I am so fucking tired of the DEA and the joke it has become. And I will also blame Obama for continuing this mess: as someone who smoked pot heavily in his youth (and still turned out OK), for his administration to continue this lie that cannabis is some super gateway drug and has no medicinal value, is shameful.
Science, bitches! Put aside your religious biases and ask: What does science say?
> And I will also blame Obama for continuing this mess
He didn't just continue it; he doubled down on it.
For some reason, Obama receives credit for relaxing laws on medical marijuana, but the reality is the opposite. Obama actually increased the rate of crackdowns on dispensaries in states with medical marijuana, and spent far more on enforcing federal marijuana laws in these states than either Bush or Clinton did[0].
After Amendment 64/Initiative 501 passed in CO and WA respectively, it's true that he didn't take as strong action against them as he could have. But that's a really low bar to apply to the president who said he "inhaled frequently - that was the point", promised to let states decide their own marijuana laws, and (when he ran for Senate in 2004) advocated decriminalization of marijuana laws.
> Follow the money. Pharma has a lot of it, and they're willing to invest in politics to keep what they have and get even more.
I don't think it's so simple. Big Tobacco also has a lot of money, and they have even more of an incentive for the federal ban on marijuana to be lifted. They can't really touch it while it's in this grey zone, but it's a huge amount of money that they're itching to get their hands on.
> Tobacco is small compared to Pharma. The average american spends over 1,000$ per year on prescription drugs.
Yes, but medical marijuana is a lot less important to pharmaceutical companies than recreational marijuana is to tobacco companies. Pharmaceutical companies care less about medical marijuana these days than you might think.
And it's not so simple, because it's not so easy to see how money gets directed. For example, Altria is a massive, diversified company (albeit less so since Kraft Foods was split off). They likely see their investment in smokeless tobacco ("e-cigarettes") as a lateral move to help them corner the marijuana market once it's legalized. They also see it as a hedge against the decades-long drop in tobacco usage. But which is it? The answer is "both" - weighing those against each other is tough. And it gets even more tough when you try to consider how much they would have considered the loss of the tobacco business to be a threat back in 2006, when their business also included production of cookies and macaroni & cheese.
These incentives are oftentimes conflicting even within the same company, so from the outside, we can't just say "well, industry $X is larger than industry $Y, so they will get their way". They have to decide that the issue at hand is actually more important to them, which isn't so obvious, and that's even before you get into the fact that those industries may actually overlap.
I really don't see why the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies can't themselves move in to production and sale of marijuana, once it becomes legal.
In fact, I'd bet this is exactly what will happen. They're even likely to come to dominate the market, much like Google did the phone market once they came out with Android, and Microsoft did the console market once they came out with the Xbox.
> I really don't see why the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies can't themselves move in to production and sale of marijuana, once it becomes legal.
That's exactly what I'm saying. The tobacco industry would love to leverage their existing assets into a lateral move into the marijuana industry. But until it's legal, they have to sit by and watch their lunch get eaten by smaller firms with larger risk appetites because they have less to lose if things blow up in their faces. That's what's already happening.
Pharma can't make money on comoditized, public domain medicine. The alcohol industry doesn't have a relevant infrastructure or supply chain. Tobacco is the only industry that's in a position to pivot, but the profit margins on mass cannabis are much less than tobacco, since it consumption is inherently lower. That said, Philip Morris purchased a few hundred thousand acres of Humboldt county in the early ninties, in anticipation of legalization.
Dont forget alcohol either. A dose of Indica has little mentally-intoxicating effect but a similar muscle-relaxing effect as a pint or 2 of beer (at least for me ), just no calories or potential for dependency.
Were there enough state-legal marijuana business operating under Clinton to make that comparison interesting?
(Bush second term to Obama first term seems like it would be the better comparison available, unless there were titanic policy shifts in the middle of either or both administrations)
> Only about half of the public do understand the difference between science and Fox news.
We can lob hand grenades at each other all day - it's not constructive.
For every Fox News, there is an MSNBC. Heck, there's even Huffington Post.
The actual science surrounding cannabis is difficult to sift through. There's decades of pseudoscience and downright fallacies that have been perpetuated by supporters on both sides of this debate.
The reality is, we're only now really starting to do real research on cannabis and it's various effects (short term, and long term). It's foolish to believe we understand everything about it - because up until recently, it was illegal in most places to even conduct research.
Reason: the DEA will lose power with less regulated substances. The only goal of some bureaucrats is to collect power, not only because it allows to have a better pay, but because mediocre people are inherently attracted to power itself.
They won't just lose power, the whole agency is dead if marijuana is legalized. 82% of illicit drug users are marijuana users (https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/nationwide-...). If you legalize weed, there's 82% less work for the DEA to do.
The elephant in the room regarding legalization is the overburdened prison system. As we saw with the recent Attica anniversary strikes, organized prisoner resistance is a huge threat to the security and economic status quo. Nothing would galvanize resistance like being incarcerated for a crime which is no longer illegal.
Therefore in a more liberal climate I would expect to see progressive access laws continue to be available to non-impoverished white populations, with the federal schedule remaining intact. Now, I simply expect a return to the old strategies for corralling free labor.
Bill Clinton admits that he "tried" to smoke it, I don't think that anyone truly believes that he only made one attempt. George W Bush likely did and at the very least, socialized with people who did.
All three of the Boomer presidents are in the same boat and before them, George HW Bush's life was saved by hemp. It was used in the webbing of the parachute that he used during WWII.
The shot at religion was unnecessary and does not help your point. FYI, I'm agnostic, but anti-religious bias and attacks is no better than racially or gender based attacks.
Also, science is pretty broad. I'm guessing you mean medical science. Social science, depending on area, may agree with the keep illegal stance.
I have to disagree with you on that. Attacking religious beliefs is strictly better than racial or gender based attacks. You can't choose your sex or race, but you can choose whether to join (or to leave) a cult and uphold the often ridiculous beliefs that go along with that. People should be berated when they attempt to force upon others the beliefs of their preferred religion which are founded on nothing more than blind faith, science be damned.
Exactly! Yet another politician who goes against common sense and does the exact opposite of what he said on the campaign trail. And people wonder why Trump won?!?
Edit: Are there people on HN who'll downvote anything with the string "Trump" in it? Not that I care about downvotes (it's just an int in some volatile memory on some server), but I'm surprised people would downvote without even reading.
Obviously, but also very fed up with politicians who say "nice" things and then fail to follow through.
I suspect that a large part of why Trump got as much support as he did is that people thought "this guy is a loose canon, maybe stuff will actually happen"
>I suspect that a large part of why Trump got as much support as he did is that people thought "this guy is a loose canon, maybe stuff will actually happen"
Oh, stuff will actually happen. Very extremely bad stuff, judging by the behavior and personnel appointments we're seeing out of this Administration so far.
> ... people thought "this guy is a loose canon, maybe stuff will actually happen"
There's a very real base of voters who will always vote for "change" until they see whatever they're looking for. They voted for Obama, who even used "hope and change" as a campaign slogan. Then they voted for Trump, because he was the candidate promising change while Clinton was going to be more of the same.
Haha I sort of thought Trump's unspoken slogan was something like, "You didn't like 'Hope and Change'? How about some Change without Hope?" Lots of people wanted that...
So, when he said these things during the campaign, they were horrible awful things that made him a lunatic idiot. But, now if he "reconsiders" these horrible idiotic things he's suddenly a backtracking flip-flopper?
Oh, come on. This kind of cheap troll shit on HN is disgusting. But oh, for the case you really don't understand: He "reconsiders" his promises like "drawning the swamp" not his idiotic accusations and lies. You can try to spin this as hard as you want, but it is obvious that everybody who elected Trump for his promises is dumb.
You're not being specific about which promises you're upset about backtracking on. "Jail Hillary" was a promise that he backtracked on, too. So was increased torture.
As far as trolls go, I'm not the one here labeling 60 million people I don't know "dump as bread".
While I'm happy for him to have backtracked on "jail hillary" it's not because he's actually reconsidered the position or now declares her to be innocent; it's simply never mentioned again. Which shows what a cynical thing it was to campaign on in the first place.
That's incorrect. He's been asked about it directly in interviews several times since the election and has stated that he's not interested in pursuing it and it's not something he wants to focus on as President.
Not necessarily the same set of things. It's not clear whether he's reconsidered the "wall" yet, for example. He did run as an anti-establishment anti-Goldman Sachs candidate and then appoint lots of ex-GS people to his cabinet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38269257
Yes, both of those statements can be true at the same time. But in this case, yes, I'm glad he's backtracking, I expected it for most of his outlandish claims.
But now we have someone who says ridiculous things, does other ridiculous things, and none of them seem to line up. We just don't know what we're going to get.
Luckily, he's old, hasn't worked an 8 hour day in his life, and will likely be letting Pence run the show from behind the scenes, whom while I disagree with vehemently, he's at least predictable.
I can name a whole bunch of people, and show a bunch of people that do take them seriously. And are already furious he's backed down on jailing Hillary, for example.
As the article says, there's nothing really new here. It's more so just making it formal instead of letting people know by having the DEA knock down their door to find out.
From the article:
"There is no major change in law brought about by the Register item. Rather, it serves to clarify and reinforce the DEA’s position on all cannabis extracts, including CBD oil."
I was shocked people were selling CBD oils thinking it was okay; that's the only news here for me.
Disclaimer: I think marijuana is great and am from a state where it's blissfully legal ;)
That may be the DEA's consistent position but whether it's a lawful position is in dispute. Also from the article:
Robert Hoban, a Colorado cannabis attorney and adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver, raised the notion that the rule itself may not be lawful. “This action is beyond the DEA’s authority,” Hoban told Leafly in an interview late this afternoon. “The DEA can only carry out the law, they cannot create it. Here they’re purporting to create an entirely new category called ‘marijuana extracts,’ and by doing so wrest control over all cannabinoids. They want to call all cannabinoids illegal. But they don’t have the authority to do that.”
CBD has absolutely no recreational appeal, so if you followed intuition rather than calling a lawyer it would make sense that it didn't fall under rules that consider marijuana a drug with a high potential for abuse.
That said, I'd hope anyone extracting and selling the stuff as a business would do their due diligence.
Mostly for clarification, I was thinking as a government entity which classifies marijuana as a schedule 1 offense and turns public health issues into criminal ones.
They sure looked the other way when it came to opiates like oxyconton, they are a part of the opiate crisis by focusing on the harmless substance when was the last time they made a major heroin bust for example.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadScience, bitches! Put aside your religious biases and ask: What does science say?
/rant
He didn't just continue it; he doubled down on it.
For some reason, Obama receives credit for relaxing laws on medical marijuana, but the reality is the opposite. Obama actually increased the rate of crackdowns on dispensaries in states with medical marijuana, and spent far more on enforcing federal marijuana laws in these states than either Bush or Clinton did[0].
After Amendment 64/Initiative 501 passed in CO and WA respectively, it's true that he didn't take as strong action against them as he could have. But that's a really low bar to apply to the president who said he "inhaled frequently - that was the point", promised to let states decide their own marijuana laws, and (when he ran for Senate in 2004) advocated decriminalization of marijuana laws.
[0] https://www.greenrushdaily.com/2016/02/24/dispensary-raids-r...
I don't think it's so simple. Big Tobacco also has a lot of money, and they have even more of an incentive for the federal ban on marijuana to be lifted. They can't really touch it while it's in this grey zone, but it's a huge amount of money that they're itching to get their hands on.
Yes, but medical marijuana is a lot less important to pharmaceutical companies than recreational marijuana is to tobacco companies. Pharmaceutical companies care less about medical marijuana these days than you might think.
And it's not so simple, because it's not so easy to see how money gets directed. For example, Altria is a massive, diversified company (albeit less so since Kraft Foods was split off). They likely see their investment in smokeless tobacco ("e-cigarettes") as a lateral move to help them corner the marijuana market once it's legalized. They also see it as a hedge against the decades-long drop in tobacco usage. But which is it? The answer is "both" - weighing those against each other is tough. And it gets even more tough when you try to consider how much they would have considered the loss of the tobacco business to be a threat back in 2006, when their business also included production of cookies and macaroni & cheese.
These incentives are oftentimes conflicting even within the same company, so from the outside, we can't just say "well, industry $X is larger than industry $Y, so they will get their way". They have to decide that the issue at hand is actually more important to them, which isn't so obvious, and that's even before you get into the fact that those industries may actually overlap.
In fact, I'd bet this is exactly what will happen. They're even likely to come to dominate the market, much like Google did the phone market once they came out with Android, and Microsoft did the console market once they came out with the Xbox.
That's exactly what I'm saying. The tobacco industry would love to leverage their existing assets into a lateral move into the marijuana industry. But until it's legal, they have to sit by and watch their lunch get eaten by smaller firms with larger risk appetites because they have less to lose if things blow up in their faces. That's what's already happening.
(Bush second term to Obama first term seems like it would be the better comparison available, unless there were titanic policy shifts in the middle of either or both administrations)
We can lob hand grenades at each other all day - it's not constructive.
For every Fox News, there is an MSNBC. Heck, there's even Huffington Post.
The actual science surrounding cannabis is difficult to sift through. There's decades of pseudoscience and downright fallacies that have been perpetuated by supporters on both sides of this debate.
The reality is, we're only now really starting to do real research on cannabis and it's various effects (short term, and long term). It's foolish to believe we understand everything about it - because up until recently, it was illegal in most places to even conduct research.
Therefore in a more liberal climate I would expect to see progressive access laws continue to be available to non-impoverished white populations, with the federal schedule remaining intact. Now, I simply expect a return to the old strategies for corralling free labor.
Bill Clinton admits that he "tried" to smoke it, I don't think that anyone truly believes that he only made one attempt. George W Bush likely did and at the very least, socialized with people who did.
All three of the Boomer presidents are in the same boat and before them, George HW Bush's life was saved by hemp. It was used in the webbing of the parachute that he used during WWII.
Also, science is pretty broad. I'm guessing you mean medical science. Social science, depending on area, may agree with the keep illegal stance.
Why? Why does religion deserve a reserved spot against criticism that race and gender rightfully share?
It's one thing to berate a religious follower, but another to criticize the religion itself.
Edit: Are there people on HN who'll downvote anything with the string "Trump" in it? Not that I care about downvotes (it's just an int in some volatile memory on some server), but I'm surprised people would downvote without even reading.
Because they where so dumb to believe the rubbish Trump said?
I suspect that a large part of why Trump got as much support as he did is that people thought "this guy is a loose canon, maybe stuff will actually happen"
Oh, stuff will actually happen. Very extremely bad stuff, judging by the behavior and personnel appointments we're seeing out of this Administration so far.
There's a very real base of voters who will always vote for "change" until they see whatever they're looking for. They voted for Obama, who even used "hope and change" as a campaign slogan. Then they voted for Trump, because he was the candidate promising change while Clinton was going to be more of the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/us/politics/obama-donald-t...
Exactly what I meant, but apparently there are some on HN who'll downvote anything appearing to be complimentary of Trump, even if it is not.
I voted for Hillary, BTW.
1) Fanatical follower that believes he will do everything he says
2) A vote against the "system" though understands he says one thing and does another
3) "Just don't like Hillary"
4) etc.
The same Trump who's been back-tracking and 'reconsidering' all his campaign promises before he's even spent one day in office?
The same people who think that a billionaire placing other billionaires in his cabinet is somehow an "outsider" to the elites and going to help them?
As far as trolls go, I'm not the one here labeling 60 million people I don't know "dump as bread".
But now we have someone who says ridiculous things, does other ridiculous things, and none of them seem to line up. We just don't know what we're going to get.
Luckily, he's old, hasn't worked an 8 hour day in his life, and will likely be letting Pence run the show from behind the scenes, whom while I disagree with vehemently, he's at least predictable.
From the article:
"There is no major change in law brought about by the Register item. Rather, it serves to clarify and reinforce the DEA’s position on all cannabis extracts, including CBD oil."
I was shocked people were selling CBD oils thinking it was okay; that's the only news here for me.
Disclaimer: I think marijuana is great and am from a state where it's blissfully legal ;)
Robert Hoban, a Colorado cannabis attorney and adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver, raised the notion that the rule itself may not be lawful. “This action is beyond the DEA’s authority,” Hoban told Leafly in an interview late this afternoon. “The DEA can only carry out the law, they cannot create it. Here they’re purporting to create an entirely new category called ‘marijuana extracts,’ and by doing so wrest control over all cannabinoids. They want to call all cannabinoids illegal. But they don’t have the authority to do that.”
That said, I'd hope anyone extracting and selling the stuff as a business would do their due diligence.