Thank god for kahama harris saving us from all those poor black men selling a plant. I love that the replacement for the dumpster that is trump is another awful candidate.
In case you are like me and only clicked the article to find out what the other 10 states were. Here's what Wikipedia says:
> The recreational use of cannabis is legalized in 11 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.
Prepared cannabis can't be taken across state lines legally yet, in general. However, you certainly can imbibe many milligrams of edible oil and be extremely stoned on Amtrak. (This isn't legal advice.)
I feel like the internet has failed me today. I legitimately searched hoping to find an example of someone growing weed from or in a gun. Sadly, i could not actually find this.
I've been amazed by this too. South Dakota and Idaho especially. South Dakota is coming around but Idaho is steadfast in all marijuana is bad, no matter what the THC level, even industrial hemp and cbd oils are fully banned. I'd love to hear from someone who is from the state and in-line with the conservative small government platform explain their position on keeping marijuana illegal.
It comes down to incumbent representatives ruining so many peoples lives that they have to be right. Reconciling that is impossible and admitting to that they need to free incarcerated people and absolve ex-felons isnt just a pride issue for them, it might be perceived as dangerous to them. Its a flaw in the system for the state apparatus to be hamstrung by its need to be respected.
No. Marijuana can definitely cause distracted driving and lead to accidents. What’s with the internet and talking about marijuana like it’s super safe and glossing over its downsides?
I think you read past my statement and went directly to the outrage. And to vmception: No! Operating any form of dangerous equipment while less-capable than some threshold should be illegal.
I was born and raised in Boise, but don't care if people want to smoke marijuana. My guess is that the majority of people in Idaho who object to legalizing it do so for religious reasons. Mormons are a large voting bloc in the state, and there are many other conservative Christian groups there as well.
As a former mormon, this is my take is well. Mormonism needs to be somewhat insular and us vs them to survive. After we were forced to give up polygamy, the word of wisdom (it has changed but today no coffee, tea, beer or weed) all of a sudden went from a “nice to do but not required” to “if you drink coffee, you will not live with your children as an eternal family after you die.”
Nothing confrontational intended by this observation, but I genuinely think it's interesting that you said "when _we_ were forced..." at first and then say "Mormons would ban coffee if _they_ could" [emphasis mine in both quotes]. You identify as a former Mormon, group yourself in with them when you bring up polygamy, then separate yourself again. Again, there's nothing malicious being implied here, it's just an interesting observation that I wanted to make sure you were aware of!
Oh for sure, and I thought about it too as I was writing it.
On the one hand, I have explicitly resigned from the LDS church. I think they engage in immoral practices and I can't in good conscience say I'm a member. On the other had, I was raised Mormon and my family goes back with the Mormons to the 1830s when the LDS church was founded (technically The Church of Jesus Christ, the original name) so to some degree it's a inseparable part of my identity. I try to split the difference in my life, but it gets messy sometimes.
I'm from a typically red state. I'm fairly conservatarian, I wouldn't mind if pot was legal. But pro-legalization groups often talk about it as if legalized pot was completely void of negative externalities. And that is wrong. It is fair to argue that the negative effects of criminalization take a larger toll on the public than legalization. But chronic marijuana use makes you stupid. Like, really, really fucking stupid. And that isn't good either. I think the legalization movement would serve itself best in convincing red states to legalize pot as well if it was open about the fact that there are bad things about pot, and making an argument of societal harm reduction. Not harm elimination.
I think abuse of any substance will have negative effects. But the casual use of one substance is clearly far more safer on the body and society than the other.
The “chronic use makes you stupid” take is um... pretty wrong. But the “convincing red states” take is off the charts wrong.
There is no regard for harm reduction logic in conservative politics that isn’t already part of the conservative platform. Guns? Sure, “if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns”. Drugs? Only the ones that are already legal. Safe injection sites? Enabling addicts. Abortion? Baby murder. Sex work? Sin and depravity. Acknowledging racism? Racist itself! Holding police accountable in any way? Riots and looting! Masks? I will literally make up fake science because real science is tyranny! My goodness.
Edit: of course there’s room for all of these in big-L Libertarian politics, but... the party has less significant sway in any red state I’m aware of (they’ve had more success in blue NM?), and at the membership level the party seems to be more successful in funneling angry white dudes into the alt right than convincing conservatives to actually care about personal liberties when those liberties might be shared by everyone and help reduce power disparities.
Drugs are perceived as an assault on the idea of free will itself, which is fundamental to many "red state" politicial philosophies (including free market and religion).
Drugs challenge free will through addiction as well as influence on behavior ("under the influence").
Marijuana just got swept up in that whole idea, and ended up polarizing like everything else.
But even the most hardcore libertarian would hesitate to say it should be legal for 14 year olds to get meth or fentanyl at the corner store.
There's a big difference between illegal and "war on drugs"-illegal, though. Most small-government types would probably agree once you point out the kind of government apparatus that's built up around the war on drugs.
Ya that state is a surprising one given the high prevalence of libertarians and proximity to Massachusetts, who has already legalized it. Maybe someone within the state could give their reasoning?
States should legalize growing for personal consumption as well. Currently where I live legal pot feels like scam. Very expensive, for no good reason. I mean, the thing is literally easier to grow than tomatoes. Why must 10 pot brownies be $30?
A lot of the expense is state and local tax, but it's also costly to create quality. Growing and harvesting good smokeable flower is generally a lot more expensive than just growing biomass for oil. Trimming is also a big expense. If you want untrimmed flower you can buy it by the pound quite cheap and trim it yourself, but then you'll see how much labor it is to create a good hand-trim.
That said 10 brownies for $30 sounds like a good deal to me.
It's kind of ironic, because growing high-quality bud at home costs virtually nothing past maybe ~$60 in nutrients[0]. Growing cannabis just doesn't scale very well - you can't just double the nutrients for the same amount of water and expect to feed 2x the plants, in a similar vein you can't double the number of plants for a given space either, because the yield typically depends on the amount of light available. Even assuming you can double the amount of light, you can't automatically assume your yield will double as well, there's techniques required to maximize that return, which ultimately requires (sometimes significant) human interference. It's a remarkably fascinating plant in that sense, you can have two clones identical in every way, and they will still grow and flower slightly differently.
For what it's worth, automatic trimmers have come a long ways in recent years. A coworker at my previous job had purchased one for personal use, he had a ACMPR license for up to 35 plants. He said where it used to take two or three hours to trim a single plant, he can knock 7 or 8 off in the same time. Of course it doesn't come anywhere near the quality of a hand-trim, but you can get 90% there with almost no effort. To the older generation like him, it's still orders of magnitude better than whatever you could get just 10-15 years ago.
And yes, 10 brownies for $30 is a reasonably good price, even here in Ontario. Assuming they contain a reasonable dosage of THC (say 50mg), anyways.
[0]: Personally I use the General Hydroponics 3-part; two 1L bottles of "Bloom" and one bottle of each "Gro" and "Micro" is roughly $90 CAD. Using just those three nutrients and some pH adjusters I've been able to harvest roughly 25 lbs across 14 plants over the past 4 years. It's likely I will need another bottle of the bloom and micro components before starting another grow, but the Gro bottle should last another two or cycles easily.
There's no good reason for you, but there's a great reason for them. Taxes.
Colorado has collected $1 billion on taxes over $6.5 billion marijuana sales.
But on the other hand, home stilling is illegal too and you can buy everything you need to distill alcohol at home on Amazon.
Politicians see a chance to increase tax income for the government, thereby giving them an increased chance of increasing their influence by being able to direct the increased tax income, and it will come from a politically unpopular and weaker class of people, so that's a no brainer.
Increase tax on alcohol then, disincentivize its use. It's far worse for the health, and it can be deadly. It's a travesty that alcohol is more socially acceptable, in my opinion. I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy MJ in bulk at Costco, and pay for it with my credit card.
In states with legal weed it's definitely a mix of social acceptance. Daily social drinking is okay, weed to unwind is okay, weed in parties is okay, but getting blackout drunk gets old fast.
So, only 39 states to go, and then maybe the federal laws might change, and then maybe 5 years after that it might finally be legalized here in Germany as well.
I know it's popular, but I feel this is a mistake.
If we had the chance to disallow tobacco use before it was available, don't you think we should do it? The deaths, medical costs, etc. make it not worth it.
Marijuana has been shown to have negative effects on the brain, I think this is a price that's not worth paying.
I appreciate you sharing your comment, but the reality is you can't just stop something by making it illegal.
Even if we all agreed "marijuana for recreation is bad" (which it is not so clear on - it seems likely less bad than tobacco or alcohol),
Then you still can not want it criminalized. This is because when something is not criminalized you don't:
-force only criminals to sell it
-provide criminals funding by allowing them to sell it
-prevent users from getting help
-prevent criminals from solving disputes through the State, instead they have to enforce their own violence
-people should be free to do things in general that don't directly harm others (e.g. pot on the couch is ok, while driving not)
-jailing people to enforce the criminalization
The war on drugs is directly responsible for huge amounts of global violence (e.g. mexico) andenormous incarceration rates in the US (about 10x our peers). The downsides are huge, the upsides are harder to quantify.
49 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] thread> The recreational use of cannabis is legalized in 11 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.
There is no metric for which marijuana does more harm than alcohol, yet alcohol is perfectly fine.
- Watch out there is a person half a block away texting while crossing the street
- Are you sure you can't go 5mph slower?
- There is a ball rolling down that driveway, a child may follow
- AAAhhhhhhh! Wooooooooooooaaaahhh!
- For every 50% increase in velocity we double our kinetic energy
Driving on weed sounds like pure hell.
I think you read past my statement and went directly to the outrage. And to vmception: No! Operating any form of dangerous equipment while less-capable than some threshold should be illegal.
Mormons would ban coffee if they could.
On the one hand, I have explicitly resigned from the LDS church. I think they engage in immoral practices and I can't in good conscience say I'm a member. On the other had, I was raised Mormon and my family goes back with the Mormons to the 1830s when the LDS church was founded (technically The Church of Jesus Christ, the original name) so to some degree it's a inseparable part of my identity. I try to split the difference in my life, but it gets messy sometimes.
I think abuse of any substance will have negative effects. But the casual use of one substance is clearly far more safer on the body and society than the other.
There is no regard for harm reduction logic in conservative politics that isn’t already part of the conservative platform. Guns? Sure, “if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns”. Drugs? Only the ones that are already legal. Safe injection sites? Enabling addicts. Abortion? Baby murder. Sex work? Sin and depravity. Acknowledging racism? Racist itself! Holding police accountable in any way? Riots and looting! Masks? I will literally make up fake science because real science is tyranny! My goodness.
Edit: of course there’s room for all of these in big-L Libertarian politics, but... the party has less significant sway in any red state I’m aware of (they’ve had more success in blue NM?), and at the membership level the party seems to be more successful in funneling angry white dudes into the alt right than convincing conservatives to actually care about personal liberties when those liberties might be shared by everyone and help reduce power disparities.
No one in the US is free to do whatever they want with cannabis.
Drugs challenge free will through addiction as well as influence on behavior ("under the influence").
Marijuana just got swept up in that whole idea, and ended up polarizing like everything else.
But even the most hardcore libertarian would hesitate to say it should be legal for 14 year olds to get meth or fentanyl at the corner store.
There's a big difference between illegal and "war on drugs"-illegal, though. Most small-government types would probably agree once you point out the kind of government apparatus that's built up around the war on drugs.
But having said that, I regularly spend $2-$3 on a single chocolate chip cookie at cafes. Those aren't even psychoactive.
Do you mean at Starbucks - or more like a CBD-only hash-brownie?
Though being in California, those individual cookies are often "vegan" and/or "organic" to try justify the high price.
But it's just a sweet like you'd give a child, nothing interesting.
That said 10 brownies for $30 sounds like a good deal to me.
For what it's worth, automatic trimmers have come a long ways in recent years. A coworker at my previous job had purchased one for personal use, he had a ACMPR license for up to 35 plants. He said where it used to take two or three hours to trim a single plant, he can knock 7 or 8 off in the same time. Of course it doesn't come anywhere near the quality of a hand-trim, but you can get 90% there with almost no effort. To the older generation like him, it's still orders of magnitude better than whatever you could get just 10-15 years ago.
And yes, 10 brownies for $30 is a reasonably good price, even here in Ontario. Assuming they contain a reasonable dosage of THC (say 50mg), anyways.
[0]: Personally I use the General Hydroponics 3-part; two 1L bottles of "Bloom" and one bottle of each "Gro" and "Micro" is roughly $90 CAD. Using just those three nutrients and some pH adjusters I've been able to harvest roughly 25 lbs across 14 plants over the past 4 years. It's likely I will need another bottle of the bloom and micro components before starting another grow, but the Gro bottle should last another two or cycles easily.
There's no good reason for you, but there's a great reason for them. Taxes. Colorado has collected $1 billion on taxes over $6.5 billion marijuana sales.
But on the other hand, home stilling is illegal too and you can buy everything you need to distill alcohol at home on Amazon.
Politicians see a chance to increase tax income for the government, thereby giving them an increased chance of increasing their influence by being able to direct the increased tax income, and it will come from a politically unpopular and weaker class of people, so that's a no brainer.
If we had the chance to disallow tobacco use before it was available, don't you think we should do it? The deaths, medical costs, etc. make it not worth it.
Marijuana has been shown to have negative effects on the brain, I think this is a price that's not worth paying.
Even if we all agreed "marijuana for recreation is bad" (which it is not so clear on - it seems likely less bad than tobacco or alcohol),
Then you still can not want it criminalized. This is because when something is not criminalized you don't: -force only criminals to sell it -provide criminals funding by allowing them to sell it -prevent users from getting help -prevent criminals from solving disputes through the State, instead they have to enforce their own violence -people should be free to do things in general that don't directly harm others (e.g. pot on the couch is ok, while driving not) -jailing people to enforce the criminalization
The war on drugs is directly responsible for huge amounts of global violence (e.g. mexico) andenormous incarceration rates in the US (about 10x our peers). The downsides are huge, the upsides are harder to quantify.
Besides, you'd achieve a lot more boost to public health if you banned booze and processed sugar than you ever would for pot