at the state level in 24 states, most of those states governed by Democrats. There's clearly a lot of support for actual action on this issue, including among elected officials.
Yes, I think you are too jaded. It's fine to be wary, but wrong to think these two groups are the same. Don't forget that our Senate is broken, so no legislation passes without an inordinate amount of rural, conservatives states backing it.
So legalization may still be a political hot button, but give it time. One party supports it, one party opposes it. Dan Patrick, Lt. Gov. of Texas, is going to push the state to ban hemp-based Delta 8 products in the next session.
One party is regressive, one party is receptive and secular.
Why wouldn't it, though? It's a massive new market that big corps are itching to get into if only they could do so legally. And the fact that some top politicians on both sides of the aisle are already investing in weed (on state level, where it's legal) has already made some news.
The only reason why it's not legalized yet is because 1) many politicians are old enough to be brainwashed to believe in "reefer madness", and 2) many voters are old enough to do the same, so politicians who don't believe in it still have to pander to them. But this is a problem that solves itself over time, which is why supporting weed legalization becomes more socially and politically acceptable.
I mean, just this year, 12 US senators wrote an open letter asking DEA to legalize weed. This would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, yet here we are.
If it's not all legal 20 years from now, I would be extremely surprised.
Experience here in Canada has shown it's not nearly the massive market that people thought it was. Tons of stores with excess stock and people losing their shirts, production curtailed. Big speculative wave when legalization was announced, and then it collapsed. Take a look at e.g. Canopy Growth's stock price over 5 years and you can see how the hype wave went.
Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related/cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.
This makes medical cannabis possible, but only under the same rules as pharmaceutical drugs. It does not address recreational cannabis at all, and most medical marijuana retailers are also not pharmacies.
Major impact will also be felt at cannabis research at land grant universities. Aka all the experiments to prove obvious stuff like different cultivars affect different people differently can finally happen at scale.
See cannabisstudieslab.com as an example of the kind of non plant touching research that Cannabis Studies majors have been doing due to the Schedule I status.
Affordable healthcare being chief among these. If people could go to the doctor without fear of bankruptcy, they might stop trying to self medicate with potentially addictive substances.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts had lost his job. He was thrilled to "only" have to pay $1000/mo for insurance on the Marketplace for his family of 6. And he confirmed it wasn't even a "Cadillac" plan!
If my back hurts, I'm probably going to reach for weed over a visit to the doctor because $10/day is a potentially more affordable than needing to shell out $8k for back surgery or physical therapy treatments for years. Maybe I get lucky and the pain goes away, or I can focus on finding a new job with better health benefits and still come out ahead financially.
Humans have been using drugs as long as we've been human. From caffeine to advanced hallucinogens.
I agree with the sentiment but it seems far more reasonable to stop criminalizing something so human as a step towards the goal, rather than put the goal before the metaphorical horse.
actually, psychedelics help people get in touch with their core issues like childhood traumas which cause people to turn to drugs, games, overeating, etc, and help alleviate PTSD, OCD, etc. psychedelics are anti-addiction.
This is not good enough, in my opinion. It's hard to treat the justice system seriously because of bullshit restrictions on victimless "crimes" like this. I'll only be okay with this if alcohol gets reclassified as Schedule III.
It's not really victimless when you have cases of psychosis and other health issues that negatively affect people around them, and put strain on taxpayers and the health system. This is Should be strictly prescription-only, and not with the rubber stamp model that "medical" marijuana clinics use. But that isn't politically correct so it's better to ignore the science and just drug the masses.
The evidence that exists suggests that heavy cannabis usage _at an early age_ is associated with the development of psychotic disorders. No state that has legalized cannabis has permitted minors to purchase it. No evidence exists that cannabis usage later in life causes psychosis. There is also a lack of population evidence that increased cannabis usage among the public results in increased rates of diagnosis of psychotic disorders. And nobody is "drugging the masses" here. The government authorizing a product for sale doesn't force you to consume it.
You're 100% incorrect. It took me 15 seconds to find this page from Yale which suggests up to age 35 as a possibility, and recommends not using before the age of 25.
> The government authorizing a product for sale doesn't force you to consume it.
And you missed the point entirely. The government doesn't need to force when it can seduce, and it doesn't need to lie (except by omission) when it has liberal surrogates spreading misinformation like what you just did. It's convenient for them when majority opinion always works out that way. Where do you think those opinions come from? The same concept works in reverse when you have relatively safe drugs banned solely because of sensationalist headlines resulting from one or two edge cases.
To be fair, if it is legalized, that makes it easier to get for minors. Look at how many high schoolers smoke/vape even though you're supposed to be 18. I still don't think it's worth keeping it as a schedule I drug, but this is a possible externality that we need to account for as a society.
Unlikely in the near term. As I understand it, rescheduling to Schedule III would mean that marijuana (and marijuana-based products) can be sold with a prescription. But, for a doctor to prescribe something, it needs FDA approval. I don't know when/if FDA will approve any marijuana-based treatments. And even if they did, this would not authorize recreational use.
you can get a prescription for marijuana within 15 mins of walking into a doctors office. we are past the peak of this, but 10 years ago you used to be able to go to a doctor that did nothing but marijuana prescriptions. and the line was out the door to the office. you walk in, pay $100-$150, and walk out with a prescription for 1 year
> you can get a prescription for marijuana within 15 mins of walking into a doctors office.
Not one that will work for the purposes of the Controlled Substances Act, as I understand it. I believe permissible use of a Schedule III has to be pursuant to a doctor's prescription for an FDA approved drug.
Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, without other legal changes, would not bring the state-legal medical or recreational marijuana industry into compliance with federal controlled substances law. With respect to medical marijuana, a key difference between placement in Schedule I and Schedule III is that substances in Schedule III have an accepted medical use and may lawfully be dispensed by prescription, while Substances in Schedule I cannot. However, prescription drugs must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Although FDA has approved some drugs derived from or related to cannabis, marijuana itself is not an FDA-approved drug. Moreover, if one or more marijuana products obtained FDA approval, manufacturers and distributors would need to register with DEA and comply with regulatory requirements that apply to Schedule III substances in order to handle those products. Users of medical marijuana would need to obtain valid prescriptions for the substance from medical providers, subject to federal legal requirements that differ from existing state regulatory requirements for medical marijuana.
it's possible that there might be a move to cheek swaps instead of urine tests for routine testing, making it possible to enjoy some recreational pot during off times.
Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use. There are more cannabis shops then mcdonalds. You can grow your own and most people do. There's online options.
A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition.
The next step for society would be to attempt at changing opinion, but what are the unintended consequences? The answer is, bad news.
There's a common notion that I've noticed, which is that if you just open up a "pot shop" that you'll make money hand over fist, meanwhile, they're fairly complex retail operations to run and you can loose your hat just as quickly as with any other business.
Except cupcake shops and craft breweries are allowed to differentiate (gluten free, superhero themed, we only sell wild fermented German beers...) while the legal cannabis retailers in Canada are more akin to owning a Subway franchise.
You must purchase your cannabis from a select set of suppliers chosen by the government (yes, the very same ones your competition must purchase from), you are not allowed to offer discounts/freebies on cannabis products (only rolling papers or similar non-psychoactive products). It is still illegal to operate any kind of venue that allows consumption, so while you can decorate your retail space like an Apple store or a Pier 1, you can't run trivia nights or do movie screenings or anything that might result in people patronizing your business over the one next door offering the same product for $0.05 cheaper.
Pre-legalization, I could go to a store (not legally operated) and look at the bud in the jar, smell it, and make decisions based on something other than a sealed package with no artwork or description on it. Some stores even offered consumption of "dabs" which is a great model: those things cost a lot of money and aren't really fun to have in your home and maintain, and it was very competitive with "a pint after work". All of this went away after 2017.
I'm referring more to the "several times as many as the market can sustain get opened" phenomenon. Around here, every just-out-of-college set of buddies decided they'd get into brewing a few years ago. Probably 75% of them were gone in a year or two.
It’s not a particularly easy industry to value add. Growing pretty good weed is probably less work than a brewery - and I have a very hard time telling the difference between the hundreds of different strains.
Then you have to have security, your staff is high 24/7, banking is a mess..
Growing might be more pleasant than running the shops but then you better like agriculture
I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong) which means there were private shops in existence but then shut down further polluting online listings. I eventually figured this out (after visiting what I thought was a cannabis shop that was actually a deli) but as luck would have it, they were all closed when I was downtown.
Coming from the US, Massachusetts specifically this was a major step backwards. Granted we are spoiled, especially in my region where there's 2-3 shops per town but I was not expecting it to be that hard in progressive Canada.
>I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong)
Quebec is an oddball, they did provincially run them. They are quite available still, search 'cannabis' in google/apple maps and they'll be available.
"A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition."
So .. all the countries in the world, e.g. Japan, China, Singapore, UAE, etc., etc., where marijuana is very illegal, failed? It seems to be working just fine for them. Since we can provide numerous counter examples to your claim isn't your claim instantly invalidated?
> Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use.
When I visited Quebec in 1997, I saw a lot of people openly smoking cannabis in public. Once I smelt weed, turned around, and saw a kid, probably about 12-14, just sitting on a bench in public smoking a joint. I wasn't in a shady part of town, either.
I grew weed durring covid, it's like taking care of a baby for weed that's mostly OK. I sold everything after two attempts. I learned alot about gardening though lol
Hard to judge the DEAs effectiveness off something like this. You have very little insight on their actual effectiveness and workings on everything, yet your comment seems to summarize the entire organization off a completely biased political comment.
The people want to be undisturbed and untaxed by rampant mental illness too, but the average person won't acknowledge that recreational marijuana use (with today's potency levels) contributes to declining mental health.
That logic doesn't really hold. I'll speak generally and not about this specific administration:
If the <current government> was doing good things that the people wanted during the entire term, then they would not need to resort to moves like this alleged one when the vote is coming up. It's only if they're not doing good things that the people want that they would dangle something shiny to the electorate.
This is a directional error. Roe protected liberty. Federal criminalization of weed impedes liberty. While ending both of these things returns policy to the states, one necessarily reduces liberty while one necessarily increases liberty.
The political group largely responsible for this has been consistently underperforming in nearly every election since it happened, so I’m not sure what point you’re driving at.
OK, but at the time of Roe v. Wade, I don't think the majority of people wanted abortion legalized, either. I'm not sure the majority of people wanted gay marriage legalized (at the time).
But even more: You don't want the judges to be focused on what the majority want. That's not the rule of law.
Yes, I'm objecting to the premise that "democratically accountable governments do(ing) good things that the people want" describes the process by which Roe v. Wade was repealed. It was not democratically accountable, and it was what only a subset of the people wanted.
The Supreme Court is not an example of democracy working, it's a purposely anti-democratic institution.
A panel of judges appointed and confirmed by elected officials. An electoral plurality did want it repealed. And based on current polls, there is not a majority who think it's important enough to change it back. Even if there's an opinion poll saying most people want abortion rights, that's effectively moot if they don't vote that way.
Abortion bans have been extremely unpopular in every state where they have gone on the ballot. Even deep red ones. I'd be curious to see what happens if every state holds a referendum on it.
Current polls indicate that "[t]wo-thirds of the public, including majorities of Democrats (86%) and independents (67%), support a law guaranteeing a federal right to abortion."
By current polls, I mean the ones showing Trump even or slightly ahead of Biden despite him being directly responsible for Dobbs. If 2/3 of the public wanted abortion rights, Biden would have 2/3 of the popular vote, but he won't get anywhere near that. Hence, most people don't want Roe reinstated. QED.
>If 2/3 of the public wanted abortion rights, Biden would have 2/3 of the popular vote, but he won't get anywhere near that. Hence, most people don't want Roe reinstated. QED.
That isn't the way people work. Or voting. Or polls.
It is the only practical measure of true public opinion. You can also, by extension, infer that roughly 47% of Americans think sexual assault is acceptable and that democracy is undesirable. It may not be what they say or even what they think but it is reflected in what they do.
It isn't practical by any means, it's unnecessarily reductionist, even when one doesn't consider the numerous innate biases involved in polling.
People are multidimensional but American Presidential politics forces them into a binary decision. Yet there are numerous reasons why people who support abortion might not vote for Biden. They may support abortion but not believe Biden is a credible choice to defend abortion rights. They may support abortion but vote against Biden to punish the Democratic Party for their response to Dobbs. They may support abortion but reject the Democratic Party altogether. They may support abortion but find activism at the state level more effective, and find other things like Biden's support for Israel more objectionable. They may support abortion but also support Trump, because pro-choice Republicans do exist, and their only options will be to vote Trump or not vote and all. And most people won't even vote at all.
>It may not be what they say or even what they think but it is reflected in what they do.
No. It may be comfortable to see people in such black and white terms, but the premise that unless one votes for Biden, one doesn't support abortion regardless of what else one says and does, is ... not even wrong levels of wrong.
Yes, this is exactly the problem with our "representative" democracy. For example, one polarizing issue this year may be whether a voter is willing to accept a candidate who acts like a mob boss or not, regardless of any other issue that the candidates are trying to stand on. Worse yet, elected candidates then have difficulty knowing which of the multidimensional issues mattered to their voters because all the information has been lost by the polarizing election system.
I understand that people are complex and can have subtlety and nuance to their personalities but I can only judge them on what they do. If someone kicks me in the shin, there could be 1000 reasons leading to them thinking it was a valid decision but ultimately they still just kicked me in the shin.
I'm sure 0% of Trump voters would tell a pollster they approve of sexual assault but their actions indicate they do.
You are making the mistake that people understand how our government works or are paying much attention at all. I've video of some voters blaming Biden for the overturn of Roe v Wade because it happened during Biden's term. If voters were properly informed across the board Biden, and most democrats, would win in a landslide. There are many active forces, foreign and domestic, which put serious effort and money into deliberately misinforming the populace, because they are incredibly selfish, and care only for their personal gain, regardless of how many are harmed, and to what degree.
Yes, it's good for the government to not be tyrannical, but I'd argue that when the majority of people increasingly and collectively want things that are net negatives for society like recreational drug use, it's a red flag that society is in decline.
I think recreational drug use is demonstrably good for society and part of all succesful civilizations. Take caffeine, sugar, alcohol and tobacco as the primary examples. All potent drugs and all taken habitually and en masse by all the most successful societies in the world.
More like all the most successful societies value personal freedoms. Personal freedoms are clearly good for society and a big one of those is recreational drug use of which tobacco use is quite common.
Having a government which restricts personal freedoms too much for the sake of "societal good" may work in the short term or for specific issues but is clearly a negative in the long and broad terms. See the "west" of today for evidence of personal freedom combined with not-overly-restrictive-legislation being the most successful method of handling these things.
You seem to be conflating a distaste for demonstratively failed policy, like as prohibition, with an appetite for what you are calling "recreational drug use".
They absolutely were. Between 25% inflation, the student loan relief failure, two proxy wars and the current beating of college students across the country, the current administration would have been facing record low turnout in November.
I would be surprised if there is not some string attached to this that doesn't take place until after November. That's a good thing though, becuase it was seeming more and more like the current administration was sabotaging itself. The Democrats need the youth vote.
Young people always have bad turnout anyway, so it doesn't matter if they find a new excuse to have it.
(Also they did do student loan reform via SAVE and have forgiven about 9% of loans IIRC. Probably shouldn't have though, it's inflationary, and as you can see from the above poll nobody even appreciates it.)
This change is not gonna legalize it, but will just make it “less illegal” acknowledging its medical use. While logically it make sense to move in this direction, I am afraid that ultimate consequences might be few large companies dominating the market completely and probably growing stuff offshore. If it gets a pass for recreational use then we will see weed induced soda in vending machines at school in couple of generations.
Reminder that Marijuana was made illegal 90 years ago due to pressure by a cartel of other drug peddlers (including opium and cocaine), and also a culture of pervasive racism that painted Marijuana as a trap that brown/black races had fallen into and must be outlawed for white people.
Whatever you think about the effects of Marijuana on yourself or society, it's clear that it should have never been outlawed in the first place, and wouldn't have been outlawed if not for the factors above.
It seems that the fentanyl crisis has finally defeated the archaic drug policy in the states, but not in the way you think. If alcohol and tobacco were outlawed in the US, it would immediately become impossible to buy them without risking getting a deadly dose of fentanyl. Legalization of marijuana, controlled legalization, is the only sane answer.
(And this is coming from someone who doesn't partake)
I'm not sure how this will affect the current "mom and pop" weed stores. I know that The Big Dogs are just raring to get in on the action, and I'll lay odds they have done things like preemptively register weed brands.
Why is it that in Amsterdam you have coffee-shops where you can sit relax and smoke cannabis but nothing like that seems to exist in New York City? Or elsewhere in America, is there?
Honestly, it's probably mostly just a tourism thing at this point. Most of the Dutch people I know tend to not care about weed but they see coffee-shops as a thing for tourists or international students. If you're a regular user in NL, then you have a hookup or grow your own plants.
Also, anecdotally, I can smell a lot less weed in Amsterdam than when I've caught a wiff of it in the US. You have to be walking right by the shop before you smell it usually. I'm not sure if this is a local regulation or what, but I suspect the Dutch would be much less tolerant if their public spaces reeked 24/7 (but no worried about the dog poop on the sidewalk)!
It's actually wild what the executive can get done in an election year... With the side effect of dangling bait for legislators to take a contrarian, nationally unpopular position.
It has been a multi-year effort to get the DEA to reclassify marijuana, starting in 2022. It starts with the President telling the HHS to provide a new recommendation to the DEA, and the finally for the DEA to decide what to do on that recommendation.
The President is the chief executive of both agencies. He didn't need to have one agency recommend it to the other for consideration over a multi-year timescale. It could have been executed within a few weeks to a few months. The office of the President knowingly chose a prolonged approach.
I feel it is misleading to call it an "effort", as if the President was struggling against the very agencies that he was elected to lead, decisively. Congress is supposed to be the slow-moving deliberative rule-making body.
If he really did struggle, it would say a lot about the growth of the administrative state and would highlight a constitutional health issue.
Regulation shouldn't cause harm for causing harm's sake. We already know prohibition doesn't work, so why did they drag their feet on repealing regulation that is both harmful and ineffective, is my concern.
Also to answer your question about weed stocks: I used to own cannabis stocks but dumped them about a year ago. Big mistake! They've doubled in price over the last week presumably from this news.
It's wild to me that people think "buying votes" is a bad thing. The whole point of democracy is to align the interests of the state's leaders to its population. If anything, politicians don't buy votes often enough!
Politician runs on a platform of 'Hey 51% of the population, if you vote for me I'll take the other 49%'s money and give it to you!', proceeds to win by 2%. Democracy in action!
The timing is complete bullshit. Politicians “pocket” issues like this and pull them out during an election year “look how much I care about you!!! Vote for me!!!” They could have and should have done this a very long time ago.
It’s obvious to everyone that the democrats are losing their bread a butter voters, young people and black folks. This gets waved around for the nth time and everyone gets excited.
My favorite was the cancellation of a ban on menthol cigarettes because it would turn away black voters despite the NAACP ardently encouraging the ban[0].
Your own link says it's 70% in favor of legalization and 29% against. 29% is as close to "a quarter of the population" as it is to "a third of the population" - 400 basis points.
Putting it another way nearly 3 quarters of citizens want it legalized. That's massive. It's as close to unanimous consensus as you can get on a hot-button issue like drugs.
So, just to clarify, you're actually taking issue with me referring to 29% as one third, while you have no issue referring to 70% as 100%? Either way, there's still over a hundred million human beings living in your country that disagree with you. Call it whatever you want but don't dismiss it.
> while you have no issue referring to 70% as 100%?
And you have no issue putting words in my mouth. I said it was close to three-quarters, is "massive" and that you can't get closer to unanimous than that.
> Call it whatever you want but don't dismiss it.
29% want to lock up the other 71% for consuming a plant. And we don't know for sure that all of that 29% are entirely clean themselves.
So why not dismiss it? Why does the 29%'s opinion matter here? If 29% of the population said you should jail people for premarital sex, or smoking, or wearing shorts, or whistling in elevators, would you take them seriously?
A simple majority or supermajority is more than enough to legalize or abolish anything. Pretty much no issue requires 100% of everyone to agree.
In fairness we do also see the opposite, which is kind of a problem with the 2 term system.
In a presidents first term they are incentivized to do just enough to not piss of the other side enough to get some crazy numbers out but do enough to appease the current voters that they tried.
But then in the second term any worry about being re-elected goes out the window.
Like I am still convinced that Obama was in support of gay marriage before he publicly said it, and just waited until after he was re-elected. At that point what was he going to loose?
If it takes multiple years, then it gives voters a reason to support the candidate that will support the process post-election. Basically, vote for Joe if you want Mary Jane.
> It comes after President Joe Biden called for a review of federal marijuana law in October 2022 and moved to pardon thousands of Americans convicted federally of simple possession of the drug.
Eh, October 2022 to April 2024 is close enough to 2 years out.
I think it dovetails with the Administration's recent pausing of outlawing menthol cigarettes which has been reported as adversely effecting African Americans. It's blatantly political, which giving the people what they want and all, but it's disingenuous when these things only occur at election time. The President could have done this on day one.
Most people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes are in state prisons and cannot be freed by the federal government, but the administration has been issuing pardons and commutations over the past several years for the small number of people that have federal cannabis convictions.
There’s been no strong studies on the harmful effects of weed due to its illegal status. Now that is legal in many places, in 30 years we will know a lot more as this natural experiment unfolds. I would not be surprised if we see different but equally harmful effects.
The issue is the prolonged constant daily use of it. Unlike alcohol, it's much easier to get by in the day with weed, and a lot of people do use it as that. It offers them an escape from reality without the full social repercussion of something like alcohol.
That’s a good point. I’ve known people who smoke a joint every couple of hours and outwardly seem more functional than someone who has had three or four drinks.
That Salvia divinorum is somehow legal (varies by jurisdiction) always blows my mind...
My personal opinion is that most people won't be able to regulate any large caches of the above-commented drugs... but after one or two rides on Salvia most'll keep a wide birth [which I recommend as "the worst experience possible; if somebody suggests you try Salvia they're bullying you; try something else"].
DMT is a drug I’d highly recommend everyone take once but only once.
The experience of existing for a short time without the concept of self, experiencing zero sensory filters, and finally having your brain rebooted as it has a kernel panic (and going through the brain kernel load process as it does so) is mind blowing.
It’s enough to convince you that we live in a highly advanced simulation. Or one could just be high af.
Also I’m pretty sure it was based on an old version of Linux because I’m convinced I saw the kernel message “Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039“.
Do all of them. To me, government exists to mediate interactions between parties. Not to get involved in personal choices. If someone wants to rip fat lines of coke, good for them. Not my business.
Do you think people who rip fat lines of coke will never interact with society in any way that affects you?
Of course government gets involved in personal choices. Every crime committed by a person is a personal choice. Interactions between parties are interactions between people. The distinction you're trying to draw here doesn't exist.
Legitimate crimes have a perpetrator and a victim. That's two parties in conflict. Drug possession only has 1 party, the person possessing or doing the drugs, and drug sales have two parties who aren't in conflict.
We don't live in libertarian utopia, let's first focus on substances that are *obviously* misclassified, the ones cited before have actual benefits, the most obvious one being psilocybin.
Yeah, no. We're already in a drug crisis as it is. We need to teach people that doing drugs (of any kind) isn't the answer to problems. Soft times seems to have created this problem where people would rather escape their lives than live them out.
You just reflexively replied with what you have been programmed to believe about mind-altering substances (aside from those exempted by the authorities). The use of "drug crisis" in reply to the substances mentioned is a clear indication of your prejudice and ignorance, given that MDMA has already been given breakthrough status by the FDA as a treatment for PTSD, psilocybin for major depression, and being studied for it's powerful anti-addictive effects, same as LSD (which had great results with curing alcoholism *in one session* when it was initially being studied in the 50s and 60s).
This entire thread is full of people who seemingly feel compelled to comment on things they are completely ignorant about, which one would hope to see less of on HN.
I don't think people do psilocybin and LSD to escape from reality. I'm not even sure how that would work, given how I understand tolerance works for those drugs?
I completely agree. People in the US need to learn that happiness cannot come from a purchase, whether it's chemicals to ingest or whatever else is being marketed to them. It's amazing what americans will do to their bodies and minds except get exercise and eat fresh healthy foods.
While it being moved to Schedule ~II~ (Correction: III) rather than removed altogether is a bit disappointing, I'm not gonna miss the forest for the trees on this one: this is a big deal after all this time.
sure, marijuana shouldn't be considered 100% harmless, but it's ludicrous to argue it does the same amount of damage to people's bodies as ketamine (abuse can lead to kidney failure, bladder cystectomy) or even some sched. IV substances such as alprazolam (seizures from withdrawal can be fatal).
As someone who has taken ketamine for medical purposes and marijuana for not, it is utterly off-the-charts bonkers that they are classified identically.
A large dose of ketamine literally disconnects yourself from reality. Weed makes you tired.
Actual harm, I think. I know that Ketamine has harm potential, but it's my impression that the physical harm only occurs with long term binge use, and that immediate physical harm due to overdose is unlikely. That the subjective effects during use are very powerful and overwhelming is not and should not be relevant, I think.
Benzo addiction is very dangerous. Withdrawal can lead to life threatening or altering outcomes. I have a hard time understanding what property the scheduling is based on
I agree. To me this feels like Biden, who loathes cannabis and has opposed its legalization at every turn, found a good way to still sontewall legalization and move the goalposts to distract everyone enough that they think he's done them a huge favor.
This will be nice for certain things, particularly payment processors for dispensaries, assuming that card processors don't continue to get in the way (don't see why they would).
But this won't fill the huge skill gap in public sector computer security due to weed getting in the way of clearances, for example. And for people in non-legal states, they will have to continue to use black markets to get it or gray markets like the "THCA" loophole (thanks unfortunately go to Trump for that one).
We shouldn't tolerate politicians delivering us half solutions when it's on issues that don't need compromise due to popular support!
We all prioritize things differently and I believe this process was started on October 6th, 2022 [1]. This is just one of many things the current administration has done over the last 3 years, though.
Statistically I'd expect more things to be done towards the end of any administrative period. First there is no way to finish thing in the beginning of their period, because that is where you get started, sharpen the tools, get your people in order etc. Then you start all kind of projects which may or may not take their time due to the complexity of the topics at hand. Then you finish some of them but the long running ones go on. Then the end nears and everybody realizes: "shit we need to wrap things up for real" and then whatever concerns may have been left are either fixed or ignored.
But the point is: if there are open concerns you would be stupid to finalize a project earlier than you would have to. On top of that comes political calculus, but I work in an european University where elections don't matter that much and our senate would also have a tendency to finish most things towards the end of an administrative period.
You have to keep some things in the bank to use in certain circumstances.
It’s all a game. The sooner you realize it and that there is no option but to play the game, the better you and everyone else will be.
And the game never ends and cannot be beaten. Any bs like “just don’t play the game bro” ok then go live on Mars and make a game there. Don’t drive on the roads, don’t use any utilities, and try to self exile.
The request was made 2 years ago, not during election season. Building good regulations requires research, conversations with stakeholders, and other things which take time.
While I've not read that book, the synopsis from Wiki would suggest that the arguments put forth in there are almost entirely obsolete owing to the internet. In particular:
---
The buying public: the "bewildered herd" (a term here borrowed from The Phantom Public) must pay to understand the unseen environment by the mass communications media. The irony is that although the public's opinion is important, it must pay for its acceptance. People will be selective and will buy the most factual media at the lowest price: "For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps." The media have the social function of transmitting public affairs information and their business profit role of surviving in the market.
Nature of news: people publish already-confirmed news that are thus less disputable. Officially-available public matters will constitute "the news" and unofficial (private) matters are unavailable, are less available, or are used as "issues" for propaganda.
News truth and conclusion: the function of news is to signal an event, and that signalling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement; journalism creates and sows the seeds (news) that establish public opinion.
---
Not only is access to information now completely free, but it's not even uncommon that a regular person is more well informed on any given topic than either the media or ostensibly highly informed political figures. See: Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [1] Outside of classification, we have all have access to, more or less, the same information. And, at this point, it's absolutely common to see high level political figures and the media both making plainly factually incorrect statements and implications, that are not only disputable but simply objectively wrong.
If anything, the real bias in society seems to do more with people believing what they want to be true, instead of what is true. Of course the exact same bias also has clearly infected politicians, the media, and so on.
Pretty sure the Internet has not only not made manufacture of consent obsolete, it has greatly aided it. The book already calls out the public wanting truth for a dollar. Now they can have a custom truth that caters to their biases for a fraction of a cent! However, that doesn't mean anything for the subtle message this "truth" carries: a TikTok video can still carry a call to action just as well as a newspaper article (see recent interest in Osama Bin Laden for an example).
Don't you think your own example contradicts your premise? People have radically different biases. And so manufacturing consent requires the elimination of dissenting views, yet the internet specifically enables those views to flourish. For instance I had absolutely no idea what you were talking about with regards to Bin Laden, yet 30 seconds later I was reading a letter he wrote that there have apparently been widespread efforts to try to censor.
Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one, and that's simply not possible. And even if it were, that clearly artificial homogeneity would itself drive distrust. See the USSR where the government not only directly controlled literally every single medium for communication, but also strictly ideologically filtered for admittance (or exit) from the country. Nonetheless this led to widespread jokes like, "Why do we have two newspapers, Pravda (meaning truth) and Novesti (meaning news)? Well that's because there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."
So we can even go one step further and say that to manufacture consent you need to not only eliminate all dissenting views, but you also need to somehow hide that from your public and make them believe that what they are reading is free to diverge from the official narrative. Chomsky, of course, hit on this exact nuance with his famous quote, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." But now a days you can no longer limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, because with the internet you can find communities where basically any view, no matter how fringe, is the norm.
> Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one
Why do you think they’re forcing TikTok to change ownership? US corporations are much easier to control.
Notice that you had to seek that content out. The algorithm would have just kept you safely cocooned in your bubble. This Bin Laden content was viral. Spread like wildfire. Talked about on the news. And you had 0 awareness of it. If this doesn't convince you that information bubbles exist, I don't know what will.
Here's what I mean by manufacture of consent - the system knows your "syntax": the set of memes you'll respond to, and can deliver any message over that channel. Note that another person's "syntax" may be different, yet the same message can be delivered to both of you while maintaining the illusion of information topic diversity.
It's also possible to eliminate a viewpoint by associating it with people who are crazy, or otherwise unpalatable. By spreading stories about a select few people on the right, for example, the mainstream media has now manufactured a "far-right" label that can now be used to mean "anything a Berkeley coffee shop customer would disagree with". Here's a recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/alternative-for-germany-afd-... After a few pages of ridiculing the supporters they interview a single person, a chain smoking mother of 8 from Eastern Germany. The implication of course being: if you listen to anything these people say, that's who you are. Never mind that even chain-smoking mothers of 8 are supposed to have representation in a democracy.
Or you can stop an effort to create some financial accountability with a simple "they are with the Russians" and leave it at that.
I think you need to prefix your assumptions here with a large ostensibly. Of course you're right that this is what "they" are trying to do and what they believe. But the only real result has been that trust in media has essentially disappeared, with government not far behind. This [1] article was shared on here sometime back. Only 25% do not think the media is trying to actively mislead them (50% do, 25% undecided), only 23% believe journalists act in the public's best interest, and so on. This is why I offered the USSR as an example.
This sort of propaganda/censorship package is tried by literally every single collapsing empire, and it just backfires horribly every single time. The only modern feature will be propaganda bots, but that will likely be even worse. Because the thing is, you can't just convince people that 2+2=5 by screaming it at them endlessly. The only time propaganda really works is on topics that people know absolutely nothing about and have no preformed opinions - like certain wars. But even that tends to very liminal, and then once people realize that things weren't exactly as they were led to believe, they're now that much less trusting of you.
I think your own example also emphasizes this reality. AfD isn't unique. Such parties are skyrocketing in popularity all throughout Europe. See the Sweden Democrats [2] who may soon become the largest party in Sweden. If you took out the ad hominem attacks against them, that Wiki page would be about 10% as long. Yet not only is the propaganda failing to change minds in the desired direction, if anything it seems to be having the exact opposite effect. Like always. But if politicians, let alone countries, were capable of learning from the past - then we might not find ourselves where are today, playing history on repeat like hamsters going around on a treadmill, with little but technology offering a refreshing change of scenery.
I think there's quite a lot of great ways to get through the muck. For currently happening events, simply look at the various contradictory views, and find where they intersect. It's in that spot that one will nearly always find the truth. For past events, where the clear truth has come out, go back and visit various sites using something like archive.org. It often becomes quite clear which groups are making impartial statements, and which are not - which generally should give some predictive power about the veracity of their statements in the future.
That's not at all what I'm saying. Let's say side one in a war says a school was bombed and 40 innocent people were killed. The other side says they attacked a school that was housing soldiers and killed 10. What can you take away from this? Well the facts that both sides agree upon - that a school building was bombed and at least 10 people were killed. You miss the details and narrative, but that's probably a feature more than a bug anyhow. There's a great quote from Thomas Jefferson [1] that hits on a similar concept (as well as the Gell Mann amnesia effect!) :
---
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
If you want to fix things you need to give parties with a track record¹ of improving things a significant majority.
I like to see democracy as a system that in it's most basic mode of participation is more like a negative right: You don't wish for a thing and get it, instead you can prevent things you don't want from happening again. That is why track record should be much more important than promises. Nowadays the political debate in the US seems to be even beyond promises: it has become purely symbolic where they expect you to fill in the blanks.
If you want more specific things from your democracy you have to invest more time, vote in local elections, maybe run yourself, write to representatives etc. This is especially the thing you should do if you are unhappy with all options. Earn your right to complain.
¹ what they say doesn't count at all — check their track record, laws they passed, how numbers developed during their last governing period in comparison to neighbouring countries etc.
They are though. It's that people tend to forget over time. I barely remember details of the last administration. A NYTimes article recently observed the same.
The President can’t unilaterally do anything on this. Congress still doesn't have the votes - in either party. The courts couldn’t. Nor HHS, or AG/DOJ and the DEA. The latter two didn’t and dont harbor favorable views of rescheduling. The DEA process merely kickstarts another process, that is uncontested but slow.
That doesn't preclude the reality of political machinations for someones remaining in office. But its disingenuous to suggest its bread and circuses only.
You just described whole maga movement and some others. It works en masse, thats why trump won first time without investing heavily into marketing, telling folks what they wanted to hear
You are underestimating the time it takes to get stuff done in a big bureaucracy AND the fear of the Congressional Review Act. It's the nuclear option where Congress not only reverses an agency decision but also ban the agency from ever doing that thing again in the future.
But Congress can only go far back so agencies are racing to put out regulations now so that a potentially hostile Congress in 2024 can't undo what they did easily.
See for example net neutrality from the FCC, FTC regs, airline refund regs from FAA and more.
Yes, all of this might help in the election, but if this were really just about elections, you would see these announcements in September and October.
Or shorter, given that this regulation is aimed at stoners who are notorious for having memory issues, you'd release this 6 days before an election, not six months before.
I'm not underestimating that, I think the timing of this approval was probably politically motivated.
Sure things can take a long time when people want to slow them down or don't care about them. But things can move extraordinarily quickly when it comes to moving billions of dollars into the pockets of friends. That's basically my point.
Doesn't everyone want freedom, justice, fairness, etc.
(unfortunately everyone doesn't agree on the definition of these terms)
(also: "But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?")
Romans have enslaved our children, raped our wives, desecrated our holy places and burned our priests. They razed our villages, slaughtered our herds, and forced our young men into their military service.
"Free will" and "consciousness" are poorly defined, as each means different things to different people.
I can't remember if it was Frederick Nitzsche or Alistair Crowley who said there's only one thing you can do which is truly your own will; that definition seems to me inherently deterministic in a way which violates other people's ideas of free will.
I've seen (and been confused by) a Young Earth creationist fundamentalist Baptist, who cleaned not to believe in evolution "because [he] believed in free will".
"Consciousness" apparently has around 40 definitions.
I am deeply confused by much of BDSM, but I am aware that some people report enjoying the experience of not having any control, of their ability to choose being taken away from them.
Can you also give an example of what you mean by "free will" such that your chosen definition does help?
OK, I can see how your definitions of those two things are tautologically identical. But this still goes with my point that both terms have many different definitions, so you can end up with situations like yours where the terms are equivalent.
Personally, I've never heard that definition of free will, to know that you are choosing; and for occasions where I don't even realise I'm making a choice (e.g. when failing to notice I've been given a false dichotomy, or which fork of a road I take on long walks), I still have what I would call a conscious experience of them… but then, for me, "consciousness" is usually "qualia" (but if the sentence is more complex then it may also be for example one of "not asleep/comatose" or "not subconscious/pre-conscious").
Likewise, my default (in the absence of further context, e.g. being on this website) assumption when I hear "free will" is that the person using those words means something like a supernatural soul, but the underlying physical phenomena which is actually backing this is some combination of hidden information and being too complex to predict, which is why we also witness animism in various forms
On the subject of not having a mental representation of what this means, I have also been pondering recently about "literally unthinkable thoughts", which may directly sound like the same kind of paradox, but is at the meta-level and about the same kind of (apparent) paradox (that isn't a paradox at all for the people using the terms in those ways): https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/30-13.54.02.html
Yes they do, for example lobbyists and donors and buddies want to get rich at the expense of the country and its people, and the common plebs don't want that.
Except that author argues for "the market" to be more in charge than governments, which baffles me because the market is also people. I'd be surprised if people pretend the market is still rational: see nfts. Or the modern stock market.
Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo. The author was heading in the right direction when writing about economic education and fighting misinformation, imo that's the correct path, we can't permanently fix stupid since our brains are all basically completely broken, but we can mitigate. Utopia may be unreachable but I think we can improve.
> I'd be surprised if people pretend the market is still rational: see nfts. Or the modern stock market.
NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
> All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo.
Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
Well, NFTs are worthless now and growth stock has expected growth priced in many years in advance. Predicting the future just use really hard. I'd argue that prices of things in the now are pretty rational.
> NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
Well, sort of, except that "added ownership value" is a scam - links to an image are encoded on-chain, not the image or even a hash of an image. People think they're buying art when instead they're buying a URL.
> What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
Sure thing. The current organization of capitalist society rewards actions that increase profit short-term, such as stock buybacks at the expense of layoffs, and not actions that increase profit long-term, such as sustaining a labor force that maintains and builds upon institutional knowledge. Institutions "get away with this" by leveraging the coercive nature of capitalist society (work, often in bad conditions, or die), but because the coercive short term actions are the ones that are rewarded, this will probably lead to total systemic collapse, like when the British pushed the American colonies too far and completely lost control and their entire colonial investment... and again in India, some Caribbean islands, etc. Not to mention all the slave revolts throughout history. Extractive, compulsory, coercive capitalism is only ever a short-term gains focused mechanism.
The greater example for our era though is climate change. There simply aren't "market forces" that can punish extractive behavior and reward sustainable behavior. Because it's cheaper to mine and burn coal in the short term than it is to do material science research and build good solar panels, the coal burning companies win out. Under capitalism, where political power correlates to capital, this means they can leverage the State to give them even greater incentives, and throttle the last remaining channel for long-term good-for-humanity projects that might not necessarily be profitable anytime soon: government sponsored research. See: exxon promoting climate misinformation despite being totally aware of climate change in the 70s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Under capitalism, long term gain requires high short term capital investment, which of course comes with risk, and the risk is too great to invest in sustainable technologies when you can keep burning oil. The collapse will come with environmental collapse, or, even if we invent incredible carbon-sequestering technologies, when the oil and coal simply run out. That won't matter though, because the political power of coal-burners will have become so great that they can just leverage the State and its monopoly on violence to continue to serve their needs as they see fit.
So TLDR capitalism rewards things that are bad for the earth and the people trying to live on it.
> Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
What would be the solution? More frequent elections are welcome to me, every 2 years or I'll take 3. That should hopefully lower the delaying strategy and easily sniff bribes since they don't have much time.
Anarchists argue that dissolving permanent positions that have regular elections is a solution. Rather than have a predefined role such as "president" or "senator," political positions are invented on-the-fly on an as-needed basis. For a new harbor, you might elect a Harbormaster, who helps design the harbor to be useful and not harmful to the local ecology, organize usage agreements, processes, signage, infrastructure, etc. Then, when the harbor is built, the office of Harbormaster is dissolved, and things are set to run "automatically" based on prior agreements. Perhaps if there's a dispute, a new Harbormaster is elected, or perhaps simply a adjudicator, or mediator, etc.
The same could be done for basically all political offices. Essentially, any person with any political power would need to be able to justify them holding that power for every second they hold it, and the moment they can't, or the people decide they can't, that office should be abolished.
The saddest thing is that people rush to vote and be lied to by politicians that spend 3.5 years bickering, getting courted by lobbyists and ignoring all their pledges to the people.
We call it democracy, proudly wear pins saying "I Voted!" and shame on you if you ever criticize it.
This should make your blood run cold. Executive Orders were never intended to be the avenue through which novel law was established. The Executive has absorbed so much of what was the purview of the legislative branch it isn't even funny.
While I would like to see the decriminalization of all drugs, I do not think President should act like an emperor and just pass EOs. EO are not meant for this sort of actions. Remember, next president is going to be Trump and he can pass even worse EOs.
I do not buy this excuse. One party has no hangups about issuing ridiculous EOs. The other should rid itself of its hangups in issuing rational humanitarian EOs, because that results in the best outcome for humanity.
Ultimately they did not do that because they expect this cannabis inevitability to be disruptive and want the rollout to appease the pharmaceutical companies that donate to their campaigns.
Yes, exactly, reactionaries will continue to leverage every state apparatus they can get their hands on to cement their hold on power, and liberals will continue to wring their hands and pat each other on the back about not "misusing the tools of democracy." Thus you are right, Trump will win because he'll declare himself president, the liberals will do nothing, and American democracy will be completely dismantled within the decade.
There's always someone who wants to blame capitalism. It's an inbuilt survival instinct to collect as many resources as possible. It's just only humans that have the technology to destroy while doing it.
I don't advocate communism. Even communism supported technological development, which I do not. And humans don't like to destroy the biosphere at all; it is just a byproduct of our basal instincts in large social groups, and we should learn to get past that.
You're on an unusual website for someone who does not support any technological development. You're not in favour of caveman technology even? Clubs and fire? Going to be a cold winter.
Well, there are some interesting discussions here (sometimes). I don't believe in echo chambers but about talking with people about ideas.
I don't advocate for a complete shunning of technology, but rather a cautious approach towards it, somewhat like the Amish but with Christianity replaced with a reverence for nature.
We will never stop using basic tools and fire but there has got to be a better optimum somewhere that uses less than all the wasteful stuff we're doing now.
Interesting outlook. I don't say you're 100% wrong, but getting enough people to make a difference to support you might be difficult. I think 99% of people never stop to question whether they should do anything, just rush headlong into the new consumable/widget.
Yes, but I love wild animals. When I hear about birds and insects and spiders going extinct, I feel a terrible sadness and for that reason at least I am trying to figure out a better path and convince people of it. It might never work given the momentum of 8 billion, but most people are equally convinced they can never win the lottery and yet someone always does.
I care about animals as much as I care about humans which is why I do not support technological growth, which just exports suffering into the animal world for our comfort.
"We will never stop using basic tools and fire but there has got to be a better optimum somewhere that uses less than all the wasteful stuff we're doing now."
Personally, I love birds and animals and natural ecosystems, which is why I can never love technology: the two are at odds and technology has been more destructive to them than anything else.
"Personally, I love birds and animals and natural ecosystems"
Me too, but I also love technology and see no fundamental problem between the two.
So no, I do not love pesticides or the toxic waste of conventional mining.
But I would love a smart robot working the fields with no need for toxic chemicals. And mining can also be done in a non toxic way. It is just more expensive with current tech.
So far, there is no evidence that mining could ever be done in a sustainable way, nor have we any evidence that advanced technology could be sustainable. Since the industrial revolution, it has not been and we have made no significant steps to change it.
Socialists really hate freedom, don't they? Somehow, it's always "capitalism" in question when it is, in fact, freedom. It's none of the government's business what somebody takes into their body. All drugs should be decriminalized anyway.
Smoking and alcohol take millions of lives every year, yet we say "people have the right" to drink or smoke. Why is marijuana different, which is way less dangerous than alcohol, which is pure poison?
If it is voluntary, repeated, and the person of sound mind, I can't see why the government should prevent a terminal patient who is in constant pain from dying with dignity on their own terms.
I am actually not against marijuana, nor am I a socialist. I am just pointing out its role in this case. Incidentally, I am against alcohol very much as well.
I do not believe the government should regulate what goes in our bodies. I am just pointing out the way the government is using it as a tool.
Frankly, I really don't care whether the government criminalizes drugs or not.
Look, I don't drink; I don't smoke; I don't do drugs. I did it all at one point.
I'm not advocating for any of the stuff; on contrary. I advocate against using it. But people should have choice. Also, I'm advocating for not putting people in prison for possessing a plant and destroying their lives. How many young people have been destroyed who had a chance for a decent life, but everything was destroyed because of maybe one mistake they had made?
I don't smoke tobacco, I seldom drink, and I don't use marijuana. Those are habits I hope my kids avoid too. Nonetheless I would never wish for a world where my kids go to prison for failing to avoid them.
But they do. Your kids will be put to prison for drunk driving, drinking in public places or you will go to prison for buying them booze. Is it an oppressive world? Do you feel the urge of strongly fighting against it and promote alcohol? I'm amazed how people regard fighting for legalisation of yet another drug as some sort of a freedom fighting act.
Well that's a topic shift. Outlawing a thing is not the same as outlawing its abuse.
I'm against drunk driving, yes. I'm also against pilots flying without any sleep. But I would disagree with the assertion that anyone who stays up late belongs in prison.
Sometimes the "cure" (in this case, prison time) is worse than the "disease" (marijuana use).
That's quite a stretch, comparing lack of sleep to marijuana. Lack of sleep doesn't get you hooked.
I've been pretty happy about cigarettes getting gradually outlawed, now I'm supposed to be cheering the rise of marijuana? As if we don't have enough junkies already.
It’s a less-harmful alcohol substitute. I have multiple friends who’ve gone “California sober” and it has sure looked like nothing but a good change.
It’s by far the best sleep aid I’ve personally found. Practically miraculous. Huge change for the better, I’ve gone several months at a time without it on a couple occasions since starting and holy crap, life used to be terrible. Extremely low-risk, doesn’t leave me hung over feeling like a lot of the legal sleep aids do. Plus, hell, it’s a lot of fun to watch some MST3K while it’s kicking in.
Almost no serious interactions, so you can take it while ill and having to take other drugs, to help (enormously) with sleep or appetite or whatever.
For that matter, having a damn effective pain reliever and sleep aid that you can just keep on hand for when you get the flu or something, and not have to go suffer through a waiting room for a prescription while ill, is a giant QOL boost.
Has society ever been safe, productive or prosperous? I’d argue it hasn’t. I think smaller collectives have managed to eek out a bit of solace but society as a whole has always been at each other’s throats. Our notion of productivity is mostly moved forward by one hand not seeing the other.
Modern first world countries are incredibly safe, productive and prosperous by any historical measure. You have to have a completely skewed perspective not to see this.
> A safe, productive and prosperous society cannot be built by drug addicts.
Historian Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was built on a collective caffeine and sugar high, from imported tea and cane sugar from its colonies and trading partners.
Neither sugar nor caffeine has the same effects as drugs like alcohol and marijuana. It's pretty asinine to classify them as even being in the same category.
It's hard to know where to start when someone espouses this mentality, but I suggest you start with looking up a chart of addiction VS harm for different substances, you might be in for a surprise.
Yet it's often claimed that civilization and brewing alcohol grow in tandem. We certainly have evidence of its importance in Egypt, Europe, and Africa come to mind as traveling along side cultural growth.
"Normalize" in this sense means "to make culturally acceptable". A thing can be legal but still be taboo, for example, in Japan tattoos are legal but you might get discriminated against at an onsen if the owner doesn't want tattoos on display in their establishment.
Weed might be "normalized" in some communities, but a large portion of Americans will silently judge you if you are a recreational drug user regardless of it is weed or cocaine or fentanyl. Contrast to, say, beer or wine, which the majority of Americans will not silently judge you for indulging in moderation.
>Contrast to, say, beer or wine, which the majority of Americans will not silently judge you for indulging in moderation.
In point of fact, it's often flipped around. It's only been the last few years that I can tell someone I don't drink and be met with lots of, "Good for you!"s rather than silent judgement.
I never had a drink until I was 27, and at the time, I found it easier to keep that a secret than to talk about it.
But you're right. I'm not drinking again, and people are way less likely to question that choice now. I can't remember the last time it was questioned, actually.
Well yeah. But thats why the premise makes no sense. At this point weed is as culturally acceptable as anything else as far as I can tell. And I travel a lot, that's true in Texas and NYC and wherever else.
Sugar is! AND it causes great long-term harm, hard to quantify how much since there is basically no control group, since it's given to children early on, it's put in near everything, and it's cheap as dirt.
It's disappointing that this guy can call cannabis users "drug addicts" and get away with it, but we can't really respond in-kind without breaking HN rules.
I've seen way too much harm done by alcohol than good. Unfortunately, it's already normalised since ages, but I'm glad it's getting regarded in a negative light more and more.
People complain about being sent to jail for weed as if this they are suffering a political persecution, but people can get in legal trouble for drinking alcohol in public places or illegally producing or selling it as well. In some European countries, if both parents are caught drinking alcohol at the same time, even just beer, they'll be stripped of their parental rights. Imagine if that would be a law in America for people who smoke weed. This would be called a genocide or something along the lines of political persecution, some absolutely laughable arguments.
Cigarettes are straightforward evil and harmful. The usage of tobacco is extremely idiotic, it was normalised and promoted by the tobacco companies for profit, despite all the known negative effects.
Gambling must be strictly forbidden. It's pure evil and it's only harming both people and society. In America, gambling isn't freely available to people, same as in many other countries. Try to run a casino in your back yard and get to enjoy the company of some handsome guys in blue. Is it oppression?
Sugar should be limited, same as many other harmful components used in the food production. Excessive usage of sugar leads to obesity which again, is bad for everyone. European countries pretty much do some really good job in this regard.
I'm really annoyed by the hypocrisy of people who so eagerly try to promote and normalise weed as if this is going to help everyone. It wouldn't. I really wouldn't want to see my children smoking it, offered by some chavs who would be friends of their friends I would not approve because of their low behaviour. Weed is same bad as alcohol, nicotine, gambling and sugar you mentioned. It slows down intellectual development of children and degrades the intellect of adults as well. Yes, weed can be a good antidepressant or a pain-relieving medication - if consumed for a short period of time and strictly when it's necessary. This whole hysteria with legalisation of weed reminds me of tobacco companies aggressively promoting cigarettes through the media back in the previous century or modern pharma peddling opioids.
>In some European countries, if both parents are caught drinking alcohol at the same time, even just beer, they'll be stripped of their parental rights.
"The DEA’s proposal, which still must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, would recognize the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. However, it would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use."
It is in fact because they were ordered to do so by the US FDA, who by law decides what schedule drugs should be in. It started with MDMA, then LSD, Psilocybin and marijuana. In that order. They signaled the DEA to reschedule all those things because, in fact, they are legitimate medicine and I cannot help to wonder if that started with MAPS (maps.org) applying to do trials with MDMA for PTSD and being *beyond* due dilligent.
The FDA will collect data from any relevant agency whenever something (at least drugs( are applied for $whatever use. I have heard through the grapewine that the FDA were downright furious to learn the DEA had lied about MDMA for years while veterans are killing themselves daily. Much of the DEA data supposedly showed a ton of deaths attributed to MDMA just because a pill with a logo was being sold as if it was MDMA, while in fact it was sooooo many other dangerous things. The US DEA lies about just about everything. These substances are not depency-forming like opioids. If the DEA of any US alphabet soup move their lips they are lying.
The empathogen and psychdelics are not even habitforming: Do you know what happens if you do LSD daily for a week? I do, You can lick an entire sheet on the 7th day and hardly feel a thing, which I know because I have. Israel has been leading the way in marijuana research for decades. 90 year old holocaust surviors inhale marijuana vapor,for PTSD. I find extreme relief from PTSD myself using marijuana vapor: The nightmares stop, and suddenly I sleep 8 hrs a night, a few days of that I almost forget I have PTSD. Then I moved back the "richest nation of earth" (and it can go fuck itself) and essentially have to be a criminal to get regular sleep to function keep a job and not live in a perpetual nightmare. WE have Bedrocan / Bedrolight, but nobody can get a script for it because of all the nonsense authorities and socialized medicine/psychiatry thinks about it. Terminally ill cancer patients have begged to try it and at least on one occasion die 6 days after the news that he got denied died, in hospital from accute opioid poisoning. THey kill cancer patients with opiods all the time.
And WTF are DEA doing with offices in Copenhagen, Denmark?! They set up shop there and suddenly swedish police (SSI) has endless kilos of cocaine to plant and don't want the labs analyzing it following swedish law (the law say to destroy within 3 months of seizure and lab analysis and it has been all over national tv in the Scandinavian nations they Police active tried to stop them destroy man y many kilos of it, 9kg of which they were caught planting.). Oh, and SSI police have a tendency to become cocaine addicts. -All that cocaine with no oversightmakes it an occupational hazard, I guess.
IMHO, if you go to war for me, you deserve the best treatment available for your injuries. MDMA assisted therapy trials have helped veterans I know personally. I stoppped drinking liquor & wine the first time I tried marijuana, 20 years ago. The UN removed cannabis from the narcotics list in 2020, for decades it was embarassing: None of its cannabinoid components ever went on it as no narcotic effect were demonstrated they were listed as psychotropic substances, along with caffeine, psychdelics, nicotine, alcoholm etc. The original Opioum conventions had a clause specifically permitting businesses to have upto 500g for resale in small quanties to adults. That is how Dutch Coffee Shios exist. The UN listedcannabis in the 1930's under the __assumption__ of opium like effects, nobody what was in marijuana until late in the 60s, many years after the 1961 Narcotics treaty.
I am still waiting for the war on tylenol, which has killed over 100k in US a year for decades. Remember when opioids killed 100k a year in the US? The entire world does, yet most people dunno about Iran's struggle: almost half the afghan heroin ends up i Iran, has for decades. Afghanistan makes about 80% of illicit heroin.
I did some AI-assisted research on this, and have come to the following tentative conclusions:
1. The re-scheduling will happen (90%), the administrative hurdles will be cleared. Only counterexample I could find was Kratom in 2016, which was the reverse of this situation, and the DEA dropped the proposal at the public comment stage.
2. Trump will not reverse it if elected (80%). He's been pro-states-rights on cannabis (or outright legalization) going all the way back 1990, and has criticized Biden on this.
3. Unlikely many US states that outlaw it will change, but I do predict (75%) at least one major European country will follow suit within a year, given Germany beat US to the punch
4. Effects in the US will be minor, outside of weed stores using the banking system as another comment pointed out, since most enforcement is state level.
5. But if there are changes, the best evidence we have on this comes from state legalization, where the effects are estimated to be huge (+3% state income, +17% substance use disorders).
These conclusions are mine, based on research the AI did. None of these probabilities were directly output, it simply found lots of news articles, made simple models, researched what people have said & done historically.
>... it simply found lots of news articles, made simple models, researched what people have said & done historically.
Those are the sources OP is asking about. In point of fact, it would help if AI could provide the sources it used to determine it's response, that way users can verify it's accuracy.
Utter bullshit. Reclassifying schedule 1 Drugs requires the approval of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the UN. Otherwise, they are just reclassifying it under an already reclassified treaty structure as a red herring.
The Psychotropic Substances Act modified the existing schedule, but left other acts in tact - those other acts are the ones being modified by this nonsense circus.
Now, there may be some procedural red tape to go through, but it would be odd for the UN to reject such a change when their own scheduling agrees with the change.
Help me out here, because I'm genuinely trying to grok your point but, for whatever reason, it's not clicking for me. You originally stated:
>Reclassifying schedule 1 Drugs requires the approval of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the UN.
In response to the person above you in this comment chain, you then suggested that their understanding was wrong and that they're "falling for the bamboozle". I'm not sure how the NYT piece is false or a bamboozle, given that it clearly states:
>The vote by the Commission for Narcotic Drugs, which is based in Vienna and includes 53 member states, considered a series of recommendations from the World Health Organization on reclassifying cannabis and its derivatives.
So, at one point you say that the Commission for Narcotic Drugs needs to be the commission to approve the rescheduling, but when you're told that they did in fact do that, you then tell us that that's wrong. I would love to be steered in the right direction here, if you don't mind.
That's because you're intentionally missing the first point where I said that's under a different treaty. Probably because you aren't actually interested in learning the complexity of international drug laws, but simply buying into political nonsense.
Edit: It makes sense you think I'm being hostile by pointing out facts since that's what you took issue with to begin with.
The only thing I am intentionally trying to do is to understand what you're saying. What's up with the hostility here?
Edit: It's not that I think you're being hostile by pointing out facts, it's that you're telling me I am "intentionally missing the point", which is not true, and you then said that I'm not interested in learning about complex drug laws and would rather buy into political nonsense. Call it what you want - hostility, being an asshole, whatever - but it's certainly not helpful nor productive.
Clearly, there are lines being blurred here. In your first post, you said that a specific commission was responsible for changing the classification, and hey - that commission actually did do that, regardless of whether or not it was under a different treaty. Because there are multiple treaties, this is a very complex issue and it should be crystal clear that I'm having trouble sorting it out (I even said as much in my first response). That's why I'm asking you to help explain it to me, and instead of saying, "Sure bud, lemme help," you're trying to paint me as some kind of ignorant asshole. And I never "took issue" with anything, I just highlighted that it was confusing.
Good for you for understanding it! I don't, hence my ask.
Edit 2: And I usually try not to do this, but it seems like I'm not the only person who is confused here. Your comment got downvoted to the point that it turned grey, while my initial response asking for clarification has four upvotes as of the time of me writing this. Seems to me like there are other people who aren't understanding your point.
I'm quite ignorant about how international law and treaties interact with domestic policy. Could you educate me? What is the mechanism within US law by which this reclassification requires approval by that UN commission?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotropic_Substances_Act_(U...
The above link is the Act that governs the USA's international obligations based on our treaty with the UN to schedule specific drugs and under those terms only allowed to reschedule Schedule 1 drugs with the approval of the UN; often after a review of the drugs medicinal purposes by the WHO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Drug_Abuse_Preve...
The above is a "DEA" schedule of drug classifications that the government can play around with and bullshit us on. Many of Cannabis schedules have already been reduced based on specific compounds of THC under other treaties enacted before the 1978 alignment from above. These domestic rescheduling may have an affect on legal charges or banking, but cannot address the overarching classifier of Schedule 1 drugs which is the UN based on the 1st link.
The 1961 convention, which as far as I know has not been contravened (w.r.t. cannabis) by the subsequent acts only bans non-medical (and non-scientific) uses of cannabis. Schedule IV would probably be sufficient to comply with the US's obligations there, and Schedule III certainly is.
>These domestic rescheduling may have an affect on legal charges or banking, but cannot address the overarching classifier of Schedule 1 drugs which is the UN based on the 1st link.
So, you're acknowledging that changes to legal charges, banking capabilities and so forth are benefits that come from this reclassification, but you're also calling this change "utter bullshit" and a "red herring"?
"may have an affect on legal charges" - for which there are many levied that don't directly correlate to a drug offense; such as the Texas cannabis tax stamp requirement. If you don't pay taxes on your illegal cannabis in Texas they can charge you with tax evasion. Making it federally "legal" in a certain context, may have an affect on states ability to make jackass laws like the Texas cannabis tax stamp law.
Banking, isn't necessarily limited by the UN treaties - but since huge amounts of cash are flowing into cannabis businesses that are unbanked, it means Wall Street is without a massive influx of investment capital and return opportunities. Allowing the DEA to make changes to a schedule may help remove domestic barriers so banks can capture what they don't directly control.
I think most people agree that weed shouldn't be a schedule 1 drug, but I believe that the movement to decriminalize will have unforeseen consequences on our society. Marijuana use leads to cognitive decline and exacerbates psychiatric conditions even in healthy individuals, full stop. The literature on this is clear. Whether the tradeoff is worth it or not (the increased pleasure, for the decrease in cognitive ability), should be up to the individual to decide.
The problem I have is that no one is talking about the potential consequences when they're talking about legalization. My 70 year old mom is going to parties with her friends where they all have a new habit of smoking marijuana because "it's legal and safe". Regulators, politicians, and advocates only hail the positive effects of marijuana and no one is talking about the cognitive risks involved.
The reason probably is because I think most people agree that it's stupid to send people to jail for smoking marijuana. But they're conflating the idea that decriminalization is good with the idea that marijuana then must not be bad for you. And this is wholly not true, and I wish more people were talking about this.
Btw, I know I will probably get downvoted for this because marijuana users don't want to face the fact that they might be dampening their long-term cognitive potential but please go do a full review of the literature—you will begin to share the doubt that I have.
Can you provide some of your top resources for this argument? I feel like if this were true it would be much more well-known. Maybe you're misreading a paper?
A systemic review of 26 studies [1] in 2019 found that:
"Although variability in the cannabis products used, outcomes assessed, and study quality limits the conclusions that can be made, modest reductions in cognitive performance were generally detected with higher doses and heavier lifetime use."
The American Journal of Psychiatry [2]:
"Long-term cannabis users showed cognitive deficits and smaller hippocampal volume in midlife. Research is needed to ascertain whether long-term cannabis users show elevated rates of dementia in later life."
This study published in JAMA [3]:
"...among 3385 participants with cognitive function measurements at the year 25 visit, 2852 (84.3%) reported past marijuana use, but only 392 (11.6%) continued to use marijuana into middle age. Current use of marijuana was associated with worse verbal memory and processing speed; cumulative lifetime exposure was associated with worse performance in all 3 domains of cognitive function. After excluding current users and adjusting for potential confounders, cumulative lifetime exposure to marijuana remained significantly associated with worse verbal memory..."
Honestly, we should look to fix the issues that lead to people depending on weed, alcohol, and other drugs instead.
These drugs are escapes for people - and a lot of them, especially younger kids get completely hooked on the escaped from reality from these drugs (including alcohol).
We should instead be limit the use of these drugs and have teams dedicated to studying why people are turning to these instead. It's OK to have them on the weekends, but most people I know who smoke weed are on it the majority of the time. Alcohol isn't much better - most do limit it to after hours / weekends, but there are a few who tend to overdo it.
From a biased point of view, I've had a few young family members and friends who turned to weed as their go-to for their daily lives, and it has changed their lifestyle, made them far less willing to live out their life and pursue actual goals. They definitely had both the potential and backing of their families (mid to high class) to do great, but chose to instead live a life of 'rotting away' in their words. Out of them only one has turned their life around (still smoking on weekends) citing that it made them not want to do absolutely anything in their day to day life.
It could just be as simple as it’s a lot of fun. I smoked pot for a lot of years, not because I had a hole in me or anything, it was just a very fun way to go about the day. I haven’t smoked in a decade because long term usage led to mild agoraphobia for me but went away a couple of months after I stopped.
Yeah. I mean, it's a great accompaniment to some fresh fruit and cheese on a sunny day, a good album, maybe the company of a loved one. It never made me feel like a different person or like I was on a vacation from reality like alcohol could. I've known lots of people who smoke a little, or used to smoke a little and then stopped (I haven't for a long time), and also people who smoke a lot and seem to be doing fine, and also people who clearly smoke in excess, to their detriment. But I have to say that the worst potheads I've ever met seemed happy, healthy, and well-adjusted compared to the alcoholics.
I think the long term effect depends on how your life is going.
Just like with alcohol, if your life is trash: bad job, no friends, no relationship, then turning to weed or alcohol can be seen as an escape from your life and eventually it will take over.
But if you are in a good headspace, then what is the problem really? I can meet some friends and get plastered with them for a weekend and not touch booze for a month after that because I have work/family commitments that would make getting drunk impractical,
I am fairly certain that weed can be used exactly the same way.
Having a few drinks with friends or alone after a a hard day's work is fun. Smoking a joint with friends while sunbathing on the beach is fun. Getting high every day and drunk everyday is a problem but it doesn't have to be that way.
I know/knew a lot of people who smoke daily. It's honestly close to 50/50 where daily smokers excel and experience more than they would have without, and daily smokers who stagnate.
A lot of them naturally moved away from smoking when its purpose was served too.
>Honestly, we should look to fix the issues that lead to people depending on weed, alcohol, and other drugs instead.
It doesn't have to be exclusive or. People are looking to fix these issues. In the mean time, we don't have to ruin people's lives by convicting them as felons.
I'm sorry but after seeing how american gradually get into worse and worse drugs, and seeing channel 5's video on people using tranq... yeah I think complete ban on drugs for non medical reasons is the best choice.
People wanna get high. There's a plausible hypothesis that we invented farming to have a more reliable way to make beer. We have 2 main options:
1. Attempt to ban it.
2. Accept that people are going to get high, and try to limit the harm.
The first has been a complete and utter disaster. The second -- e.g. applying the same rules about who can use it and where they can use it as alcohol -- is the only sane option.
Prohibition is about as effective as abstinence-only education and for many of the same reasons. We can either work with how we wish people would behave or how they're actually going to behave.
Drugs aren't just an escape from suffering. I have a very good life. I also like having a beer with friends or, yes, smoking weed with friends. That amplifies an already positive experience.
If you magically eliminated all suffering in my life, I'd still enjoy a beer at dinner.
Why? Drugs are fun. I drank a hot cup of coffee this morning and enjoyed the warmth, taste, and way it made me feel. Those were all pleasant sensations that would be hard to get another way. Why shouldn't I be allowed to experience them?
Roller coaster rides are fun and cause a release of adrenalin in me, which leads to feeling hyperalert, excited, and energized. That's fun! I don't want to live in a society that wouldn't let me enjoy adrenalin releases.
This morning my wife told me she loved me, and I enjoyed a nice wash of endorphins from it. What's wrong with enjoying that?
The common thread here is that there's not a clean dividing line between "bad" drugs and "good" drugs. All animals enjoy certain chemicals. We're evolved to. That's what makes us (in nature) dig into food that's healthy for us, and drives us to reproduce. A mind free from drugs is going to die of misery in relatively short order.
In what sense is your mind free in a world where psyotropics are prohibited? LSD and psilocybin aren't addictive or habbit-building, think about that. Don't knock it 'till you try it.
I've watched the same videos, and the impression I got was that the main gateway drug for tranq was prescription painkillers prescribed legally by a doctor.
Maybe we should consider banning drugs for medical reasons too...
tranq is an adulterant added to fentanyl. I don't think that is apples to apples here. The entire opiate ecosystem is honestly insane at the moment. The only street drug available is fentanyl and it's often mixed with the vet drug tranq which is horrible for humans. It prevents wound healing. I would say there needs to be some kind of harm reduction done in this space too because apparently fentanyl cannot be stopped.
Yes, because Prohibition was such a ringing success. Just because someone says you can't do something does not prevent someone from doing that thing. If people want something badly enough, they will find a way. When that want has progressed to being a literal need from addiction, the ways found will become more and more bold/risky.
Hell, even if you added the drug that blocks the opiate receptors into the water supply like fluoride so everyone is getting dosed, addicts will just switch to bottle water. Legislation does not prevent anything. It only increases those deemed as a criminal.
I downvoted you because while it may not have been successful at getting Americans to stop drinking, it was effective at reducing violent crimes caused by drinking, as well as the negative health effects such as liver cirrhosis. The anti drug control crowd has done a great job commandeering popular opinion on this topic. I found this (non-academic) article informative to this end.
Edit: to the downvoters, I look forward to future academics and politicians being absolutely shocked when it turns out the absence of evidence is in fact not evidence of absence and there are a myriad of negative health and societal consequences from legalizing marijuana use
In addition to prohibition being impossible (and a policy failure in every case where it has been tried, without a single historical exception - one of the most consistent policy outcomes in all of political science), it also isn't cognizable to define the word "drug" for the purposes of your calculus here.
It’s not like any other country in the world is any better. All countries have problems. My friend is one of those rich liberals who left the country for EU bouncing between Spain Germany and Netherlands before settling in Germany. Now he complains about life there and thinking about Singapore..
I’m from a 3rd world country. Corruption and people treating others like ants is common. It’s why I grew up without running water or power there because of some asshole.
The best outcome is you try to win, because I didn’t choose to spawn into this hybrid RTS game with basically a free for all rules GTA online server.
You need money, planning, and resources to ensure your safety and prosperity.
One advantage to legalization (as implemented in Canada at least) is that THC content needs to be measured and labeled, so if you want to smoke something closer to your grandfather’s level you have the choice and aren’t at the mercy of whatever your dealer happens to have.
It's a matter of treaty law. States punched out a treaty on drugs and then promised each other to stick to it, pressuring other states to buy in.
Leaving a treaty means you change your relation to the other signatories and possibly a regulatory body that took part in developing the treaty. Sometimes it's cheap, sometimes it's been a justification for horrible atrocities over decades and decades.
In this case the latter is true. Ditching the UN convention is almost like saying you owe a lot of people restitution for the nasty things you did.
Which is why the UN needs to take the blame for the convention on drugs to go away, the signatories most likely won't.
There was a debate in the early 80s on whether the country should concentrate on treatment or enforcement. Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies. He usually chose the wrong approach.
The approach promised in Oregon failed because the original intent of the decriminalization was to also increase support for rehabilitation. This never ended up happening, so drug users were thrown back into the situations that got them into drugs in the first place, instead of being given a way out.
Those policies were not well funded or implemented, we should keep trying alternative solutions to the status quo.
In contrast to the "war on drugs" which has been extremely well funded, and implemented to the cost of our own liberties, tried for years and has not been successful either.
> tried for years and has not been successful either.
What's the measurement for success?
It seems, from a casual observer's perspective, we have fewer people trying hard drugs when the consequences are strict and known. We have more people trying hard drugs when the consequences are removed.
Neither system will achieve 0% drug usage - so which policy results in fewer people trying hard drugs?
It's not "the number of people who try hard drugs", which isn't a particularly interesting or meaningful number (lots of people, including myself, try hard drugs but never end up hooked on them and are productive members of society).
Try "the amount of harm caused to society". The drug war destroys more lives than hard drugs. It's a policy failure.
> The drug war destroys more lives than hard drugs. It's a policy failure.
Again, this does not seem as clear as you attempt to present it.
In areas with decriminalized hard drugs, drug usage dramatically increased. It has a direct impact on the lives of the users, and also secondary impacts on the lives of everyone around them and/or has to deal with them.
Drug usage is not the so-called "victimless" crime some position it as. It has a lot of effects on society as a whole.
> In areas with decriminalized hard drugs, drug usage dramatically increased. It has a direct impact on the lives of the users, and also secondary impacts on the lives of everyone around them and/or has to deal with them.
Absolutely. I'm no stranger to the impact of drug abuse, as I've had family and close friends become addicts.
Even so, the drug war is way worse. It adds violence and danger to drug use, making it more dangerous for users and those in their proximity. It increases policing and police militarization and violence. Punishments for possession destroy families and career prospects.
Every ounce of prevention bought by the drug war costs a pound of pain.
> Drug usage is not the so-called "victimless" crime some position it as. It has a lot of effects on society as a whole.
Responsible drug use is pretty victimless. Drug abuse has victims. But that's no different than alcohol, and banning that also caused way more harm than it prevented.
Enforcement is not a form of treatment, regardless we've been trying enforcement since the 70s and it's been a disaster. Why would you want to double down on that?
> Enforcement is not a form of treatment, regardless we've been trying enforcement since the 70s and it's been a disaster.
This is often said - but what do you actually mean by disaster? Hard drug usage is objectively lower in strict enforcement areas vs. non-enforcement areas like Portland was briefly.
Our prisons do a horrible job at rehabilitation. Our prisons themselves contain lots of drugs. Our prisons are, in my opinion, immorally run. As a nation we believe in retribution and are fine with prison rapes and other abuses that occur there.
The drug war has been a disaster in terms of cost/benefit regarding how much we've spent on it. It's been a disaster in terms of civil liberties. We Americans like to think we are free but walking around with $10,000 in cash will, if found out by police, result in it being seized. Civil asset forfeiture has caused many innocent people to be punished. It has been a disaster in terms of our national incarceration rate. Incarceration for drugs targets poor and minorities. Rich people rarely go to jail for drug use. For example, Rush Limbaugh got a fine and drug treatment.
There is a lot that I could talk about, but America's prison population comes to mind first. America has the largest prison population in the world, and they're essential a slave class. They get fewer rights and are forced to work for whatever company wants their labor.
On it's surface it seems to have worked better than these experiments. Otherwise the experiments would not be getting rolled back...
There's very few if any fans of what played out in Portland, for instance. Overt drug usage exploded and became a much worse problem. The exact opposite of what proponents had hoped.
Some will say "but they didn't do it right" or similar - tired arguments we hear every time pet policies fail.
This is a very un-nuanced take on what happened in Portland, and lines up with what the uncritical and uninformed national reporting about Portland has been saying.
It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
Ideas don’t execute themselves and when someone doesn’t deliver the goods, it is human nature to question their decision making ability in the first place.
Being defensive or arguing nuance is fine in theory, but in practice bad outcomes tend to reinforce biases.
I would prefer fully baked ideas that are rigorous and practical rather than purely utopian and just hoping for the best. One does not roll out underfunded programs that play with safety and health.
And... when dealing with humans - policies are often not enacted like we thought they would be in our head's under ideal conditions.
Policies are implemented by politicians and government drones, are beholden to budgets and meandering political sentiment of the population, etc. ie - they will never be implemented "correctly" - so we should pick the policies that are the hardest to get wrong and/or have the least negative side effects.
> It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
So... like almost every government program? What makes you convinced it can actually be achieved in reality? With real people, real politicians, real budgets that get robbed for other pet projects down the line...
Even if it was achieved in reality - let's pretend to wave a magic wand - what is the expected outcome? Fewer people doing hard drugs than before? That seems difficult to accept given all consequences will effectively be removed... how many celebrities (with effectively unlimited resources) struggle their entire lives with drug abuse - in and out of rehab, etc. It seems it's better to prevent people from becoming addicts in the first place, vs. attempt to treat/mitigate addiction after it has formed.
> What makes you convinced it can actually be achieved in reality?
It may never be achieved, regardless of my or your personal views on the subject at hand I think reasonable people can agree if you try and do something but do it poorly, and it doesn't work, that's not necessarily a failure of the thing but more a failure of the execution.
ex: I'm bad at welding so therefore welding is not a good way to hold two pieces of metal together, is an invalid/incorrect conclusion.
You strike me as the type of person who doesn't know that US urban crime decreased in 2023.
The novel thing in world of illicit drugs is that fentanyl is very hard to dose correctly, so death rates are higher than before. That new fact on the scene makes long term comparisons difficult. But, I would say given the dropping crime rates of the last 40 years, we're doing better than the previous waves of "tough on crime" policy including drug wars from the 1980s and 1990s, despite incarcerating a lot fewer people. So I think these "experiments" absolutely are working. That effectiveness may however be overshadowed by the specific dangerousness of fentanyl in the illicit market.
US is only lenient when compared to even more severe steamrollers of human rights. Executing individuals for drug possession is absolutely unconsciousable and unacceptable. Incarceration being less diabolical does not mean it is not still highly diabolical. Countless lives were and continue to be destroyed.
The state killing people is always unjustified since you can't prove 99%+ really did the crime. In fact, we can show the states and feds have put to death many of their own innocent citizens.
Compared to selling hard drugs on the street? Technically what you're describing is against the law, but given that people are selling hard drugs on the street, I doubt you could get the cops to care.
FWIW I asked ChatGPT how long the process would take from DEA putting the rule out for public comment until it becomes an active rule:
> The entire process can take from a few months to several years, depending on the complexity of the issue, the volume of public feedback, and the urgency of the reclassification.
I really don't think this is a positive in any way, unless you oppose recreational marijuana usage.
Making it a schedule III puts it back in "Doctor prescription" territory, and since there's now a legal route to getting it, a lot of these businesses that have operated with impunity are breaking a different set of laws if it's schedule III. No doubt that laws and decriminalization statutes would need to be updated to comply federally. Banks may be able to be used, but only if you're a registered pharmacy. It's really just a lot more questions and a lot more people to profit on the chain to selling it.
Most of the world still treats it as an illegal substance. In the US we have definitely allowed popular sentiment to make it appear much less harmful than it is. I'm not sure it belongs in schedule I, but it certainly doesn't belong OTC.
> I'm not sure it belongs in schedule I, but it certainly doesn't belong OTC.
How is it more dangerous than cigarettes or alcohol?
Prescriptions are basically a formality. There are a certain set of symptoms you have to describe to a doctor in order to get any particular drug, then you go to a doctor and get the prescription. It has to be this way because many of the conditions have no non-invasive tests to determine if the patient is lying and as much as the DEA would like it to be the case, doctors are not supposed to be cops and they can't be effective doctors if they have to play CYA all day.
But at that point all the law is doing is propping up pharma profits and inflating healthcare costs by routing recreational use through the insurance system, and screw that. If you want to eat pot brownies then you should a) pay the market price, not a tax to corporate shareholders, and b) pay it yourself, not stick the cost on everyone who buys health insurance.
You seem to believe that a move from Schedule I (totally illegal to sell) to Schedule III (legal to sell under some circumstances) is going to hit the reset button on state laws around cannabis. That seems unlikely, the states are already ignoring the feds on this, this is just a step the feds are taking to bring the federal legal landscape closer to the state landscape. The major changes will simply be, as others have stated, to make it possible to travel with cannabis (with an Rx) and for dispensaries and others to use FDIC insured banking and transfer mechanisms.
Other than that, nothing is likely to change unless states walk back the laws they've already passed.
Remember, it's already illegal on the federal level for these businesses to exist, and that isn't stopping them.
They've been thumbing their nose at more more serious laws until now, why would a downgrade in consequences suddenly make them burn down industries that bring in billions?
Know that the reason why it's illegal in so many places to begin with is because of the US. Weed wasn't really an "issue" anywhere. Until the US drug war began and spread to other countries thru international narcotic treaties.
Obviously there are outliers and certain cultures where domestic policy was also heavily at play (Japan). But many European countries didn't view weed as particularly problematic.
Supposed evidence of the harmfulness of cannabis compared to alcohol shows that cannabis absolutely deserves to be OTC and available for recreational use. Popular sentiment is popular precisely because the supposed harm has never materialized to the point of justifying the paternalistic and authoritarian control of social groups who tend to use cannabis.
