Yeah, this is common joke, especially when you feel ambivalent.
Examples:
"Do you want to go out for dinner tonight? Or should we stay in and save money?"
"Do you want cake or ice cream for dessert?"
"Should we prioritize this bug fix or focus on hitting our release target?"
Somebody might reply with tongue in cheek, "Yes", to indicate they agree with both parts, want both things, it's not a simple choice, etc.
FWIW, I encounter it more with older people. As a kid, I heard it often from uncles and grandparents.
Don't you hate it when you ask someone if they want coffee or tea and they say "yes"?
I mean, strictly speaking they answered the question. They do want a coffee or a tea. They just haven't yet specified which one they would like most...
~Don't you hate it when you ask that question out of curiosity, and then the person you asked gets all mad that you didn't give them either coffee or tea afterward?~
The question has several possible responses. "No, thank you," means the person wants neither coffee nor tea. "Coffee, please," and "tea, please" mean just what you think. "Yes, please," means that either coffee or tea would be acceptable, and the respondent is indifferent to which one.
This usually means "I'll take one of whatever you're having," and is probably intended to be less burdensome to the host, by allowing them to choose what they would prefer to serve rather than forcing them to defer to their guest.
Of course, the person might be trying for a cheap laugh rather than politeness. In that case, it would be appropriate to wait a beat, chuckle, optionally make a flirtatious gesture (such as a wink or arm touch), then ask "So either one is fine?"
The joke is in treating the "or" as the Boolean operator and collapsing it into a yes-no question.
Thus, the answer would be "no" if and only if legalization has had no effect whatsoever. As the asking of the question implicitly assumes that there has been an effect, answering yes therefore responds to the question in a very literal, truthful way, without actually conveying any new information.
This is my favorite way to punish a poorly structured interrogatory. It forces the follow-up question, "Which one?" Which can then be answered with "both."
Some people say that there are no stupid questions, but clearly, some questions are more intelligent than others.
It's good, because people are exercising their right to consume as they wish. It's bad, because that right is heavily taxed and regulated. It's good, because it's helped the economy. It's bad, because people spend way too much time thinking about it.
Somewhere a bunch of people are getting stoned, and they haven't even bothered to email you, they maybe didn't even send out so much as a tweet. What you hate, is the outspokenness of a small fraction of users. There's a fair chance you'd hate listening to these people no matter what they were on about at any particular moment.
Tax money hasn't appeared to make it to schools or roads, but that's not really a priority here (after all, Mississippi spends less). Commercial real estate prices in Denver have been driven up to the point where it's driven out established businesses who've seen their leases skyrocket. I'd say the biggest worry is what's going to happen if someplace like CA legalizes- CO has a history of boom and bust, and Denver becoming a ghost town of abandoned grow houses seems like the sort of thing that would happen here.
The usual shell game when pegging a new tax to education is that whatever old funds for education get pulled, and simply replaced with the new tax money.
So, if the schools were getting $3 million in subsidy before, they peg the pot taxes to schools, pull the previous $3 million to go to different pet projects, and the schools see (at best) a 0% change.
Tying marijuana taxes to education does somewhat lock the education budget in, so there's maybe an advantage, but generally speaking, it's a political move, because then you can paste anyone voting against whatever law as someone who is voting against education.
If I recall, most if not all the money was tagged for schools. Doing a quick search, it looks like CO made $76 million off MJ taxes in 2014. The new high school in Northfield I believe has a construction budget of around $50 million. That's one high school in a state with 644 high schools, not to mention all the middle and elementary schools. And that's not counting the schools that just need major work done. Denver in particular has many aging schools that need things like new boilers or central air or capital investments like a STEM/STEAM lab.
It seems like a lot of money, but when you look at what costs they're trying to cover, it doesn't go very far.
Seems like a bit much to compare the annual tax revenue to the total construction budget for a school. AFAIK, any type of construction is typically financed and treated in budgets as being paid off over the course of 30 years or so. Maybe the annual budget for school construction work statewide for the same year?
I live in Colorado; Boulder, specifically. People aren't consumed with the issue of legal weed. It just isn't a serious contender in the arena of concerns people bat about. Most people smoke it, but it's not a big deal. Take a vape to the mountain along with a Cliff bar. Enjoy the view.
The revenue and benefits the market brings to the state certainly aren't lost on its citizens though. =]
you know whats weird I was in Boulder recently (for about a month actually) I think I saw 1 maybe 2 people smoking...I couldn't even remember passing any places that sold it!
Smoking pot in public is still illegal, much like drinking in public is illegal. An apartment I lived in within Boulder had 1 or 2 people that would walk around while smoking, but I have yet to see anyone out and about the city while smoking.
So people that are trying to be legal about it will smoke in their homes.
Here in the UK, I see people smoking 'out and about' fairly often. Not every day, by any means, but enough for it not to be a total 'shock'. This is an advantage (one of many) of legalisation, IMO; when something is legal, it can be much more easily controlled because people actually respect the legislation. Here, anything goes so long as you can get away with it.
Colorado resident here. Everyone in law enforcement loves to talk about stoned driving, it's their wedge issue to get this over-turned. My issue with that logic is that people smoked before it was legal too. In fact I'd guess that other than out of state tourists the rate of people using marijuana hasn't changed much more than 2-3%. So driving stoned was illegal before, it's illegal now. Nothing has changed other than law enforcement feels like their federal drug boondoggle funds are drying up.
Here in Canada where the government has promised to legalize marijuana, the canard is underage usage. Quite regularly you see newspaper articles about studies on the effects of marijuana smoking on teenage brains.
I suspect that Canada will prohibit edibles for this reason.
With even the same parallels that consuming marijuana while underage was illegal before and will be illegal after. You may as well publish articles about the effects of alcohol on underage brains (which is actually quite detrimental) as an argument for prohibition.
Can you establish that marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol? If so, I'd be very interested to see your sources and metrics. If not, I'd be very interested to see a justification for why marijuana should remain illegal.
I did not, and am not, saying that it's harmless. That would be ridiculous.
But if it's less harmful than alcohol, a substance which is legal for consumption and moderated by the government, why should it be illegal? What's your justification for saying marijuana should be banned for reasons of harm, when you can't establish that it's more harmful than more easily available alternatives?
Or are you also arguing that alcohol should be banned, as well?
Edit: To answer your initial question, the logic here is "One harmful substance is legal, thus other substances which are less harmful should probably also be legal".
The logic here is that studies about the effects of a substance on youth has no merits in a discussion about the legality of adult use. Studies about the effects on adults would be more relevant.
I'm also Canadian, a high school teacher told me a whole bunch of students got suspended for selling weed brownies at school. He also said a girl got suspend for being drunk around the same time.
The law hardly matter in these cases, people do what they will do. If edibles are illegal kids will just make them at home.
I don't have any on hand, but I'm pretty there's been surveys showing teenagers in the US admit it's easier to get cannabis than alcohol. I know that was 100% true when I was in high school. All it took was a phone call to 1 of 10 possible sources who would then deliver it to your doorstep. Getting alcohol meant trying to find someone with an older friend or sibling willing to go out of their way, or driving to the sketchy part of the town next door and hoping that one liquor store would sell to you.
Once you make the conclusion that whether or not it's legal has no effect on whether people will use it, then everything else falls out from there. It's easier for kids to get illegal pot than legal and that will always be the case.
Can we just nuke the entire argument in this thread about vehicle deaths and push self-driving cars as hard as possible?
Pot. Alcohol. Texting. Talking on the phone. They all impair you terribly while driving. That does not require prohibition. That requires taking the human out of the loop for driving ~2.5 tons of metal down the highway.
For starters, I heartily agree. Full stack vehicle automation will save a great deal of lives and property damage.
And then we need to look at "What happens when we have 5 million people unemployed in a short time, due to rapid advancements in automation?" The Democrats aren't looking at this, and nor are the Republicans. Really, no party is looking at this. We have a few economists and scientific-y types talking about Mincome, but aside some experiments in Europe, it's being drowned out.
What do we have that can absorb such a hit on our financial system and not drop in a recession? How do we make sure these people don't simply sink when the 'bots come to take their job?
I'm a terrible driver, it's just hard to drive when I'm on ADD 100% of the time, and it means that I must live in the city. I look forward very much to self-driving cars.
Yes, but that was almost a hundred years ago. We've figured out how to ban substances now, as the huge success of the War on Drugs demonstrates. So we should try alcohol again.
(Big, fat /s on that, just in case it's somehow not obvious.)
Everything about enforcing driving stoned has changed. The stuff stays in your system too long to have a convenient test like alcohol does. So now you effectively have no way to prove whether or not someone was breaking that law.
I know it stays in fatty-tissue for a long time, but surely the fractional blood-content of THC is way higher 20 minutes after toking up than the next day?
I don't know about Colorado, but in many jurisdictions, the appearance of being impaired, plus a negative breath-test is sufficient cause for a blood draw already.
Police already have the authority to draw blood for alcohol-impaired driving. If you refuse, your driver's license is automatically suspended and the refusal can be used against you in court.
Detecting intoxication is a problem, but how is that different from before legalization? If someone was smoking illegally before, you still wouldn't be able to determine if they were driving stoned. Unless you're saying any amount of weed in their system should result in a DUI, even if it could have been from a week ago.
The illegality of the stubstance gave police an excuse to search the car, or to intimidate the driver into implicitly consenting to a search of the car, during which they inevitably find something the stoner or one of their friends forgot which leads to an arrest. I've seen it play out on COPS dozens of times.
I wonder why they don't go back to doing a sobriety test for detecting intoxication though. It worked ok before breathalyzers, if you can pass the test than presumably you are ok to drive.
One study found a field sobriety test to correctly classify impaired driving state due to THC 65-75% of the time [1]. The chance of a false positive seems too high to me given the harsh penalty of a DUI. Field sobriety tests have been shown to be ~91-94% reliable for alcohol impairment [2].
The evidence of the stuff stays in your system much longer than the impairment. There is also the issue of "tolerance" and or how the amount of substance present in urine or blood relates to the supposed impairment.
>So now you effectively have no way to prove whether or not someone was breaking that law.
But you can still perform an objective test to determine if someone is currently impaired. They need to design and validate a motor skills and reaction time test. I'm not sure why anyone cares more about why someone is impaired than they do about whether someone is impaired.
>I'm not sure why anyone cares more about why someone is impaired than they do about whether someone is impaired.
It's easy to target people who are engaging in unnecessary actions at the expense of driving capability. Drinking, using drugs, and texting fall under this category. People are much less accepting of punishments for things seemingly outside of personal control. Imagine the embarrassment for law makers when some mothers' advocacy group attacks them for banning all new mothers from driving (except those rare exceptions who function well on <4 hours of sleep.) Or the backlash for hardworking people getting arrested regularly because their multiple jobs keep them from getting an amount of sleep that makes driving permissible.
It was explained to me like this in the state I grew up in...
The law is to prevent dangerous driving. It doesn't matter if you have a sip of beer or a 6 pack, if it impairs you, that's against the law. HOWEVER, once your BAC reaches 0.08, that is proof enough of being impaired. Lower than 0.08, then they must show that you are impaired. And if you fail the sobriety field tests, you are impaired.
My point is, if you can't tell if someone is impaired, even after field tests, then maybe they aren't impaired. Regardless of what you suspect they may or may not have eaten. If they are impaired, the field tests will show and you can arrest them.
I see no point in making this easier for law enforcement. I don't think we need more specific laws, that just opens up new questions and loopholes.
We were always told (as far back as being 15 year-olds in Driver's Ed.) if you get pulled over and the Officer suspects you are impaired, always decline the field sobriety tests and ask for a Breathalyzer at the station. This does 2 things:
1) It provides a definitive test which would later stand in court (if needed).
2) Gives you more time to "sober up" if you actually have been drinking.
At the time, I remember thinking it was good information. In hindsight, it's rather funny to think it came from the High School teachers who were teaching Driver's Ed.
I believe most (all?) states now have implied consent laws, under the rationale that driving is a privilege not a right. So declining a field sobriety test may in fact lead to the same penalties as failing one. (Maybe worth a shot though?)
Interesting. I have not followed those types of laws in the 20 years (and 4 new states) since Driver's Ed.
Going back to the Michigan laws, Implied Consent does apply there today. However, the implied consent of chemical testing only appears to apply if you've been arrested. You can, however, still be fined for declining the field sobriety test while not under arrest.
Hopefully some of the tax revenue is going into research on marijuana as well, if we hadn't basically banned research on this substance for so long we'd have more data. However, can't the officer give a field sobriety test if they suspect the citizen is high? What would they do if someone took too many xanax or went on a drive while on ambien?
While I understand why a "highness-measuring" device would be nice, I think this underlies a sore point in our policing and governing. It's not enough for the officer to make a judgement on whether the citizen is too impaired to drive, we must have a quantitative measurement. I think both a subjective judgement and any one quantitative measurement can overlook a ton of factors, but one is better at negating legal repercussions.
That's why I think we should look for some sort of acuity-based test. We need to devise some task that tests attention, reaction-time, etc and use that as a basis for whether you are too impaired to drive. It has the added benefit of also being applicable to tired-driving and medicated-driving (non-mmj medicated, think cold pills).
In the state I live in: "No person may endanger the safety of any person or property by the negligent operation of a vehicle."
If you're endangering people and property while dead sober, you get arrested anyway. Why does the content of their blood fundamentally matter?
If someone is swerving around and kills me, why should I care if he was drunk, stoned, or just not paying attention? I'm just as dead. Its not like I'm any less dead if he was stoned or more dead if he was drunk.
Remember its not 1930s era prohibition anymore. Plenty of video recorders, cheap.
I'm willing to trade "arrest stoners who haven't crashed yet" for "also arrest dead sober idiots who can't drive"
I'm just not seeing a problem. Other than the criminal justice system, who benefits by DUI laws? Clearly the general public isn't any safer because dangerous driving is already illegal via the negligence law.
I guess the idea is that negligent driving isn't always obvious either to people watching or to people doing it, since most impaired drivers don't cause accidents on most of their trips (and many won't visibly weave back and forth). If some kinds of impairment significantly increase the risk of an accident but aren't easy to detect from behavior or from introspection, it might be a big benefit to safety to say that you can never drive a vehicle under those conditions.
And I think the introspection part could be important alongside the enforcement part, again because the idea is that people might routinely be overconfident in their ability to drive safely after consuming intoxicants. So they don't necessarily think they're endangering others as much as they are.
(That might be possible to measure empirically, and it might turn out that some existing laws are too strict under that rationale.)
I remember a children's museum exhibit that was about reaction times, basically trying to justify to kids why they shouldn't drink and drive when they got older. The interesting issue that it highlighted was that fast reaction times can be very important for avoiding some kinds of accidents, and even a small impairment to your reaction time could increase risk a lot in a way that you might not anticipate. But I also remember that when I saw that exhibit, I thought "hmmmm, why don't driving tests test someone's baseline reaction time to make sure that everybody who's a licensed driver can actually react to stuff quickly?" and "hmmmm, why don't they make a toy that you could use to test your own level of impairment before driving, rather than only relying on estimating your blood alcohol content?".
Edit: someone already suggested both of these ideas in another thread above!
Every time this is brought up people say "there is no effective way to test impairment". What ever happened to good old 'walk the line'. Road-side maneuvers are still used extensively with suspected DUIs, but the logic is that if you can perform the certain complex set of tasks they give you, you are fine to drive.
How is this any different for weed, or anything else?
Not sure about other people but for myself, there is no physical impairments; stumbling, tilting, etc. That would be present when drinking alcohol. Can ski a black diamond while still being stoned.
Yo so i posted this comment a couple hours ago. and fucking now i see youtube recommended videos for "driving while stoned news report"
fucking cookies.
I've never been to Colorado so could be wrong. But this article makes me worry, especially for the kids. And, that you can't distinguish b/w a regular candy and one with marijuana in it. And, the concern that as time passes and this industry becomes big, and gain enough political muscle, favorable regulations would be made. All valid concerns.
Sure, it's (a little) tricky to tell if a candy has marijuana in it, especially for a kid. The solution is simple, just don't leave your pot candy laying around for kids!!!
If I had kids, had pot candy, and lived in CO, I'd have a small lockbox/safe in the top of my closet with the candies in there... and/or simply have other forms of edibles that were less attractive to kids.
Upvoted you, of course it doesn't. But if we are talking about "pot candy", can you say that you just like the taste, as you can with alcohol? Never tried it, maybe you can, but now I guess that smoking pot or eating pot candy involves getting high more or less.
You can also just enjoy the actual drug effects of alcohol without getting to the point of being actually drunk. I have no experience with marijuana, but I'm sure there are different degrees there as well.
TL;DR Weed and alcohol in moderation are both fine. Alcohol in excess is far worse in the short-term.
Grandparent sounds like they might not be a drinker. Fair enough, I have no issue with that, but - as you point out - there is a whole world between being teetotal and being drunk. The stereotype (which, yes, also goes for weed) is that one swig of a drink turns you into a staggering, vomiting wreck. In actuality, the mast majority of drinking (that I have experience of, anyway) is in moderation, with a meal, and results in a pleasant relaxed feeling which is totally unlike being drunk.
Weed, actually, is different - again, IME - in that the effects aren't quite so wide-ranging. Now, I've not experimented with really strong strains/forms, nor smoked an insane amount in one sitting, but a small amount has a very pleasant effect, and - for me - a greater amount doesn't really change it that much. I prefer to smoke in moderation, have a great time, and spend as little as possible.
I have never done anything I've regretted under the influence of marijuana, nor have I injured myself, embarrassed myself in public, or woken up the next day feeling even slightly bad, let alone like I want to stay in bed for a week. Apart from the legal status (here in the UK), MJ is a far superior drug in every way.
Teaching your kids how to tend bar, including when to cut someone off, is a valuable life skill.~
My personal opinion is that to prevent party-related mishaps later in life--particularly between the ages of 18 and 22--you need to teach your kids how to party responsibly before they leave your household. Thanks to the keen foresight of federal highway funding bills, this means you will almost invariably have to break the law in order to protect your kids in the US.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of not having to visit the cop shop or emergency department--or both--because your kid never learned about the potential dangers of satyrs and maenads before running off and joining the bacchanalia.
In the same vein, teach them to handle a firearm. And drive in bad conditions (slippery, offroad, gravel). And cross country in harsh weather on foot (rain, snow). And negotiate transit stations.
As long as you're covering all the commonplace disasters, better include how to manage their consumer credit, how to not fall in love with a train wreck of a person, and how to behave around cops.
I agree, but plenty of children are hospitalised or die after accidentally overdosing on medication that people leave out.
There are a lot of grandchildren that die after visiting their grandparents and taking an overdose of strong meds. Older people without children tend to forget that meds need to be locked up and don't want the inconvenience of locking meds away when they only have children around occasionally.
These are preventable deaths, they do happen, they happen way too often, but these are not reasons to make the meds / drugs illegal.
Your argument holds zero weight/relevance in this discussion because you can not die from an overdose of marijuana. No, not even if you ate a 50 edibles. Not even if you smoked 15 blunts back to back.
People like to throw out the "hospitalized" statement all the time. Just because someone was taken to the hospital does not mean that they were ever in any actual danger. Someone's kid eats an edible and "feels funny" so they are taken to the hospital. Someone's kid eats a bottle full of Vicodin that they thought were candy and are taken to the hospital.. if you think those two things present the same danger to the child than I don't even know how to respond.
Sure, the kid's not going to die. That doesn't mean that it's harmless for children to take cannabis.
These conversations are really fucking tedious because every single time I forget to say "I am strongly in favour of legalising drugs" someone leaps in to make some ridiculous point - here "no possible harm to children from cannabis".
If you think it's okay to let children take cannabis then I don't even know how to respond.
> But this article makes me worry, especially for the kids. And, that you can't distinguish b/w a regular candy and one with marijuana in it.
There's still a minimum age (21 I believe) for purchasing. Same argument (irresponsible parents leaving things lying around for kids) applies for painkillers, anti-depressants, alcohol etc.
I think the argument is that it's easier to regulate and control the use of something when it's legal, and - at the very least - a policy that arbitrarily criminalises certain substances just serves to cause confusion and a lack of respect for the law.
These dangerous things are legal and the sky has not fallen. There are no widespread deaths from toddlers ODing on vicodin or gin. If mom and dad can keep their prescription drugs and booze away from their kids (which they mostly do) there's no reason to believe they couldn't do the same with pot.
Is that a major problem? Are Coloradans in the habit of leaving half-licked lollipops lying around, and do other unsuspecting Coloradans have the habit of picking up random half-consumed food items and consuming them? This sounds like it might be a potential parenting problem, but not a law enforcement problem.
With all due respect, that's really just fear mongering. There have been alcoholic beverages that are visually indistinguishable from non-alcoholic beverages pretty much since we have had alcoholic beverages. In fact making a stiff drink that tastes like basically juice is a semi-comic matter of folklore among young human males... and probably females too. It's always interesting, and a little depressing, to see how casually people will attempt to elevate their personal biases into the realm of reasonable concern without even really challenging the basis of the argument. As long as it sounds reasonable it must be reasonable, and what could be unreasonable about concern for children?
You're right to be concerned- while responsible adults won't smoke around kids, plenty of irresponsible ones will. And there have been instances of kids bring consumables to school. And there's also a vibe here that weed is somehow 'medicine' and 'beneficial' caused by the years of medical MJ being used as backdoor legalization, which confuses the issue of how it affects developing brains.
It's not just a vibe, but also a fact that cannabis use has health benefits under certain conditions. There is also very little to support the potential feared effects on "developing brains" or any other kind of brains; and growing evidence to show that it has few negative side effects.
I live in Denver, and I hate the legalization. To be clear, I have nothing against people using drugs, and in an ideal state all drugs would be legal. But now, that's all that Colorado is: one big haze of pot smoke. I can't get away from the smell anywhere. Every time I leave and come back, I have a mild allergic reaction to the smoke, and have to live with perpetual congestion.
If I could get away from the effects of other people smoking, then I would be a huge supporter. But as it stands, we might as well be back when smoking cigarettes everywhere was commonplace.
Living in Denver myself, I have more issue avoiding cigarette smoke than I do people actually smoking weed outside (illegally, I might add)--where are you in the city that you have allergic reactions every time you leave your place?
I understand that it's illegal to smoke outdoors. But in the same way that it's illegal to speed on the highway - nobody really cares until they need to meet a ticket quota.
The largest part of the problem is my apartment complex. The ratio of stoners to non is pretty high, so the smoke just soaks into everything. I live near Glendale, but it's the same everywhere I go. I'm aggressively trying to find a new job outside of the state.
Another minor issue is the smell of the grow (ware)houses. There's about a 5 mile stretch on 25 that reeks of them on my way to and from work every day. Same on the east side of 70.
Sure, the tax money is nice for some people. But I see zero benefit from it, and a lot of annoyances.
If you have breathing problems, getting out of Denver would probably be a good start. Air quality is pretty good for a city, but you're still surrounded by motor vehicle pollution pretty much all the time.
The wildfires are probably the biggest issue with living in Colorado period though - as with many of the western states. Getting just beyond the state boundaries won't help there - you'll want to move somewhere less arid.
> The largest part of the problem is my apartment complex. The ratio of stoners to non is pretty high, so the smoke just soaks into everything.
Gotcha! Yea, that sucks. You might talk to your landlord about it or ask your neighbors to be more considerate/seal their apartments better. I live in one myself and have similar gripes. Even as a regular smoker of weed, it's gross as hell to smell smoke all the time. I also agree on the statement on 25, they could really move the grow house.... like anywhere else.
> I'm aggressively trying to find a new job outside of the state.
This seems eager for a problem that seems unique to apartment complexes; even having outside entrances to the apartments helps a lot.
However, have you checked out duplexes/houses? It's actually quite easy to find renters who are looking for non-smokers—not just in the fulfilling the lease kind of way. There are plenty of families in the city who will have similar (or stronger) reactions, and many people just don't like being around smoke.
I guess I'm surprised you find this problem dominates your experience of the city; I have more issues trying to find a way to socialize without drinking, something objectively FAR more harmful than smoking (let alone any of the other even healthier ways to intake) weed.
> Sure, I can find exactly the place I want to live - as long as I'm willing to pony up the cash.
So—it's not really Denver, it's cheap housing complexes in Denver. Furthermore, I know for a fact that there's plenty of affordable housing over in e.g. Lowry with family living (read: no centralized air, outside entrances, reliable utility costs), so I can't imagine this is your only option.
> This is a weird argument to me. I'm making statements about how other people using affects me, and this is talking about how my using affects me.
I'm not trying to address your needs, I'm simply pointing out that on the list of all the unhealthy things about denver, weed smoke has got to be behind social attitudes toward drinking, smoking, the high altitude, the high density of cars/people, and high rent on the public transit lines. Realistically, you could easily avoid weed smoke if you wanted to, and I frankly don't buy that it would be more expensive. There's a reason the non-smoking clauses are in all the leases—it's a liability and depreciates your property.
We must have wildly different definitions of "cheap". My rent is going up 21% in a month. My actual cheapest option is to move out of the city and get a job that pays 10-15% less.
>I'm not trying to address your needs
Changing the frame of the debate doesn't change the points made. In the case of alcohol, an individual is in control of how it affects them. In the case of smoke (pot or cigarette), the individual is at the mercy of the general populace.
So—to be clear—you're arguing that because weed is the largest problem in spite of the fact that you cannot choose where to live? It seems like the weed problem is a symptom of generally inflating rent in the metro area. Either you can afford to live in the metro area, and you choose a healthy place to rent/own, or you can't, and you're instead complaining about a symptom of being forced to live in a place you don't like.
>The ratio of stoners to non is pretty high, so the smoke just soaks into everything.
I live in an apartment, too.
I could complain about the fact that my neighbors smoke tobacco in their apartments and that it slowly but surely seeps into mine. But I don't. I put weather stripping on my door that faces the hallway and have my windows opened slightly whenever it's warm enough to allow for it.
You have to make compromises when you live in a building shared by 400 other people.
I have to ask where you live in Denver. I smell smoke occasionally, typically walking down Colfax at night, or in LoDo, or at a concert.
What I do notice is the smell from the big dispensary/grow house on I-70 & Grape. That's not smoke, that's just the plants. I'd find that a little annoying if I lived downwind. But on the other hand, the smell from the Purina plant or the Suncor refinery or the feedlots in Greeley is way more obnoxious.
I live in Denver (80219 / Mar Lee) and I haven't noticed it, and I'm incredibly sensitive to smoke of all kinds.
What neighborhood are you in? What sort of building? Do you have particularly inconsiderate neighbors? How much did it change for you relative to prior to the recreational legalization, or prior to the medicinal legalization?
The change was very drastic between pre-legalization and a year after. It was already medically legal when I moved here, and I didn't notice it at all, except of course right around the dispensaries.
I do find it funny that everyone here is jumping to find excuses for why it's not that big of a deal. I'm providing my experience, and my opinion on it. It's not all happiness and sunshine.
I'm not even saying that it should be illegal again. I'm not realizing any benefit from it, so I'm leaving. Why am I being downvoted for it?
"that's all that Colorado is: one big haze of pot smoke"
As a CO resident of over 20 years, I have not noticed any change at all. The only outside consumption I've seen is in people's private yards, just like when I was an undergrad at CU in the 90s.
My neighbor warming up his diesel truck in the morning is far more nauseating.
You're probably right. It's a little over the top editorializing, but it's making the point.
I travel quite a bit, so when I come back it's a very stark difference for me. My wild guess is that it's the boiling frog situation: it's a slow change, but it effects a big difference over time.
On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.
> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.
OTOH, it beats talking about that guy shooting up the abortion clinic and seems to have mostly supplanted memories of Columbine or New Life Church... So it could be worse (and for a while was).
At least for a little bit we can all talk about Peyton and whether bud light is really any better than coors.
> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.
Haha, i sympathise: i lived near Amsterdam for many years (i'm a non-smoker), and almost anyone non-Dutch i ever met outside of the Netherlands would immediately mime smoking when it became clear where i lived. Conversely, this was usually relatively strongly negatively correlated with how cool i was likely to find the person in general, so i tried to see it as a useful people-filter :p.
> "I do find it funny that everyone here is jumping to find excuses for why it's not that big of a deal"
Nah -- just trying to figure out why your experience is so drastically different from ours. You're like "weed EVERYWHERE, it dominates EVERYTHING" and I'm confused because it hasn't impacted my day-to-day existence in the slightest. My grandpa (born in Denver in 1921) hasn't noticed it and he lives across from Kepner middle school. I guess that one stretch of globeville by the Purina plant (I-70 and York) smells terrible, but it's not worse than it always has been, just different (dog food and weed are both stinky.)
But I live in a single-family home with a yard in a low-income neighborhood, rather than an apartment building in a low-income neighborhood, so the airflow from my stoner neighbors 2 houses down is insignificant. On the other hand, my little sister lived in an apartment just south of Glendale before legalization, and she always complained about her stoner neighbors.
my sister's experience was pre-legalization. (Please don't be snarky.)
Your experience seems to be unique in this thread, in that you say things got substantially worse as a result of legalization. I'm just trying to make sense of it in light of everything else I know of -- my own experience and those of my family and friends and others commenting here.
I notice a slight change in the type of funk in the air near the Purina plant, but no change in the general public. The complaint that "some stoner in my apartment is making it hard to breathe" is an old one. Did your complex have a sudden influx of stoners? Did they come from out of state because of legalization? Is there something particular about your complex that makes it attractive to people who are coming for the weed? Is there something particular about my neighborhood that makes it unattractive to people who are coming for the weed? I just don't know how to build a pattern with your experience as one data point and all these other experiences as the rest of the data.
I live in Denver too and bike around absolutely everywhere. In a 3-4 mile ride on a Friday or Saturday night, I probably smell weed 1-2x. Riding through 'liberal' neighborhoods like Rino, Cap Hill, or South Broadway are no different.
I smoke, and I'm actually always pretty surprised by just how few people do smoke here. There is a group of the jam band follower types who go at it pretty hard but even in bars where there is a lot of them (Sancho's) you really don't smell it that much.
They should pass a law mandating air filters for grow houses if the smell is that bad. I see no reason why they shouldn't be regulated like any industrial operation. And since smoking outside is illegal, cops should actually ticket those who do it. Legalization is good policy, but it should be enforced consistently and properly regulated.
I agree 100%. This is not an insurmountable problem. But we have so many fanatical supporters of marijuana that no laws can be passed that would possibly limit its use.
That's not a surprise since it is one of the few and first places where it is allowed. Once the new wears off, and once detractors stop attempts to re-criminalize, I would expect more willingness to compromise from supporters.
It's agriculture, sometimes it stinks. I'd trade a dozen cannabis farms for the plastic pipe plant in my town, or the local egg farm. Same for mushrooms, corn or other grain processing, a feedlot, good grief they all stink.
I'll pile on. I'm currently sitting on 13th/Penn in lower Capitol Hill. If there is a spot in Denver that should be covered in smoke, this is it. I smell nothing.
I live very close. Every now and then my neighbor smokes on his back porch. I can count the number of times on one hand I've smelt pot from my back yard.
Walking around the city, which I frequently do, I very rarely see people consuming pot. Occasionally from an alley on 16th and that's about it.
"He said this month new data indicate that the biggest
increases in marijuana hospitalizations have been seen among out-of-staters, who might be naive about the drug’s effects."
Colorado is a high-altitude state, and dehydration is a common problem. MJ is famously dehydrating ("cottonmouth"). Combine that with alcohol consumption and you've got a trifecta. People who live here are both acclimated to the altitude and typically familiar with the dehydration issue and tend to take precautions. Out-of-staters are likely not acclimated and not used to living in an arid environment.
If you're coming to CO and you want to smoke, remember to hydrate. 2 liters a day, minimum.
As an anecdote I have a friend who works in an ER. He contends that most of the cases he sees on the weekends are dehydration (not necessarily from MJ, just overall).
Why does altitude dehydrate one so? I was just up in the mountains (~7k feet) this weekend and I was drinking water constantly but still felt dehydrated.
Higher altitude means lower air pressure, simple as that. Remember, evaporative equilibrium is directly related to pressure. Additional factors involved in evaporation don't help either: though not perfectly universal, usually higher altitudes are also more arid as well, which further increases the rate of evaporation, as do higher wind speeds if you're outdoors. Combined though and at 1800-2000m above sea level for example you can easily see water loss from perspiration and exhalation double, which over the course of a day adds up to a significant amount of water even without any other activities. In general at low to medium-high altitudes dehydration is a much much more common issue then reduced oxygen, and some of the symptoms can be confused.
One of the things the article mentions is that marijuana is almost exclusively a cash business, due to federal law. As a Colorado lawyer explained it, most of that cash tends to stay in the state. Lawyers, accountants, construction, what have you--mostly local, and mostly paid in cash.
>"They worry that the burgeoning marijuana industry, like alcohol and tobacco before it, could eventually use its profits to gain clout and subvert attempts at regulation."
Or they worry about corporations being corporations, but put the onus on citizens. Maybe the problem isn't with our citizens, but with our laws? Maybe corporations shouldn't be able to use an unlimited amount of profits to affect laws and regulation, but no mention of that in the article.
> It's not like "corporations" turn otherwise acceptable people into raving power brokers.
One of the major functions of corporations is shielding the people involved in them from most personal liability (and, hence, accountability.)
Its hardly a novel thought that reduced accountability might make "otherwise acceptable people" into problems for the rest of society. (Plato was certainly not the first to point this out with his account Gyges Ring in the Republic around 2,500 years ago.)
It shields people from losing personal assets that aren't tied up in the business. It isn't a get-out-of-anything card, though, and I see no evidence that corporations as a concept allow people to be personally unaccountable for actions.
When people complain about corporations as evil in the abstract, I can only assume they don't understand the nature of the exercise of power, or are unwilling to examine it closely due to "down with corporations" being emotionally resonant for them.
This does not look good. As somebody heavily in favor of decriminalization and legalization I am afraid the US is going the ruin the whole project, due to the way they are implementing this.
American traits of moralizing and money obsessed are showing some bad trends here.
My opinion favoring legalization is based on a desire to take the organized crime out of the equation and avoid turning lots of normal teenagers into criminals.
But like everything else it just looks like the US is totally overdoing this. Huge pot companies with advertisement and lots of variation of products and financial muscles is definitely NOT what I wished for.
With this approach one risks getting more new users than ever and get existing users to develop new bad habits. All these edibles makes my head shake.
I lived many years in the Netherlands where pot has been decriminalized for a long time. There is none of this American big capitalist approach to drug sales.
I don't like the attitudes of pro-legalization people in the US. They wont accept that there are negative sides to drug use and seem to think there should be no restrictions.
It is as if there is never any middle ground in the US. Either you got the moralists who spell doom or you got people who think you should be free to do however dam you please. Where are the pragmatic people who accept it is a bad thing to do drugs but that a strict regulation is a better solution than a war on drugs.
I just hope the Canadians can manage to do this is a more sensible way.
>I don't like the attitudes of pro-legalization people in the US. They wont accept that there are negative sides to drug use and seem to think there should be no restrictions.
This sums up my experience both in this thread, and living in Colorado.
>I don't like the attitudes of pro-legalization people in the US. They wont accept that there are negative sides to drug use and seem to think there should be no restrictions.
Who's saying that? For example, I don't think anyone is advocating selling to minors.
>It is as if there is never any middle ground in the US. Either you got the moralists who spell doom or you got people who think you should be free to do however dam you please. Where are the pragmatic people who accept it is a bad thing to do drugs but that a strict regulation is a better solution than a war on drugs.
Why do pragmatic people accept "it is a bad thing to do drugs"? Do they drink coffee? Avoid OTC painkillers?
I love the strawman stance that aspirin, coffee, and weed are all equal, and that the single constraint of simply not selling to children is plenty of restrictions.
That was hyperbolic. Obviously even potheads in the US want some restrictions. But the guiding principle seems to be that grown adults should be free to smoke pot as they please and in whatever way they please. That is not my perspective on legalization at all. I view it as a necessary evil. Something to do because the alternative is much worse. So I want the legalization to be as strict as possible while still being more attractive than the criminal alternative. Perhaps though in a transition period it can make sense to be more liberal to drive out the dealers completely and tighten it more later.
Here are are more of my specifics. I favor an absolute ban on any form of advertisement. Limits on the size and number of shops and their placement. I would also like the dispensaries to be non profit, or alternatively a government monopoly. One does not want anybody to have a profit motive to sell drugs.
I think a dispensary should be place that you can both buy drugs but also get information about health hazards and informations about available treatment. Edibles should be banned and government should set max rates for potency of the drugs.
But apart from that I of course wish that there is an end to the federal rules against this. People operating dispenseries should not have to fear being imprisoned by FBI and banks should be allowed to have them as customers.
> But the guiding principle seems to be that grown adults should be free to smoke pot as they please and in whatever way they please. That is not my perspective on legalization at all.
I don't think "in whatever way they please" is the goal. Nobody is advocating legalizing driving while high, for example.
> One does not want anybody to have a profit motive to sell drugs.
Why? What is so bad about selling recreational drugs?
That's basically where cigarettes are in the US. Their use is discouraged, there's an age restriction on sales, they are heavily taxed, people are educated about the dangers of smoking them and there are nuisance restrictions on public use in many cities.
Beyond that, people are free to do as they please with a reasonable expectation that it's an informed decision.
I think a lot of what we're seeing in the US is simple "new market" factor more than anything else. The assumption is that it will settle down at some point once there's a reasonably established marketplace.
I live in Vancouver. We have a number of pot chains that are starting to grow bigger and bigger. The city is trying to implement a number of regulations that include not allowing pot shops to be within 300m of schools, community centers, or other pot shops. As well, edibles were banned almost a year ago now.
At first I was completely against the edible ban. Now, with shops only being able to sell things like infused oil pills and simple cooking oils, I'm fully in support of it. Weed gummy bears are a fun idea to think about, but it seems like these are novelties at best and extremely likely to be used in a distasteful prank or over-consumed by novice users.
I'm still kind of against the "300m from other pot shops" rule, but c'est la vie.
That was a fairly naive perspective you had. Capitalism, money, and strong puritan morals are at the very heart of America's culture (that is changing, slowly).
Of course it was going to get picked up by companies and exploited for every penny its worth. Of course there are going to be sensational moral debates that spiral out of control and detract from the issue.
This isn't the Netherlands. And since when did one country's policies blindly apply to another?
That is not true. Perhaps I have been naive about the American result but as a Norwegian I am used to a very controlled sale of alcohol. Alcohol advertisement is banned and any alcohol above 5% is sold in government monopolies. This is quite different from e.g. the Canadian liquor monopoly which the government seems to treat as a cash cow. In Norway they are really not trying to push alcohol on your or increase sales. Instead they focus on customer satisfaction and teaching customers what wine goes with what food and things like that.
In the Netherlands there might not be a monopoly on drug sales, but the coffeeshops are generally small operations without a huge presence. There are no advertisement. So yes I have experience alternatives which don't treat these industries as big money operations. And perhaps I naively thought that was possible in the US, forgetting that Americans tend to think very big when it comes to business.
Although I can't find numbers on international marketing expenditures for alcohol, personal experience informs me that most pubs in Germany, and plenty in Ireland and Austria, have a sign from a beer company hanging outside the front. That's actually something the USA doesn't have; neon signs are in some pubs' windows, but not every single one like I'd see in Germany. That sign outside the bar is most definitely marketing, even if it's less glitzy than American alcohol TV ads.
I then asked a question about why, and you answered - thank you! I didn't know alcohol ads (do you mean on tv, in print, on the radio, online...?) were banned in the Netherlands.
I also must ask for clarification: because I can't sense the tone with which yore typing these words, it seems like you're using the word naive in a way that suggests you are simply disappointed that the USA is not behaving like your country. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Americans do think big when it comes to business... as do many other countries. The Forbes international 500 [1] has companies from all over, and the USA does not dominate. In fact, the Netherlands shares the number 3 slot with the UK. I hope you don't naively think businesses want less success outside the USA; they may want less growth, though, but the Forbes top 10 global would seem to say otherwise.
Ambition for business is everywhere in the world, although the USA does indeed have its share of large companies.
Hehehe well yeah maybe I had naive hopes. I honestly had not thought a lot about how this would turn out in the US. The US is following such a different trajectory from what I am used to in politics in Norway where I am from. Pot isn't legal in Norway either but I found the laws extremely draconian in the US. The war on drugs really turned me off prohibiting drug sales. But what I find odd is that America seems to be moving from one extreme to another so quickly.
Here in Norway pot is not legal, but there is a gradual sort of decriminalization with respect to drugs. They are still keen to point out it is illegal but police reactions to abuse is quite mild. It is mainly the big sellers they are going after.
I guess naively I had expected the US to first change their laws to be milder long before any full legalization happens. But I think a major difference is that in Norway a lot of the liberalization is driven by the legal profession and actors rather than by some popular opinion in the population. Citizens aren't really favoring legalization the way Americans are, but nor are they really favoring a harsh response either. It is people working close to the issue that typically push for some form of legalization.
I think the unique aspect in the US is legalization happening in the context of a very polarized population. Where many are like, just let people do whatever they dam please and others are very moralistic and want to keep going with a sort of war on drugs. This seems like an explosive combination.
You might ask why do I care at all. Well American has tremendous influence on the rest of the world. I fear that a failed legalization experiment in the US would set back legalization everywhere else. People will point to the US as a horror example. The US is already used like that as a way to scare people away from any sort of privatized hospitals or clinics.
Edibles tend to be popular with inexperienced users who don't want to smoke, it's impossible to know exactly what dose you're eating, and you won't feel the effect until it's too late. Ergo, it's very easy to overdose with them.
Not entirely true. Over-the-counter edibles available at most legal dispensaries have measured amounts of cannabinoid oil, as well as the potency of that oil, listed on the package.
One company called Spot (in Seattle) has a little chart on the back, as well as these informative numbers, that roughly equates the dose of a cookie to a certain number of glasses of wine for further expectation setting. Overall, the packaging is very clear[0] about dosage, the time of the onset, and other factors that may contribute to the type of buzz you'll get.
It's very much similar to ABV on an alcoholic beverage, though. You can know exactly what you're ingesting, and you can get the general idea of what to expect, but it's impossible to label a can of beer with something like "5 of these will make you drunk in about an hour and half".
I don't think 'jernfrost' is commenting on the possibility for overdose at all. In the context of his comment, he seems to imply that there are just so many choices and flavors, that it can be confusing. Like going to the supermarket grocery store to pick out a new tube of toothpaste, how many variations does there really need to be? How likely will it be that I pick out the best one for my needs?
Are these fears born out of experience or are you just voicing concerns for what you think is going to happen? To be honest, what you've written reads like you are the victim of a lot of scare-mongering and hysterical claims about the effects of legalization. For one thing, I see no evidence of "the US totally overdoing this", least of all because there is no US wide approach to cannabis legalization, even among the states where it is legal. Most of the states where cannabis is legal seem to be handling the matter with great caution, with the laws and regulations in place specifically precluding the commercialization fears and behaviors that you are citing. Just google "Alaska cannabis laws" or "Oregon cannabis laws". Some cities forbid the sale of recreational cannabis altogether, limiting users to what they can grow themselves. You shouldn't judge decriminalization in the US based on sensationalist reporting from the worst excesses of it; you have to remember that the US isn't one place and one set of laws when it comes to cannabis legalization.
If the government really wanted to curb the usage of pot they should just show that clip from South Park where they talk about how "Pot makes you fine with being bored."
I've shown that to a few close friends who ended up in a "rut" at college. Those are some of the most profound words on the topic that exist.
190 comments
[ 8.7 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadPerplexes law enforcement.
Detractors spread FUD.
(EDIT: A tl;dr haiku. Pun fully intended.)
https://archive.is/exvT2
Headline might as well be "Colorado legalizes weed, nothing bad happens to anyone"
Examples: "Do you want to go out for dinner tonight? Or should we stay in and save money?" "Do you want cake or ice cream for dessert?" "Should we prioritize this bug fix or focus on hitting our release target?"
Somebody might reply with tongue in cheek, "Yes", to indicate they agree with both parts, want both things, it's not a simple choice, etc.
FWIW, I encounter it more with older people. As a kid, I heard it often from uncles and grandparents.
I mean, strictly speaking they answered the question. They do want a coffee or a tea. They just haven't yet specified which one they would like most...
The question has several possible responses. "No, thank you," means the person wants neither coffee nor tea. "Coffee, please," and "tea, please" mean just what you think. "Yes, please," means that either coffee or tea would be acceptable, and the respondent is indifferent to which one.
This usually means "I'll take one of whatever you're having," and is probably intended to be less burdensome to the host, by allowing them to choose what they would prefer to serve rather than forcing them to defer to their guest.
Of course, the person might be trying for a cheap laugh rather than politeness. In that case, it would be appropriate to wait a beat, chuckle, optionally make a flirtatious gesture (such as a wink or arm touch), then ask "So either one is fine?"
Thus, the answer would be "no" if and only if legalization has had no effect whatsoever. As the asking of the question implicitly assumes that there has been an effect, answering yes therefore responds to the question in a very literal, truthful way, without actually conveying any new information.
This is my favorite way to punish a poorly structured interrogatory. It forces the follow-up question, "Which one?" Which can then be answered with "both."
Some people say that there are no stupid questions, but clearly, some questions are more intelligent than others.
This is actually the thing I hate about pot, stoners won't shut up about it.
So, if the schools were getting $3 million in subsidy before, they peg the pot taxes to schools, pull the previous $3 million to go to different pet projects, and the schools see (at best) a 0% change.
Tying marijuana taxes to education does somewhat lock the education budget in, so there's maybe an advantage, but generally speaking, it's a political move, because then you can paste anyone voting against whatever law as someone who is voting against education.
It seems like a lot of money, but when you look at what costs they're trying to cover, it doesn't go very far.
The revenue and benefits the market brings to the state certainly aren't lost on its citizens though. =]
So people that are trying to be legal about it will smoke in their homes.
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/marijuanainfodenver/residen...
Although most renters are violating their lease if they do.
I suspect that Canada will prohibit edibles for this reason.
But if it's less harmful than alcohol, a substance which is legal for consumption and moderated by the government, why should it be illegal? What's your justification for saying marijuana should be banned for reasons of harm, when you can't establish that it's more harmful than more easily available alternatives?
Or are you also arguing that alcohol should be banned, as well?
Edit: To answer your initial question, the logic here is "One harmful substance is legal, thus other substances which are less harmful should probably also be legal".
The law hardly matter in these cases, people do what they will do. If edibles are illegal kids will just make them at home.
Pot. Alcohol. Texting. Talking on the phone. They all impair you terribly while driving. That does not require prohibition. That requires taking the human out of the loop for driving ~2.5 tons of metal down the highway.
And then we need to look at "What happens when we have 5 million people unemployed in a short time, due to rapid advancements in automation?" The Democrats aren't looking at this, and nor are the Republicans. Really, no party is looking at this. We have a few economists and scientific-y types talking about Mincome, but aside some experiments in Europe, it's being drowned out.
What do we have that can absorb such a hit on our financial system and not drop in a recession? How do we make sure these people don't simply sink when the 'bots come to take their job?
They won't so much sink as they will just never float.
(Big, fat /s on that, just in case it's somehow not obvious.)
Basically, we either accept an invasive test, or we can't enforce the law. Which is 100% different than what it was before.
http://www.larryformanlaw.com/blog/can-the-police-take-my-bl...
Pre-legalization, the police had no way to discern if a driver was high.
Post-legalization the police still have no way to discern if a driver is high.
The only difference is pre-legalization, they could arrest you for having some bud in your pocket. Now that can't do that.
I wonder why they don't go back to doing a sobriety test for detecting intoxication though. It worked ok before breathalyzers, if you can pass the test than presumably you are ok to drive.
1 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073804... 2 - http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/48/3/608.short
The evidence of the stuff stays in your system much longer than the impairment. There is also the issue of "tolerance" and or how the amount of substance present in urine or blood relates to the supposed impairment.
>So now you effectively have no way to prove whether or not someone was breaking that law.
But you can still perform an objective test to determine if someone is currently impaired. They need to design and validate a motor skills and reaction time test. I'm not sure why anyone cares more about why someone is impaired than they do about whether someone is impaired.
I agree that the "why" isn't that important (or at all), but what is the alternative?
It could hypothetically be as simple as a video game driving test. It could be some other abstract measurement of reaction time.
I don't understand the question. A driving skills / reaction time test, is an alternative.
It's easy to target people who are engaging in unnecessary actions at the expense of driving capability. Drinking, using drugs, and texting fall under this category. People are much less accepting of punishments for things seemingly outside of personal control. Imagine the embarrassment for law makers when some mothers' advocacy group attacks them for banning all new mothers from driving (except those rare exceptions who function well on <4 hours of sleep.) Or the backlash for hardworking people getting arrested regularly because their multiple jobs keep them from getting an amount of sleep that makes driving permissible.
Nope! The only relevant crime is possession, and "in your bloodstream" doesn't count.
The law is to prevent dangerous driving. It doesn't matter if you have a sip of beer or a 6 pack, if it impairs you, that's against the law. HOWEVER, once your BAC reaches 0.08, that is proof enough of being impaired. Lower than 0.08, then they must show that you are impaired. And if you fail the sobriety field tests, you are impaired.
My point is, if you can't tell if someone is impaired, even after field tests, then maybe they aren't impaired. Regardless of what you suspect they may or may not have eaten. If they are impaired, the field tests will show and you can arrest them.
I see no point in making this easier for law enforcement. I don't think we need more specific laws, that just opens up new questions and loopholes.
1) It provides a definitive test which would later stand in court (if needed). 2) Gives you more time to "sober up" if you actually have been drinking.
At the time, I remember thinking it was good information. In hindsight, it's rather funny to think it came from the High School teachers who were teaching Driver's Ed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_consent
Going back to the Michigan laws, Implied Consent does apply there today. However, the implied consent of chemical testing only appears to apply if you've been arrested. You can, however, still be fined for declining the field sobriety test while not under arrest.
While I understand why a "highness-measuring" device would be nice, I think this underlies a sore point in our policing and governing. It's not enough for the officer to make a judgement on whether the citizen is too impaired to drive, we must have a quantitative measurement. I think both a subjective judgement and any one quantitative measurement can overlook a ton of factors, but one is better at negating legal repercussions.
In the state I live in: "No person may endanger the safety of any person or property by the negligent operation of a vehicle."
If you're endangering people and property while dead sober, you get arrested anyway. Why does the content of their blood fundamentally matter?
If someone is swerving around and kills me, why should I care if he was drunk, stoned, or just not paying attention? I'm just as dead. Its not like I'm any less dead if he was stoned or more dead if he was drunk.
Remember its not 1930s era prohibition anymore. Plenty of video recorders, cheap.
I'm willing to trade "arrest stoners who haven't crashed yet" for "also arrest dead sober idiots who can't drive"
I'm just not seeing a problem. Other than the criminal justice system, who benefits by DUI laws? Clearly the general public isn't any safer because dangerous driving is already illegal via the negligence law.
And I think the introspection part could be important alongside the enforcement part, again because the idea is that people might routinely be overconfident in their ability to drive safely after consuming intoxicants. So they don't necessarily think they're endangering others as much as they are.
(That might be possible to measure empirically, and it might turn out that some existing laws are too strict under that rationale.)
I remember a children's museum exhibit that was about reaction times, basically trying to justify to kids why they shouldn't drink and drive when they got older. The interesting issue that it highlighted was that fast reaction times can be very important for avoiding some kinds of accidents, and even a small impairment to your reaction time could increase risk a lot in a way that you might not anticipate. But I also remember that when I saw that exhibit, I thought "hmmmm, why don't driving tests test someone's baseline reaction time to make sure that everybody who's a licensed driver can actually react to stuff quickly?" and "hmmmm, why don't they make a toy that you could use to test your own level of impairment before driving, rather than only relying on estimating your blood alcohol content?".
Edit: someone already suggested both of these ideas in another thread above!
How is this any different for weed, or anything else?
If I had kids, had pot candy, and lived in CO, I'd have a small lockbox/safe in the top of my closet with the candies in there... and/or simply have other forms of edibles that were less attractive to kids.
Grandparent sounds like they might not be a drinker. Fair enough, I have no issue with that, but - as you point out - there is a whole world between being teetotal and being drunk. The stereotype (which, yes, also goes for weed) is that one swig of a drink turns you into a staggering, vomiting wreck. In actuality, the mast majority of drinking (that I have experience of, anyway) is in moderation, with a meal, and results in a pleasant relaxed feeling which is totally unlike being drunk.
Weed, actually, is different - again, IME - in that the effects aren't quite so wide-ranging. Now, I've not experimented with really strong strains/forms, nor smoked an insane amount in one sitting, but a small amount has a very pleasant effect, and - for me - a greater amount doesn't really change it that much. I prefer to smoke in moderation, have a great time, and spend as little as possible.
I have never done anything I've regretted under the influence of marijuana, nor have I injured myself, embarrassed myself in public, or woken up the next day feeling even slightly bad, let alone like I want to stay in bed for a week. Apart from the legal status (here in the UK), MJ is a far superior drug in every way.
My personal opinion is that to prevent party-related mishaps later in life--particularly between the ages of 18 and 22--you need to teach your kids how to party responsibly before they leave your household. Thanks to the keen foresight of federal highway funding bills, this means you will almost invariably have to break the law in order to protect your kids in the US.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of not having to visit the cop shop or emergency department--or both--because your kid never learned about the potential dangers of satyrs and maenads before running off and joining the bacchanalia.
I find the story highly unlikely. It's probably more likely that he saw a weed cookie on the kitchen counter and ate it without knowing.
There are a lot of grandchildren that die after visiting their grandparents and taking an overdose of strong meds. Older people without children tend to forget that meds need to be locked up and don't want the inconvenience of locking meds away when they only have children around occasionally.
These are preventable deaths, they do happen, they happen way too often, but these are not reasons to make the meds / drugs illegal.
People like to throw out the "hospitalized" statement all the time. Just because someone was taken to the hospital does not mean that they were ever in any actual danger. Someone's kid eats an edible and "feels funny" so they are taken to the hospital. Someone's kid eats a bottle full of Vicodin that they thought were candy and are taken to the hospital.. if you think those two things present the same danger to the child than I don't even know how to respond.
These conversations are really fucking tedious because every single time I forget to say "I am strongly in favour of legalising drugs" someone leaps in to make some ridiculous point - here "no possible harm to children from cannabis".
If you think it's okay to let children take cannabis then I don't even know how to respond.
There's still a minimum age (21 I believe) for purchasing. Same argument (irresponsible parents leaving things lying around for kids) applies for painkillers, anti-depressants, alcohol etc.
+1 to this Tylenol is probably as dangerous as poison, and some people treat it like jelly beans.
It's easy to tell — look at the price tag. One is 25¢ and the other is $5.
It's not just a vibe, but also a fact that cannabis use has health benefits under certain conditions. There is also very little to support the potential feared effects on "developing brains" or any other kind of brains; and growing evidence to show that it has few negative side effects.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/4pk_Dad'...
If I could get away from the effects of other people smoking, then I would be a huge supporter. But as it stands, we might as well be back when smoking cigarettes everywhere was commonplace.
The largest part of the problem is my apartment complex. The ratio of stoners to non is pretty high, so the smoke just soaks into everything. I live near Glendale, but it's the same everywhere I go. I'm aggressively trying to find a new job outside of the state.
Another minor issue is the smell of the grow (ware)houses. There's about a 5 mile stretch on 25 that reeks of them on my way to and from work every day. Same on the east side of 70.
Sure, the tax money is nice for some people. But I see zero benefit from it, and a lot of annoyances.
The wildfires are probably the biggest issue with living in Colorado period though - as with many of the western states. Getting just beyond the state boundaries won't help there - you'll want to move somewhere less arid.
Gotcha! Yea, that sucks. You might talk to your landlord about it or ask your neighbors to be more considerate/seal their apartments better. I live in one myself and have similar gripes. Even as a regular smoker of weed, it's gross as hell to smell smoke all the time. I also agree on the statement on 25, they could really move the grow house.... like anywhere else.
> I'm aggressively trying to find a new job outside of the state.
This seems eager for a problem that seems unique to apartment complexes; even having outside entrances to the apartments helps a lot.
However, have you checked out duplexes/houses? It's actually quite easy to find renters who are looking for non-smokers—not just in the fulfilling the lease kind of way. There are plenty of families in the city who will have similar (or stronger) reactions, and many people just don't like being around smoke.
I guess I'm surprised you find this problem dominates your experience of the city; I have more issues trying to find a way to socialize without drinking, something objectively FAR more harmful than smoking (let alone any of the other even healthier ways to intake) weed.
Sure, I can find exactly the place I want to live - as long as I'm willing to pony up the cash.
>drinking, something objectively FAR more harmful than smoking ... weed
This is a weird argument to me. I'm making statements about how other people using affects me, and this is talking about how my using affects me.
So—it's not really Denver, it's cheap housing complexes in Denver. Furthermore, I know for a fact that there's plenty of affordable housing over in e.g. Lowry with family living (read: no centralized air, outside entrances, reliable utility costs), so I can't imagine this is your only option.
> This is a weird argument to me. I'm making statements about how other people using affects me, and this is talking about how my using affects me.
I'm not trying to address your needs, I'm simply pointing out that on the list of all the unhealthy things about denver, weed smoke has got to be behind social attitudes toward drinking, smoking, the high altitude, the high density of cars/people, and high rent on the public transit lines. Realistically, you could easily avoid weed smoke if you wanted to, and I frankly don't buy that it would be more expensive. There's a reason the non-smoking clauses are in all the leases—it's a liability and depreciates your property.
>I'm not trying to address your needs Changing the frame of the debate doesn't change the points made. In the case of alcohol, an individual is in control of how it affects them. In the case of smoke (pot or cigarette), the individual is at the mercy of the general populace.
I should have been clearer and said "leave the metro area".
I live in an apartment, too.
I could complain about the fact that my neighbors smoke tobacco in their apartments and that it slowly but surely seeps into mine. But I don't. I put weather stripping on my door that faces the hallway and have my windows opened slightly whenever it's warm enough to allow for it.
You have to make compromises when you live in a building shared by 400 other people.
You're part of a community. Learn to live in it.
What I do notice is the smell from the big dispensary/grow house on I-70 & Grape. That's not smoke, that's just the plants. I'd find that a little annoying if I lived downwind. But on the other hand, the smell from the Purina plant or the Suncor refinery or the feedlots in Greeley is way more obnoxious.
What neighborhood are you in? What sort of building? Do you have particularly inconsiderate neighbors? How much did it change for you relative to prior to the recreational legalization, or prior to the medicinal legalization?
I do find it funny that everyone here is jumping to find excuses for why it's not that big of a deal. I'm providing my experience, and my opinion on it. It's not all happiness and sunshine.
I'm not even saying that it should be illegal again. I'm not realizing any benefit from it, so I'm leaving. Why am I being downvoted for it?
"that's all that Colorado is: one big haze of pot smoke"
As a CO resident of over 20 years, I have not noticed any change at all. The only outside consumption I've seen is in people's private yards, just like when I was an undergrad at CU in the 90s.
My neighbor warming up his diesel truck in the morning is far more nauseating.
I travel quite a bit, so when I come back it's a very stark difference for me. My wild guess is that it's the boiling frog situation: it's a slow change, but it effects a big difference over time.
On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.
> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.
OTOH, it beats talking about that guy shooting up the abortion clinic and seems to have mostly supplanted memories of Columbine or New Life Church... So it could be worse (and for a while was).
At least for a little bit we can all talk about Peyton and whether bud light is really any better than coors.
Haha, i sympathise: i lived near Amsterdam for many years (i'm a non-smoker), and almost anyone non-Dutch i ever met outside of the Netherlands would immediately mime smoking when it became clear where i lived. Conversely, this was usually relatively strongly negatively correlated with how cool i was likely to find the person in general, so i tried to see it as a useful people-filter :p.
Nah -- just trying to figure out why your experience is so drastically different from ours. You're like "weed EVERYWHERE, it dominates EVERYTHING" and I'm confused because it hasn't impacted my day-to-day existence in the slightest. My grandpa (born in Denver in 1921) hasn't noticed it and he lives across from Kepner middle school. I guess that one stretch of globeville by the Purina plant (I-70 and York) smells terrible, but it's not worse than it always has been, just different (dog food and weed are both stinky.)
But I live in a single-family home with a yard in a low-income neighborhood, rather than an apartment building in a low-income neighborhood, so the airflow from my stoner neighbors 2 houses down is insignificant. On the other hand, my little sister lived in an apartment just south of Glendale before legalization, and she always complained about her stoner neighbors.
Your experience seems to be unique in this thread, in that you say things got substantially worse as a result of legalization. I'm just trying to make sense of it in light of everything else I know of -- my own experience and those of my family and friends and others commenting here.
I notice a slight change in the type of funk in the air near the Purina plant, but no change in the general public. The complaint that "some stoner in my apartment is making it hard to breathe" is an old one. Did your complex have a sudden influx of stoners? Did they come from out of state because of legalization? Is there something particular about your complex that makes it attractive to people who are coming for the weed? Is there something particular about my neighborhood that makes it unattractive to people who are coming for the weed? I just don't know how to build a pattern with your experience as one data point and all these other experiences as the rest of the data.
I smoke, and I'm actually always pretty surprised by just how few people do smoke here. There is a group of the jam band follower types who go at it pretty hard but even in bars where there is a lot of them (Sancho's) you really don't smell it that much.
I live very close. Every now and then my neighbor smokes on his back porch. I can count the number of times on one hand I've smelt pot from my back yard.
Walking around the city, which I frequently do, I very rarely see people consuming pot. Occasionally from an alley on 16th and that's about it.
I have been to night clubs in Denver where people were asked to stop smoking a cigarette but when it came to smoking marijuana nobody cared.
Colorado is a high-altitude state, and dehydration is a common problem. MJ is famously dehydrating ("cottonmouth"). Combine that with alcohol consumption and you've got a trifecta. People who live here are both acclimated to the altitude and typically familiar with the dehydration issue and tend to take precautions. Out-of-staters are likely not acclimated and not used to living in an arid environment.
If you're coming to CO and you want to smoke, remember to hydrate. 2 liters a day, minimum.
As an anecdote I have a friend who works in an ER. He contends that most of the cases he sees on the weekends are dehydration (not necessarily from MJ, just overall).
Or they worry about corporations being corporations, but put the onus on citizens. Maybe the problem isn't with our citizens, but with our laws? Maybe corporations shouldn't be able to use an unlimited amount of profits to affect laws and regulation, but no mention of that in the article.
One of the major functions of corporations is shielding the people involved in them from most personal liability (and, hence, accountability.)
Its hardly a novel thought that reduced accountability might make "otherwise acceptable people" into problems for the rest of society. (Plato was certainly not the first to point this out with his account Gyges Ring in the Republic around 2,500 years ago.)
When people complain about corporations as evil in the abstract, I can only assume they don't understand the nature of the exercise of power, or are unwilling to examine it closely due to "down with corporations" being emotionally resonant for them.
American traits of moralizing and money obsessed are showing some bad trends here.
My opinion favoring legalization is based on a desire to take the organized crime out of the equation and avoid turning lots of normal teenagers into criminals.
But like everything else it just looks like the US is totally overdoing this. Huge pot companies with advertisement and lots of variation of products and financial muscles is definitely NOT what I wished for.
With this approach one risks getting more new users than ever and get existing users to develop new bad habits. All these edibles makes my head shake.
I lived many years in the Netherlands where pot has been decriminalized for a long time. There is none of this American big capitalist approach to drug sales.
I don't like the attitudes of pro-legalization people in the US. They wont accept that there are negative sides to drug use and seem to think there should be no restrictions.
It is as if there is never any middle ground in the US. Either you got the moralists who spell doom or you got people who think you should be free to do however dam you please. Where are the pragmatic people who accept it is a bad thing to do drugs but that a strict regulation is a better solution than a war on drugs.
I just hope the Canadians can manage to do this is a more sensible way.
This sums up my experience both in this thread, and living in Colorado.
>I don't like the attitudes of pro-legalization people in the US. They wont accept that there are negative sides to drug use and seem to think there should be no restrictions.
Who's saying that? For example, I don't think anyone is advocating selling to minors.
>It is as if there is never any middle ground in the US. Either you got the moralists who spell doom or you got people who think you should be free to do however dam you please. Where are the pragmatic people who accept it is a bad thing to do drugs but that a strict regulation is a better solution than a war on drugs.
Why do pragmatic people accept "it is a bad thing to do drugs"? Do they drink coffee? Avoid OTC painkillers?
Here are are more of my specifics. I favor an absolute ban on any form of advertisement. Limits on the size and number of shops and their placement. I would also like the dispensaries to be non profit, or alternatively a government monopoly. One does not want anybody to have a profit motive to sell drugs.
I think a dispensary should be place that you can both buy drugs but also get information about health hazards and informations about available treatment. Edibles should be banned and government should set max rates for potency of the drugs.
But apart from that I of course wish that there is an end to the federal rules against this. People operating dispenseries should not have to fear being imprisoned by FBI and banks should be allowed to have them as customers.
I don't think "in whatever way they please" is the goal. Nobody is advocating legalizing driving while high, for example.
> One does not want anybody to have a profit motive to sell drugs.
Why? What is so bad about selling recreational drugs?
> Edibles should be banned
Why?
Beyond that, people are free to do as they please with a reasonable expectation that it's an informed decision.
I think a lot of what we're seeing in the US is simple "new market" factor more than anything else. The assumption is that it will settle down at some point once there's a reasonably established marketplace.
At first I was completely against the edible ban. Now, with shops only being able to sell things like infused oil pills and simple cooking oils, I'm fully in support of it. Weed gummy bears are a fun idea to think about, but it seems like these are novelties at best and extremely likely to be used in a distasteful prank or over-consumed by novice users.
I'm still kind of against the "300m from other pot shops" rule, but c'est la vie.
Of course it was going to get picked up by companies and exploited for every penny its worth. Of course there are going to be sensational moral debates that spiral out of control and detract from the issue.
This isn't the Netherlands. And since when did one country's policies blindly apply to another?
Why would one expect the same desires that drive alcohol's mass marketing and consumption to not be present for marijuana?
The side effects are certainly different, but they both affect your mental state, so comparing these seems pretty reasonable.
In the Netherlands there might not be a monopoly on drug sales, but the coffeeshops are generally small operations without a huge presence. There are no advertisement. So yes I have experience alternatives which don't treat these industries as big money operations. And perhaps I naively thought that was possible in the US, forgetting that Americans tend to think very big when it comes to business.
Alcohol has a huge industry behind it in the USA.
And who bought Budweiser-creator Anheiser-Busch, one of the USA's largest beer companies? InBev, based in Belgium.
Alcohol consumption per capita is higher in plenty of countries in Europe compared to the USA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol...
Although I can't find numbers on international marketing expenditures for alcohol, personal experience informs me that most pubs in Germany, and plenty in Ireland and Austria, have a sign from a beer company hanging outside the front. That's actually something the USA doesn't have; neon signs are in some pubs' windows, but not every single one like I'd see in Germany. That sign outside the bar is most definitely marketing, even if it's less glitzy than American alcohol TV ads.
I then asked a question about why, and you answered - thank you! I didn't know alcohol ads (do you mean on tv, in print, on the radio, online...?) were banned in the Netherlands.
I also must ask for clarification: because I can't sense the tone with which yore typing these words, it seems like you're using the word naive in a way that suggests you are simply disappointed that the USA is not behaving like your country. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Americans do think big when it comes to business... as do many other countries. The Forbes international 500 [1] has companies from all over, and the USA does not dominate. In fact, the Netherlands shares the number 3 slot with the UK. I hope you don't naively think businesses want less success outside the USA; they may want less growth, though, but the Forbes top 10 global would seem to say otherwise.
Ambition for business is everywhere in the world, although the USA does indeed have its share of large companies.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500
Here in Norway pot is not legal, but there is a gradual sort of decriminalization with respect to drugs. They are still keen to point out it is illegal but police reactions to abuse is quite mild. It is mainly the big sellers they are going after.
I guess naively I had expected the US to first change their laws to be milder long before any full legalization happens. But I think a major difference is that in Norway a lot of the liberalization is driven by the legal profession and actors rather than by some popular opinion in the population. Citizens aren't really favoring legalization the way Americans are, but nor are they really favoring a harsh response either. It is people working close to the issue that typically push for some form of legalization.
I think the unique aspect in the US is legalization happening in the context of a very polarized population. Where many are like, just let people do whatever they dam please and others are very moralistic and want to keep going with a sort of war on drugs. This seems like an explosive combination.
You might ask why do I care at all. Well American has tremendous influence on the rest of the world. I fear that a failed legalization experiment in the US would set back legalization everywhere else. People will point to the US as a horror example. The US is already used like that as a way to scare people away from any sort of privatized hospitals or clinics.
Can you explain this sentence? I'm having trouble parsing it and the preceding sentence isn't providing any helpful context.
So the parent comment is saying that all of the variations/flavors of these pot candies can be disorienting.
One company called Spot (in Seattle) has a little chart on the back, as well as these informative numbers, that roughly equates the dose of a cookie to a certain number of glasses of wine for further expectation setting. Overall, the packaging is very clear[0] about dosage, the time of the onset, and other factors that may contribute to the type of buzz you'll get.
It's very much similar to ABV on an alcoholic beverage, though. You can know exactly what you're ingesting, and you can get the general idea of what to expect, but it's impossible to label a can of beer with something like "5 of these will make you drunk in about an hour and half".
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0. http://twotentwice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SPOT-Bites...
I've shown that to a few close friends who ended up in a "rut" at college. Those are some of the most profound words on the topic that exist.