Not really, it confers some pretty specific policy changes (making possession legal, as well as retroactively expunging records, is one part of decriminalization.)
Decriminalization is akin to a parking ticket, it's still illegal, but is not a criminal offense. It literally is what the word means, not a "spin word". Both things serve very different purposes.
You still support crime syndicate with your money. You still have to deal with shady characters in the dark streets. You still have no clue what you are buying, the potency, what is it mixed with. When you travel, you have no clue where to go.
Decriminalization is a half-assed step from horrible situation, but its still a bad and unfair situation. We can do better once we recognize that some substance is not the end of the world (like weed recently).
Personal example - a friend brought from US a vaporizer with weed oil inside. Its much less health-damaging compared to usual smoking - even compared to plant vaporizers, the potency and effect is predictable, you know what to expect. This is how things improve when market is legal, in just couple of years. And this product is illegal everywhere else, including Amsterdam...
Portugal decriminalized possession, sale is still illegal. Overall usage dropped down. Decriminalization doesn't serve the same objectives as legalization. Pretty sure outright legalizing meth wouldn't be such a great idea.
Legalization is not the solution to everything either. Since weed has been legalized around here (Canada) a couple of big cities moved to literally ban smoking it everywhere. Current Quebec government is also pushing to ban smoking it outside province wide. They also let landlords ban marijuana use property wide. So basically, in these cities (and if the current Quebec government gets its way, which it definitely might considering its a majority government), marijuana is now legal to own, but renters now can't legally smoke anywhere.
There was a fair bit of teetotaling going on in the late 1800s, but I think they probably just got sick and tired of high assholes running all over, dangerously operating heavy machinery, crashing their carts, and falling off their horses. Oh, and a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.
I vouched for your comment not because I agree with it, but I vehemently disagree. I also think your viewpoint is pervasive in more conservative circles.
We saw what happened in the Prohibition. When alcohol was criminalized, gang violence spiked, production was accidentally mixed with ethyl -and- methyl, tax revenues went down, and we as a populace was generally unsafer after than before. There were even cases where the US govt poisoned rumrunners' stocks to kill drinkers - they were doing something illegal, so US officials deemed it OK to kill people. It was bad enough that Congress and the president did another constitutional change to remove the ban.
With cannabis, it is mostly harmless and makes you feel weird. But as noted by Nixon and other republicans, banning and punishing cannabis users was being equated with targeting hippies and blacks.
And of course, cannabis usage completely ignores many health positive effects like prevention of nausea, glaucoma, and many others. It's not a cure-all, but the downsides are very very limited. Just compare this to say, the Sacklers' pushing of Oxycontin. I don't think "near harmless" can be used to discuss that.
When we look at harm minimization, making drugs illegal only pushes them underground, deprives tax dollars, increases violent groups to maintain illicit trade, and further reduces public safety. So yeah, you do have to look at the whole issue rather than "My uncle Jimbob sits around gettin' high". Whereas alcoholism and alcohol overdose is a significant issue which can kill people.. Yet we had that discussion a century ago, and we learned our lesson then.
I’m not an expert on conservative philosophy, but it seems like the conservative case for sobriety is that happiness and joy should be earned, and drugs are a short-circuit of that.
To be clear, I'm simply stating what I perceive to be the kernel of the conservative argument against drugs. I'm not personally espousing any particular position on drug use.
Was more of a general 'you'. I think they're more afraid of a counter culture than anything else. People get nasty when you threaten (or are perceived to threaten) their way of life.
I think that's part of the case part of the time, but it's definitely not the whole thing. Other prongs include purity (drugs are a corrupting influence) and tribalism/classism (drug use marks you as an inferior and unwelcome kind of person).
just as a quick FYI, the alcohol humans consume to become intoxicated is, and always has been, the ethyl- variety. Ethanol is poisonous as varying doses but methyl alcohol, or methanol, is FAR more dangerous. This is the compound that was poisoning people back in the days of prohibition due to lack of production controls.
As a fun little side note, the concentration of ethanol in black market drink drastically increased during the days of prohibition because the moonshiners could fit more "bang for the buck" into a smaller volume making transport easier and more profitable. Smells quite a bit to me like the current fentanyl predicament of the black market heroin/opiate trade.
> Oh, and a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
Yes, he's terrible.
Putting him in jail, and destroying any possibility of him getting a decent job, forever, hardly seems a constructive way forwards there though does it?
Re-learn? Everything you described still happens regularly despite decades of warring against drugs (and even prohibition!).
> a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
Have you ever wondered why they're drunk/stoned all the time? They're not a drunk because they're a drunk. They're a drunk for different reasons. They're depressed. They're not satisfied with their life or themselves. They're hurting. They're scared. They're angry. There's a reason for it and it's not because they can buy alcohol or drugs.
I feel like there is a bit of a reason to do that for things like say ... crack. Pot is one thing but the ultra addictive stuff, I just don't see making that legal a good idea.
Not all drugs are equal in my mind in that sense.
Granted I've no issue for being measured with how to handle folks who are caught with it.
more like we're throwing you in jail to protect the rest of us from your addiction. Anyone who has ever crossed paths with an addict short on money to feed their addiction knows this all too well. Also, finding syringes on the sidewalk where kids play isn't good either.
The syringes at the park are a direct result of drug policy. Perhaps the person had social/mental problems before becoming an addict. Why not divert resources to making life more livable for more people rather than cages that do not fix anything?
This just makes them 'lowest priority', and only to denver police and courts. Still very much a crime, still prosecuted, just way less.
Yay selective local enforcement! What a huge leap forward! /s
While I am happy any effort and attention is here, it doesn't do anything even for people who get busted. The colorado courts are still happy to assume any more than one is intent to sell, and weigh the box the came in to charge you. I welcome a step forward, but this is closer to a twitch.
This was a first step in Washington with marijuana. Seattle voted to make prosecution "lowest priority," and it was a series of steps from that to complete legalization.
It seems like these laws often slowly follow what is already taking place unofficially. It makes sense because most police really don’t want to be spending time on pointless arrests.
>> most police really don’t want to be spending time on pointless arrests.
Most police are happy to confiscate and personally use or make use of contraband as an alternative currency.
When arrests are incentivised as paths to promotion, most police seem to be fine with them, and when they are disincentivised to skew statistics and optics they seem fine with that as well.
Do you have evidence of this other than from the movie Training Day? Saying "most" is a huge generalization. I would agree it probably happens, but "most"?
It really is kind of insane that we have a law that criminalizes possession of a plant you can literally pick out of the grass in your lawn in some places.
The deeper insanity is that physically speaking, magic mushrooms are one of the safest known drugs to man. Nobody's dying from magic mushroom overdose, flying into violent rages, dancing until they pass out from dehydration, or robbing stores to pay for their next mushroom fix. Along any metric you'd care to name, psilocybin is a much safer drug than, say, alcohol.
It has the capability of changing you mentally permanently. It can change it for the better, or for worse, and it doesn't take that many times. It takes longer for alcohol to change you.
Physically, you're absolutely right though.
No one wants willow bark, they want aspirin. You can't grow aspirin in your back yard, you need to do chemistry to turn the bark into the medicine. Plus willow is a tree and you can't grow it everywhere.
Cannabis approaches that point where if it were any easier to grow, everyone would. But it's not quite there yet.
Water requires organization but is plentiful enough to be mostly free for typical amounts. Companies that do the organization are heavily regulated and the people running it aren't getting rich.
No one wants willow bark, they want aspirin. You can't grow aspirin in your back yard, you need to do chemistry to turn the bark into the medicine. Plus willow is a tree and you can't grow it everywhere.
Nobody wants willow bark (not totally accurate, but let’s accept it) because aspirin was formulated. That’s not a defense of your argument, it’s the hole in it. Why do you think that mushrooms, unlike willow trees and a thousand other natural sources for what would eventually be synthesized, won’t be made into a superior form by a drug company? Legalizing one opens up opportunities for the latter, which then displaces the old.
Why do you think mushrooms are somehow the exception?
You are trying to argue on the basis of truth. I can accept the truth of your statements, despite it being irrelevant to the politicians who ultimately drive regulation. The politicians do not see truth, they only see their next re-election campaign. And since there's more political capital to be reaped, right now, from being anti-drug, then there is in supporting a new drug whose industry hasn't been built out yet, we won't be seeing psilocybin decriminalization, much less legalization anytime soon.
The same mechanics are at work in the current push for cannabis decriminalization and ultimate legalization. It takes the building of a tax base in order to get politicians to take the cause of cannabis seriously. Political economics neatly explain everything about the world we live in.
We already have plenty of regulated drugs which are used recreationally. Adderall, narcotics. You're saying psilocybin isn't special compared to other drugs. You'd be right, except for the fact that there isn't already an industry that exists to cultivate and bring psilocybin mushrooms to people, simply because anyone can go out and pick them themselves. There already was a cannabis industry before legalization, albeit an illegal one. Where is the illegal mushroom business? It's just random people doing it for side profits. Nobody's getting rich off of it.
Because nobody can get rich off of it, there isn't a political economic reason for legalizing it. There might be a public-interest reason, but that means the public has to actually generate more political capital than the anti-drug crowd generates from saying it's horrible in order to get it legalized.
I'm not saying nobody can make money off of psilocybin or that research can't be done. I'm saying that because nobody is already getting rich off of it, its political heft is forever going to be limited to 'mere' public interest.
Cannabis required a public-interest campaign before it could be regulated in one state, because the existing black-market industry had a vested interest in cannabis remaining illegal. Once the regulation enabled taxes, now we're seeing more regulation and legalization.
It can trigger deep psychosis which can take people years to come back from, or even permanently 'break' personalities and make people worse human beings. Imagine having very dark bad trip for the first time, on high dose, with nobody around to help.
My opinion is that those people could end up there via different ways (alcoholism, mental shocks like car crash or other mental traumas), but this is definitely one way.
It is extremely powerful substance and can take you very far from common reality, not something most folks are prepared for. I know I was not, and having every single aspect that makes me me taken away, both on physical and personality level was by huge margin the most intense experience of my life.
I believe it should be legal (maybe with some huge warnings/education about potential consequences), but from all I've heard LSD is just synthetic variant of the same - why would that be illegal then? If that is OK, what about mescaline, that's also just a plant? Ayahusca? Cocaine is also a plant extract, and so is heroine (with some chemistry on top of that, but coca itself has quite an effect on its own). A bit slippery slope...
> It can trigger deep psychosis which can take people years to come back from, or even permanently 'break' personalities and make people worse human beings.
I'm sorry to hear that, but you honestly have no idea if the psychedelic actually caused it. Any number of environmental factors could be at play. No doubt that they will cause issues in some folks, but as the link I provided shows, there's no reason to think they will cause it at any greater rate than other factors we encounter daily.
I'm a strong proponent of hallucinogens, and in general agree with you, but two years ago a close friend of mine did mushrooms, and it generated profound, negative, permanent changes to his mental health. IDK if they caused it, or if it was always lurking there and they triggered it, or what, but this has certainly caused me to think twice on my original position of "they're fine, they're safe, it's all good"
I think I still agree that they're certainly safer than most other drugs
Funnily; one of the ways to "make Mexico pay" for the wall would be by legalizing U.S. owned and grown marijuana, and using a tax to pay for the wall. It's only coming from Mexico in the sense of an untracked trade deficit, but a little pr could do it.
This also puts the stereotyped rural, underemployed, farmer back in a lucrative industry. Provides a solution for the Opioid epidemic. Lowers the cost of healthcare.
I fear this gives rhetorical ammo to folks who don’t want any “drugs” (besides caffeine and alcohol, of course) in their communities legal. I can hear the argument now. “Maybe you want weed, because it’s harmless? How about magic mushrooms? Where do we stop? Cocaine? Meth? How about we empty out the pharmacy for all to get high on whatever they want!” Slippery slope.
I fear the successful movement thus far is about to have breaks applied in the “on the fence” states after this news.
Call it psilocybin and have it officially used for addiction treatment, depression, anxiety, and terminally ill patients. The transition from medical psilocybin to recreational can be gradual, and should prevent the slippery slope you mention. Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.
I did pretty much every drug imaginable in my 20s other than opiates and sitting here in my 40s I don’t see any reason they should be illegal. Certainly none of them had worse effects on me or my friends than alcohol and smoking.
I am. You should be able to walk into a doctor's office and ask for a prescription to treat your addiction and withdrawal symptoms. If there's no methadone type reduced-harm variant of your drug of choice, it should be straight up prescribed to you so you can buy it in a metered, safe and pure form from a pharmacist. And your doctor should continue to try and keep you safe even if you are never able to beat the addiction.
The moral hazard into turning doctors and pharmacists into pushers and dealers is obvious, but bringing it above board should make the problem tractable.
You'd definitely save tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives per year in reduced overdoses, elimination of the drug war and reduction in gang warfare.
There direct counterpoint here is that many doctors treated opiates in this way - allowing people to walk in and ask for them, and it let to significant issues for society.
It's not that simple. By prescribing these kinds of drugs an ethical obligation is assumed to prevent the patient from becoming addicted or experiencing withdrawals unnecessarily. If we allow anyone free access to drugs, would we not bear a similar responsibility?
I think they should be legalized and regulated. Too many people get killed by a dealer's shitty cutting skills. Having the stuff regulated by the FDA and requiring FDA certification for labs would save thousands of lives every year, as well as make the drugs potentially safe for recreational use.
The other thing legalization does is eliminate the need for a seedy underbelly of dealers and thugs. The thugs exist because nobody can risk going to the cops and asking for help. You don't want to get arrested for reporting a robbery or assault. A lot of the bad things associated with drug sales are a result of the drug sales being illegal.
> Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.
I am. Criminalization has proven to be a dead-end strategy, inflicting serious harm on people to people and society. Several studies have shown alcohol to be on par or worse with heroine and cocaine in terms of harm inflicted and it's still legal to sell to adults. The opiate epidemic has all but proven that OTC and prescription medication can have effects at least as bad as cocaine and meth. Criminalization fosters crime and leads to drugs that are worse in side effects, leading to increased harm.
Criminalization makes it substantially harder to reach affected people and get them into treatment since we treat the addicts as criminals- Portugal has proven that decriminalization is an effective harm reduction strategy. I'm all for it "make all recreational drugs available to adults" and at the same time invest in educating people and helping them to leave the circumstances that lead to the addiction.
> Though are you serious with meth and cocaine? No one is advocating legalizing those.
Methamphetamine and cocaine are both schedule 2, meaning they are legal with a prescription. Pot and shrooms, arguably way safer, are schedule 1, meaning there are no valid medical uses and are outright prohibited in the US.
That's not really the proper response, since it doesn't address their actual argument. People arguing against drug legalization don't want other people doing drugs. The argument against them is around personal freedom and an adult's right to do what they want with their own body. They'll generally respond with concerns about societal impact. Those concerns are, in my opinion, valid and are where discussions can be had to actually come to a resolution.
I'm not sure what your argument is. The "Oh, we already tried that? whoops" seems like you just wanted to say something snarky. We have plenty of laws in place around regulating the societal impact of alcohol. Minors can't drink, you can't drive under the influence, there's very strict limits on drinking in public in many places. These are all things in place to address societal concerns.
Those boundaries are likely very different for a drug that detaches you from reality, and discussions around that are where concerns can be met and middle ground can be found.
I think you're delusional if you're under the impression that ethanol doesn't "detach you from reality"
but yes, psychoactive substances should be made legal and controlled in a similar fashion where one would need to be of a certain age to legally purchase them. I don't understand how people think "oh well kids would just be high on meth all the time!" when that thought process in itself, is the one detached from reality.
You're arguing against points I'm not making, and equating the ability of alcohol and psychedelic drugs to detach you from reality is willful ignorance. This is the kind of argument that hurts the cause you're arguing in favor of.
Tell me then at what dose an NMDA antagonist, of any variety you can choose, detaches one from reality? I'd love to hear your take on the effect of anti-glutamatergics on consciousness.
Are you fine if depressed/lonely/traumatized people are being targeted with highly addictive drugs that could kill them? You can say that it's their choice but you need right mind for the choice.
Are you fine if your child has easy access to drugs and it being 'cool' to have drugs?
Yes I specifically told the things that is currently happening and I am not fine with it. I am not saying that mushrooms should be banned, just saying I criticize legalizing everything just because you have choice to not do drugs.
Do you support the return of prohibition of alcohol, then, but keeping it "decriminalized"?
I think a lot of this fear that legalizing drugs will lead to a bunch of non-drug users suddenly becoming drug addicts is simply hysteria. People use illegal drugs to self-medicate some other problem; healthy people are not suddenly going to want to be crack users.
A lot of the hysteria in Colorado prior to marijuana legalization was that youth consumption rates would increase. The opposite happened:
OxyContin is an example of targeting vulnerable with highly addictive drugs that can kill you. Corporations are far more effective at this than a local mushroom dealer.
This debate isn’t about whether or not these drugs are harmful, but whether or not the criminal justice system’s overwhelming capacity to enact harm against people is the way to protect ourselves.
Try telling that to people who don't understand anything and don't care to try. The people who are OK with a life sentence for three strikes of weed possession because "just don't break the law." That's who the parent poster was talking about taking up those arguments.
Yes, the logic is faulty, but guaranteed you'll see it on social media memes and the evening opinionews.
And if you don't know anyone who thinks like that, consider yourself lucky, then know that they are out there and they vote in force.
Naw, I regrettably have known many folks like that, and grew up around plenty even though my family believed otherwise.
I found that to convince them of the mutual benefit of the humane approach required beginning the conversation from where they were at and slowly working our way toward the understanding of pursuing better outcomes through a thoughtful reimagining of our reaction to antisocial behaviors. If you just dump on people and tell them they're wrong they stop caring about the idea and only want to fight you off.
So, oddly enough, actually making progress toward convincing people to be humane requires being humane in the doing of the convincing.
It wasn’t that all that long ago (mid-2000s) that these were banned in the UK and Netherlands.
I remember little mushroom stalls in Camden market which sold all kinds of interesting fungi, packaged and shrink-wrapped just like you’d see in a supermarket.
Does a step like this help lead to research opportunities (in a few more years an legal pushes)? [Like this? https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/marijuana-research] I'm interested in how long it takes for this to make research on such chemicals easier/accessible. How could this affect MAPS? (https://maps.org/)
Regarding general trends in the legalization movement and related spaces:
> The interest in CBD currently seems like a soft, first step for many people into the realm of what was once perceived as very bad or dangerous (e.g. Reefer Madness). Plus the wave of recreationalization in the US.
> Canada is an interesting position due to the legalization movement; I'm curious if they are poised to become the global leader in "mj" research and the pharmaceuticals/medicines derived from that research. Or is the market just waiting for the US to become federally unfettered ("sleeping giant")?
As someone whose done shrooms around 50x I don't think they should be illegal. But I also don't think you want the average Joe to have easy access either. Low doses of 1 gram or less are manageable by most but at high doses of around 3 or super high like 5 gram doses your connection to normal reality loosens.
When ever i consumed high doses I always marked the expected peak time and eta to near baseline so I could use that to calm myself if I became too high. I don't expect this approach from most people. And that worries me.
It's a amazingly calming feeling to be able to say to oneself "wow I am really fucking high only 1.5 hours to near baseline" while staring at a third eye on your best friends forhead.
I don't really use them any more as I am enjoying sobriety more and more as I get older.
Speaking from personal experience, residual 'disconnection' / difficulties resolve after ~48 hours. I actually feel more connected to 'reality' during/after tripping, but everyone's experiences vary.
Lately there has been some promising research into psilocybin's long-term effects on the brain and specifically depression - it's becoming clear that the drug has a unique effect in breaking down old (potentially negative) pathways/connections and allowing new (potentially healthier) connections to form in their place. Really interesting stuff.
Yes, although a good amount of academic research and most of my personal experience has been with LSD as opposed to mushrooms. Mainly due to the increased duration and slight stimulant properties.
Nothing but good things to say about the practice provided you keep dosage and frequency at the 'micro' threshold. My roommate and I ran a pseudo-blind study (50% chance we'd get LSD on a microdose day, 50% water) and both noticed increased energy, empathy, creativity, and general quality of life.
How to Change Your Mind as someone else suggested is a great place to start.
First disconnection to reality cannot be explained, only experienced. If you have not experienced hallucinogenics than attempting to comprehend that meaning is likely futile. Furthermore, each individual may have their own unique experience/definition of this disconnected reality. It makes conveying experiences very difficult.
I'd say 24 to 48 hours. Though at 8 hours post consumption you are pretty much back and I think most of what remains is system shock. LSD is an entirely different story as the trip can last twice as long as shrooms. Despite the effects being less physically severe (i.e. no stomach discomfort) I was never a fan. Twelve hours of being high is just too long for me. Would be nice to get thoughts from someone who has taken lots of LSD as my experience is limited to about 3 trips.
The cynic in me fears that most psychs will never be legalized. Can you imagine the threat posed to the elite if you had a large portion of the public regularly engaging in unrestrained free-associative thought?
I can't. I totally fail at imagining any form of threat the elite might face from a "public regularly engaging in unrestrained free-associative thought". Their positions would be safer than ever.
Instead of the majority of people mindlessly consuming media and products without questioning the impact it's having on their minds, their future, the environment, other cultures, etc, they might pause to ponder these things.
Rather than accepting society as an immutable construct that they couldn't possibly influence in a positive way, people might choose to participate in challenging the status quo.
In lieu of othering demographics that they don't understand, people might realize that despite some minor cosmetic differences, we're all humans that have a pretty vivid subjective experience of pain.
The elite benefit from a complacent majority. I would even go so far as to say they rely on a complacent majority to maintain their position. You don't have to venture very far to read stories about people who experience tectonic shifts in their patterns of thought after taking psychs.
The current fully legalized and regulated substances just don't have that kind of effect. Alcohol just lowers your inhibitions and arguably makes you stupider.
> “Denver is quickly becoming the illicit drug capitol of the world,” Jeff Hunt, director of the Colorado-based Centennial Institute, a conservative think tank, said in a statement.
Slow your roll, Jeff. Denver is pretty far from Amsterdam.
Conservatives are just a total joke at this point. If only they put an ounce of effort that they put into policing personal behavior into conserving say...the environment.
Pretty sure weed hasn’t hurt Colorado’s reputation whatsoever. We still have tons of people moving here, including large businesses.
All the hyperbole these people shouted about prior to legalization of weed has not come true.
There was a study that was conducted in the UK which looked into the relative amount of harm caused by the various legal and illegal recreational substances.
>It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual "from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships" and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.
Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack.
He lost his job after publicly calling out the government for ignoring the conclusions of the study.
>Nutt was sacked last year by the home secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, for challenging ministers' refusal to take the advice of the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which he chaired.
A brilliant book - a careful philosophical argument for decriminalizing all drugs: Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs (Practical Ethics Series) by Doug Husak
The gist: whenever someone is about to be put in jail for any reason, they ought to be given a reasonable answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?" There simply is no satisfactory answer for current drug charges.
Bad answers to this question would require, out of consistency, criminalization of alcohol, tobacco, skiing (dangerous!), pizza (bad for your health!), etc.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadDecriminalization is a half-assed step from horrible situation, but its still a bad and unfair situation. We can do better once we recognize that some substance is not the end of the world (like weed recently).
Personal example - a friend brought from US a vaporizer with weed oil inside. Its much less health-damaging compared to usual smoking - even compared to plant vaporizers, the potency and effect is predictable, you know what to expect. This is how things improve when market is legal, in just couple of years. And this product is illegal everywhere else, including Amsterdam...
Legalization is not the solution to everything either. Since weed has been legalized around here (Canada) a couple of big cities moved to literally ban smoking it everywhere. Current Quebec government is also pushing to ban smoking it outside province wide. They also let landlords ban marijuana use property wide. So basically, in these cities (and if the current Quebec government gets its way, which it definitely might considering its a majority government), marijuana is now legal to own, but renters now can't legally smoke anywhere.
We're going to re-learn all those lessons all over again.
We saw what happened in the Prohibition. When alcohol was criminalized, gang violence spiked, production was accidentally mixed with ethyl -and- methyl, tax revenues went down, and we as a populace was generally unsafer after than before. There were even cases where the US govt poisoned rumrunners' stocks to kill drinkers - they were doing something illegal, so US officials deemed it OK to kill people. It was bad enough that Congress and the president did another constitutional change to remove the ban.
With cannabis, it is mostly harmless and makes you feel weird. But as noted by Nixon and other republicans, banning and punishing cannabis users was being equated with targeting hippies and blacks.
And of course, cannabis usage completely ignores many health positive effects like prevention of nausea, glaucoma, and many others. It's not a cure-all, but the downsides are very very limited. Just compare this to say, the Sacklers' pushing of Oxycontin. I don't think "near harmless" can be used to discuss that.
When we look at harm minimization, making drugs illegal only pushes them underground, deprives tax dollars, increases violent groups to maintain illicit trade, and further reduces public safety. So yeah, you do have to look at the whole issue rather than "My uncle Jimbob sits around gettin' high". Whereas alcoholism and alcohol overdose is a significant issue which can kill people.. Yet we had that discussion a century ago, and we learned our lesson then.
Yes, he's terrible.
Putting him in jail, and destroying any possibility of him getting a decent job, forever, hardly seems a constructive way forwards there though does it?
stoned fathers still exist, during the current prohibition.
> a father who is drunk/stoned all the time isn't much good to a family.
Have you ever wondered why they're drunk/stoned all the time? They're not a drunk because they're a drunk. They're a drunk for different reasons. They're depressed. They're not satisfied with their life or themselves. They're hurting. They're scared. They're angry. There's a reason for it and it's not because they can buy alcohol or drugs.
Not all drugs are equal in my mind in that sense.
Granted I've no issue for being measured with how to handle folks who are caught with it.
The former means you won’t get a criminal record for it but it’s still illegal.
Criminalizing addicts is not helping anyone. Throwing addicts into jail doesn't solve their addiction problem, and distributors are still out there.
Yay selective local enforcement! What a huge leap forward! /s
While I am happy any effort and attention is here, it doesn't do anything even for people who get busted. The colorado courts are still happy to assume any more than one is intent to sell, and weigh the box the came in to charge you. I welcome a step forward, but this is closer to a twitch.
Most police are happy to confiscate and personally use or make use of contraband as an alternative currency.
When arrests are incentivised as paths to promotion, most police seem to be fine with them, and when they are disincentivised to skew statistics and optics they seem fine with that as well.
The deeper insanity is that physically speaking, magic mushrooms are one of the safest known drugs to man. Nobody's dying from magic mushroom overdose, flying into violent rages, dancing until they pass out from dehydration, or robbing stores to pay for their next mushroom fix. Along any metric you'd care to name, psilocybin is a much safer drug than, say, alcohol.
Cannabis approaches that point where if it were any easier to grow, everyone would. But it's not quite there yet.
Water requires organization but is plentiful enough to be mostly free for typical amounts. Companies that do the organization are heavily regulated and the people running it aren't getting rich.
Nobody wants willow bark (not totally accurate, but let’s accept it) because aspirin was formulated. That’s not a defense of your argument, it’s the hole in it. Why do you think that mushrooms, unlike willow trees and a thousand other natural sources for what would eventually be synthesized, won’t be made into a superior form by a drug company? Legalizing one opens up opportunities for the latter, which then displaces the old.
Why do you think mushrooms are somehow the exception?
The same mechanics are at work in the current push for cannabis decriminalization and ultimate legalization. It takes the building of a tax base in order to get politicians to take the cause of cannabis seriously. Political economics neatly explain everything about the world we live in.
We already have plenty of regulated drugs which are used recreationally. Adderall, narcotics. You're saying psilocybin isn't special compared to other drugs. You'd be right, except for the fact that there isn't already an industry that exists to cultivate and bring psilocybin mushrooms to people, simply because anyone can go out and pick them themselves. There already was a cannabis industry before legalization, albeit an illegal one. Where is the illegal mushroom business? It's just random people doing it for side profits. Nobody's getting rich off of it.
Because nobody can get rich off of it, there isn't a political economic reason for legalizing it. There might be a public-interest reason, but that means the public has to actually generate more political capital than the anti-drug crowd generates from saying it's horrible in order to get it legalized.
I'm not saying nobody can make money off of psilocybin or that research can't be done. I'm saying that because nobody is already getting rich off of it, its political heft is forever going to be limited to 'mere' public interest.
Cannabis required a public-interest campaign before it could be regulated in one state, because the existing black-market industry had a vested interest in cannabis remaining illegal. Once the regulation enabled taxes, now we're seeing more regulation and legalization.
My opinion is that those people could end up there via different ways (alcoholism, mental shocks like car crash or other mental traumas), but this is definitely one way.
It is extremely powerful substance and can take you very far from common reality, not something most folks are prepared for. I know I was not, and having every single aspect that makes me me taken away, both on physical and personality level was by huge margin the most intense experience of my life.
I believe it should be legal (maybe with some huge warnings/education about potential consequences), but from all I've heard LSD is just synthetic variant of the same - why would that be illegal then? If that is OK, what about mescaline, that's also just a plant? Ayahusca? Cocaine is also a plant extract, and so is heroine (with some chemistry on top of that, but coca itself has quite an effect on its own). A bit slippery slope...
No link found between psychedelics and psychosis:
https://www.nature.com/news/no-link-found-between-psychedeli...
I think I still agree that they're certainly safer than most other drugs
This also puts the stereotyped rural, underemployed, farmer back in a lucrative industry. Provides a solution for the Opioid epidemic. Lowers the cost of healthcare.
I fear this gives rhetorical ammo to folks who don’t want any “drugs” (besides caffeine and alcohol, of course) in their communities legal. I can hear the argument now. “Maybe you want weed, because it’s harmless? How about magic mushrooms? Where do we stop? Cocaine? Meth? How about we empty out the pharmacy for all to get high on whatever they want!” Slippery slope.
I fear the successful movement thus far is about to have breaks applied in the “on the fence” states after this news.
From following the discusssions here on HN it seems a number of people are actually arguing to legalize everything for personal use.
I am. You should be able to walk into a doctor's office and ask for a prescription to treat your addiction and withdrawal symptoms. If there's no methadone type reduced-harm variant of your drug of choice, it should be straight up prescribed to you so you can buy it in a metered, safe and pure form from a pharmacist. And your doctor should continue to try and keep you safe even if you are never able to beat the addiction.
The moral hazard into turning doctors and pharmacists into pushers and dealers is obvious, but bringing it above board should make the problem tractable.
You'd definitely save tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives per year in reduced overdoses, elimination of the drug war and reduction in gang warfare.
The other thing legalization does is eliminate the need for a seedy underbelly of dealers and thugs. The thugs exist because nobody can risk going to the cops and asking for help. You don't want to get arrested for reporting a robbery or assault. A lot of the bad things associated with drug sales are a result of the drug sales being illegal.
I am. Criminalization has proven to be a dead-end strategy, inflicting serious harm on people to people and society. Several studies have shown alcohol to be on par or worse with heroine and cocaine in terms of harm inflicted and it's still legal to sell to adults. The opiate epidemic has all but proven that OTC and prescription medication can have effects at least as bad as cocaine and meth. Criminalization fosters crime and leads to drugs that are worse in side effects, leading to increased harm.
Criminalization makes it substantially harder to reach affected people and get them into treatment since we treat the addicts as criminals- Portugal has proven that decriminalization is an effective harm reduction strategy. I'm all for it "make all recreational drugs available to adults" and at the same time invest in educating people and helping them to leave the circumstances that lead to the addiction.
Methamphetamine and cocaine are both schedule 2, meaning they are legal with a prescription. Pot and shrooms, arguably way safer, are schedule 1, meaning there are no valid medical uses and are outright prohibited in the US.
"Then don't do drugs"
Those boundaries are likely very different for a drug that detaches you from reality, and discussions around that are where concerns can be met and middle ground can be found.
but yes, psychoactive substances should be made legal and controlled in a similar fashion where one would need to be of a certain age to legally purchase them. I don't understand how people think "oh well kids would just be high on meth all the time!" when that thought process in itself, is the one detached from reality.
Are you fine if your child has easy access to drugs and it being 'cool' to have drugs?
This is about not taking a clear public HEALTH issue into a criminal justice one.
Why do so many Americans think we can jail or kill our way out of every single problem?
I think a lot of this fear that legalizing drugs will lead to a bunch of non-drug users suddenly becoming drug addicts is simply hysteria. People use illegal drugs to self-medicate some other problem; healthy people are not suddenly going to want to be crack users.
A lot of the hysteria in Colorado prior to marijuana legalization was that youth consumption rates would increase. The opposite happened:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/11/follo...
Yes, the logic is faulty, but guaranteed you'll see it on social media memes and the evening opinionews.
And if you don't know anyone who thinks like that, consider yourself lucky, then know that they are out there and they vote in force.
I found that to convince them of the mutual benefit of the humane approach required beginning the conversation from where they were at and slowly working our way toward the understanding of pursuing better outcomes through a thoughtful reimagining of our reaction to antisocial behaviors. If you just dump on people and tell them they're wrong they stop caring about the idea and only want to fight you off.
So, oddly enough, actually making progress toward convincing people to be humane requires being humane in the doing of the convincing.
We could stop wherever there's actual evidence of harm. I know, radical notion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Psychiatric
I remember little mushroom stalls in Camden market which sold all kinds of interesting fungi, packaged and shrink-wrapped just like you’d see in a supermarket.
Regarding general trends in the legalization movement and related spaces:
> The interest in CBD currently seems like a soft, first step for many people into the realm of what was once perceived as very bad or dangerous (e.g. Reefer Madness). Plus the wave of recreationalization in the US.
> Canada is an interesting position due to the legalization movement; I'm curious if they are poised to become the global leader in "mj" research and the pharmaceuticals/medicines derived from that research. Or is the market just waiting for the US to become federally unfettered ("sleeping giant")?
When ever i consumed high doses I always marked the expected peak time and eta to near baseline so I could use that to calm myself if I became too high. I don't expect this approach from most people. And that worries me.
It's a amazingly calming feeling to be able to say to oneself "wow I am really fucking high only 1.5 hours to near baseline" while staring at a third eye on your best friends forhead.
I don't really use them any more as I am enjoying sobriety more and more as I get older.
I agree about average Joe access. I live in Colorado and a lot of people, “adults,” cannot even responsibly take marijuana edibles.
Lately there has been some promising research into psilocybin's long-term effects on the brain and specifically depression - it's becoming clear that the drug has a unique effect in breaking down old (potentially negative) pathways/connections and allowing new (potentially healthier) connections to form in their place. Really interesting stuff.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5640601/
Nothing but good things to say about the practice provided you keep dosage and frequency at the 'micro' threshold. My roommate and I ran a pseudo-blind study (50% chance we'd get LSD on a microdose day, 50% water) and both noticed increased energy, empathy, creativity, and general quality of life.
How to Change Your Mind as someone else suggested is a great place to start.
I'd say 24 to 48 hours. Though at 8 hours post consumption you are pretty much back and I think most of what remains is system shock. LSD is an entirely different story as the trip can last twice as long as shrooms. Despite the effects being less physically severe (i.e. no stomach discomfort) I was never a fan. Twelve hours of being high is just too long for me. Would be nice to get thoughts from someone who has taken lots of LSD as my experience is limited to about 3 trips.
Instead of the majority of people mindlessly consuming media and products without questioning the impact it's having on their minds, their future, the environment, other cultures, etc, they might pause to ponder these things.
Rather than accepting society as an immutable construct that they couldn't possibly influence in a positive way, people might choose to participate in challenging the status quo.
In lieu of othering demographics that they don't understand, people might realize that despite some minor cosmetic differences, we're all humans that have a pretty vivid subjective experience of pain.
The elite benefit from a complacent majority. I would even go so far as to say they rely on a complacent majority to maintain their position. You don't have to venture very far to read stories about people who experience tectonic shifts in their patterns of thought after taking psychs.
The current fully legalized and regulated substances just don't have that kind of effect. Alcohol just lowers your inhibitions and arguably makes you stupider.
Never met a drug user who did that. Met scores of drug users who thought that they did.
Slow your roll, Jeff. Denver is pretty far from Amsterdam.
Pretty sure weed hasn’t hurt Colorado’s reputation whatsoever. We still have tons of people moving here, including large businesses.
All the hyperbole these people shouted about prior to legalization of weed has not come true.
>It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual "from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships" and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.
Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more...
Magic mushrooms scored a 5.
He lost his job after publicly calling out the government for ignoring the conclusions of the study.
>Nutt was sacked last year by the home secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, for challenging ministers' refusal to take the advice of the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which he chaired.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more...
https://www.amazon.com/Legalize-This-Decriminalizing-Practic...
The gist: whenever someone is about to be put in jail for any reason, they ought to be given a reasonable answer to the question "Why am I being put in jail?" There simply is no satisfactory answer for current drug charges.
Bad answers to this question would require, out of consistency, criminalization of alcohol, tobacco, skiing (dangerous!), pizza (bad for your health!), etc.