most: anyone not in a job that requires it by law, either state or federal. Drivers, for example, will continue to be tested because DOT drug tests are law.
Of course that will be the case. That’s usually the nature of spending money. It’s why currency and the market are such powerful things. They permit a weighted aggregation of preferences.
For instance, I think that money spent on Porsche Panameras could be put to better use.
The fact that different groups have different preferences doesn’t seem all that interesting.
Yes, it would be cheaper if we didn't have to drag half the country into modern society. Imagine all the money we could have saved had we not needed court cases to establish LGBT rights, for example.
This might've been true years ago but in the US lately that does not seem to be the case.
Nuclear energy and vaccines are the main things that comes to mind with the left, but lately I think both of those are more likely to be rejected by the American right than the left.
I'd argue that the proliferation of guns in the US is an example of the opposite of "modern society".
I think politicians in general have trouble with newer technologies and seems to have more to do with the age of the average person in Congress than political leanings (e.g.: Al Franken's questioning of Eric Schmidt years ago and not understanding how Amazon could run Android on their own devices without Google's input).
What I mean is that there are well established laws and case law but they consistently introduce contradicting laws rather than change the law at the higher level (similar to abortion restrictions for other groups). For example, things like cities ignoring state level preemption. Or using the Trayvon Martin case as a talking point against stand your ground laws even though that law was not invoked as his defense (just standard self defense).
On a side note, why would proliferation of firearms be the opposite of modern society? There are other modern countries with firearms. And by proliferation do you mean simply higher total numbers or more widespread?
> why would proliferation of firearms be the opposite of modern society?
In the past, guns and weapons generally were required to survive for folks outside of cities. That is not the case today. I see this as a move towards the modern - a society that can solve problems without the use of guns.
I mean a combination of both higher numbers and how widespread guns are.
That said, I think the case law supporting the 2nd amendment to the level it is today is flawed, but I understand that given past rulings the only legal things to do are: a) allow basically any and all guns with no restrictions or b) overturn past decisions on the matter.
Even with all of that the cat is out of the bag in the US - there are too many guns to remove. Beyond the US, 3D printing will make creating a gun at home somewhat trivial in the near future. I don't know how we dig out of that hole societally.
I'm gonna guess you've never been arrested, much less seen the inside of a jail cell. So it's not "just you," but you are expressing an existing stereotype of civic ignorance.
Pot being illegal causes uncountable amounts of suffering and disadvantage, and it's not going to be federally legalized (descheduled) until enough states pass their own legalization.
There are much bigger issues in the justice system than simply decriminalizing marijuana. Its civically ignorant to think this is the most important topic.
What bigger issue were you thinking of? The odds will be good that whatever you come up with, there will be a "bigger" one that you're not thinking of.
It's turtles all the way down. Choose your turtle carefully.
Rule of law not being followed through abuse of law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion, violations of rights and protections, conflicting laws. Hard to find a bigger issue than the very foundation of the system being ignored.
Police love it. A smell is invisible and leaves no record; it's impossible for a defendant to dispute that an officer thought they "detected the smell of marijuana".
This isn't going to change that very much. Now they'll pull you out for field sobriety tests and blood draws just like with the smell of alcohol.
The discretion I was talking about is where they can choose to charge one person and not another. This leads to implicit and explicit bias. It also undermines the integrity of the system. Why should I trust a system that can ruin my life with a charge and let a similar offense go with someone else? Equal protection and application of the law should be required.
I could be biased due to jealousy of people who can use cannabis, since I can't for health reasons.
However, I've always wondered about the inconsistency of saying it's harmless and non-addictive, but also talking about the devastating effects of prohibition.
If it's everything people say it is, why were people driven to use it anyway despite the draconian penalties?
I may be unusually risk averse, but I wouldn't risk prison for, say, consuming or selling chocolate if that was illegal.
I don't mind them lobbying for it. What confuses me is when a corporation cannot find middle ground. Why do you go from one position of testing people for cannabis and firing offenders to the next of lobbying for legalization?
Why not just stop testing? The only explanation I can muster is they want to sell it.
Just like with alcohol, if your recreational substances interfere with work performance, you're much likely to be laid off. I imagine this is especially true with Amazon and their notoriously tough work conditions.
Operating machinery under the influence of anything that inhibits your ability is a bad idea and potentially illegal regardless of the substance's legality.
Marijuana legalization is massively popular across the entire political spectrum. It's legal in several states producing no horrible headline disasters as far as I'm aware. So why hasn't it been legalized federally? Seems like a slam dunk for any party. I'm old enough to remember all the rumors about how Trump would try to legalize it via executive order right before the election and at other times in his presidency (I have no idea whether that is actually possible/legal)
Not having numbers handy, I suspect the problem is that while polls do show widespread support generally, that doesn't hold true across demographics and districts. For example, older voters tend to vote Republican, and I can imagine that marijuana legalization isn't as popular among that group. If you were a Republican counting on support from that demographic, it would make sense to oppose it. Or maybe in your particular district it isn't a popular position, at least not popular enough to stick your neck out for it, especially when your opponents will likely hit you with a "soft on crime"/"moral corruption" attack if you try.
So many conservatives smoke pot now, especially here in Florida. Weed used to be a "friendly" signal, but not anymore. For example, my pothead sister is a HUGE Karen. Ie can't where a mask because "breathing issues", but that doesn't stop her from smoking joints! Her BF sells weed illegally. And she manages to complain about pride month. I'm 30, and she's almost ten years younger.
Point is, sadly, weed smoking doesn't mean liberal.
I wouldn't be so terribly sure. <em>Mississippi</em> voters approved medical marijuana last year by a fairly strong majority https://ballotpedia.org/Mississippi_Ballot_Measure_1,_Initia.... The vote was complicated by competing "initiatives", one of which was written by the legislature, and by a legal challenge to the rules surrounding initiatives in the state that ultimately led to the state Supreme Court striking it down, but 68.5% approved of at least one of the two competing proposals, and of them 73.7% voted for the one that was actually a popular initiative.
It was popularly perceived that the "medical" requirement would not last for more than a few years before recreational was legalized.
So while it might still be a deal-killer in, say, Utah, I don't think it holds nearly the sway it did even ten years ago. It got almost as many votes as the presidential race, and even if you assume that every Biden voter was pro-legalization, there are nearly 300k extra "yea" votes you have to account for. You only make that go away if you assume that every Biden voter was pro-legalization and voted for the citizen initiative, and that every Trump voter who voted to legalize voted for the (more restrictive) legislative proposal instead of just voting against it or choosing the citizen proposal.
From my layman point of view, there is a lot involved with legalizing federally. Some of the obvious points that I can think of are:
1. Career politicians don't want to seem "soft on drugs or crime". This seems to be changing, but it's a slow roll.
2. Agency funding. The DEA gets a ton of money to enforce these federal laws. This has many layers to it and it seems much more complex than what I'm aware of, but I can imagine that all the people who currently get paid to enforce the ban on cannabis would be against this because there would likely be decreased funding to them (or at the very least, their roles would be changed).
3. Lobbying. Many people might want cannabis to be legal, but a lot of business do not because it could hurt their business. Big pharma has made a ton of money from prescription drugs that might possibly be replaced by a plant that people can grow on their own. These companies pay our representatives, and then representatives vote in their interests. One of the reasons cannabis was made illegal in the first place was because of a paper company that felt threatened by the use of industrial hemp.
4. In addition to the points related to money above (agency funding, lobbying), there are private prisons that make money from offenders of the current crimes in place. Police departments can get easy revenue from fines related to cannabis. Big pharma doesn't want legal alternatives to their drugs. Cartels also have an interest in keeping cannabis illegal. Alcohol companies may even be incentivized to keep it illegal so that alcohol remains the vice/drug of choice (this seems to be changing, major hard beverage companies have invested in cannabis companies).
These are some of (not all) the main reasons for why I think it's taking much longer than we would like.
republicans uniformly oppose it. in practice it's the issue on which their supposed libertarian ideology is the most transparently phony (if the deficit spending, anti-gay fervor, religious power grabs, opposition of voting rights, etc weren't clear enough anti-personal-freedom stances for you), they literally held complete and total political power in the US during the first couple years of Trump and didn't do shit, and they'll vote lockstep against it if democrats bring it up.
and on the flip side some democrats aren't great about it either, but it's far from the lockstep opposition on the republican side.
personally I think democrats are fairly likely to bring it up as an easy victory lap before the 2022 elections but it's highly likely that republicans will filibuster it anyway to prevent democrats from "getting an easy win" .
and that's about the state of the things - republicans are just 100% against it and democrats are tepidly for it but don't really have the political control to break lockstep opposition, even if they were agreed within their own party. It's easier to work at a state level but obviously that leaves huge problems with federal enforcement and various legal logjams.
it's largely a problem of republicans, if there were only a few republicans willing to cross the aisle it could probably pass, but it's more important that democrats be denied political "wins" than to do what's good for their voters, and what their voters overwhelmingly want. Like I said, probably look for it to be brought up sometime in 2022, unless democrats lose their senate majority in the meantime in which case probably 5-10 more years (republicans ain't gonna do it, just like they didn't under trump).
would be the easiest possible "crossing the aisle" ever, if republicans were the least bit interested in good governance, but they're not.
What about vitamins? I (reluctantly) buy some vitamins from Amzn but I always wonder if they are real or just wood shavings mixed with rat droppings or whatever.
Spain too. Probably a local law thing. I'm sure there's some US states forbidding it so they probably have it banned for the whole US to avoid mistakes?
Weed is popular with middle/upper-middle class millennial techies, especially in liberal states like Amazon's home state of Washington. I doubt Amazon cares all that much about unskilled workers, they're hoping this will make them a more attractive home for tech talent.
Larger candidate pools is probably the biggest thing. But they might also realize that drug tests for weed aren't really that great because it stays in our bodies for so long compared to other drugs that could be used on a Friday night, and not show up in a drug test taken on the following Monday.
> Is it a competitive/recruiting move to have unskilled workers prefer working for Amazon over Walmart/Target?
Having people prefer to work at Amazon is a plus, this goes back to the larger candidate pool.
> Do they believe it will increase employee retention?
I can't speak on their behalf, but it could if an employee prefers to work for a company that does not drug test them for cannabis. If their other potential employers are drug testing for cannabis, it's an incentive for the employee to stay.
I think just trying to buy back public goodwill, since its all been pretty negative lately; drivers peeing in bottles, unionbusting, etc. By 'connecting' with the hip youth it'll save their reputation long term. And pot has strong support now, so they are really just jumping on the bandwagon at the last minute for looks
I assume they have to pay for the testing. Search suggest ~$30/test/person. Not sure how many tests per year, 4? With 1m+ workers that’s a decent sized budget line item.
IMHO large numbers of the unskilled workers working for Amazon aren't Amazon employees but rather from various contracting companies; so when Amazon talks about "employees" it's less about people in warehouses or delivery vans but more about people who build and maintain AWS.
In states where cannabis is legal, testing is going out the window. More then anything i would guess it is to stay competitive and to get rid of archaic policies this country appears to be moving away from. i think most US citizens now live without criminal marijuana laws.
Employees at my local Home Depot here in Washington, openly wear clothing that carries obvious cannabis related brands, imagery, and wording. I am seeing it more and more in other F500 type companies as well.
"Those with cannabis dependence at the first three or four follow-up visits experienced significant cognitive decline from three to eight IQ points. This was noted in the persistence of cannabis users and those with cannabis dependence."
You are a free person, but why impose this danger on everyone? You can always skirt the law if you decide so, why make other people in their most formative years dumb?
I remember reading that quite a lot of people didn't like Elvis too for his provocative dancing and believed he'd have a corrupting influence on the youth of the time.
In retrospect these things didn't turn out to be so bad after all.
The point was that cannabis used to be the "youth rebel" drug of choice making teenagers feel they crossed the boundaries of society and were therefore cool. Now you legalize it, what are teens going to do? Krokodil to see how their hands fall off alive and they can pose as real zombies? /s
83 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadFor instance, I think that money spent on Porsche Panameras could be put to better use.
The fact that different groups have different preferences doesn’t seem all that interesting.
That seems a little inflammatory. It depends on the issue which subsets of the country are being dragged.
Nuclear energy and vaccines are the main things that comes to mind with the left, but lately I think both of those are more likely to be rejected by the American right than the left.
I think politicians in general have trouble with newer technologies and seems to have more to do with the age of the average person in Congress than political leanings (e.g.: Al Franken's questioning of Eric Schmidt years ago and not understanding how Amazon could run Android on their own devices without Google's input).
On a side note, why would proliferation of firearms be the opposite of modern society? There are other modern countries with firearms. And by proliferation do you mean simply higher total numbers or more widespread?
In the past, guns and weapons generally were required to survive for folks outside of cities. That is not the case today. I see this as a move towards the modern - a society that can solve problems without the use of guns.
I mean a combination of both higher numbers and how widespread guns are.
That said, I think the case law supporting the 2nd amendment to the level it is today is flawed, but I understand that given past rulings the only legal things to do are: a) allow basically any and all guns with no restrictions or b) overturn past decisions on the matter.
Even with all of that the cat is out of the bag in the US - there are too many guns to remove. Beyond the US, 3D printing will make creating a gun at home somewhat trivial in the near future. I don't know how we dig out of that hole societally.
Pot being illegal causes uncountable amounts of suffering and disadvantage, and it's not going to be federally legalized (descheduled) until enough states pass their own legalization.
Stop downplaying one problem because its not your problem.
See what I did there. People have differences of opinions. You don't need to attack everyone.
It's turtles all the way down. Choose your turtle carefully.
The discretion I was talking about is where they can choose to charge one person and not another. This leads to implicit and explicit bias. It also undermines the integrity of the system. Why should I trust a system that can ruin my life with a charge and let a similar offense go with someone else? Equal protection and application of the law should be required.
However, I've always wondered about the inconsistency of saying it's harmless and non-addictive, but also talking about the devastating effects of prohibition.
If it's everything people say it is, why were people driven to use it anyway despite the draconian penalties?
I may be unusually risk averse, but I wouldn't risk prison for, say, consuming or selling chocolate if that was illegal.
Why not just stop testing? The only explanation I can muster is they want to sell it.
Point is, sadly, weed smoking doesn't mean liberal.
It was popularly perceived that the "medical" requirement would not last for more than a few years before recreational was legalized.
So while it might still be a deal-killer in, say, Utah, I don't think it holds nearly the sway it did even ten years ago. It got almost as many votes as the presidential race, and even if you assume that every Biden voter was pro-legalization, there are nearly 300k extra "yea" votes you have to account for. You only make that go away if you assume that every Biden voter was pro-legalization and voted for the citizen initiative, and that every Trump voter who voted to legalize voted for the (more restrictive) legislative proposal instead of just voting against it or choosing the citizen proposal.
From my layman point of view, there is a lot involved with legalizing federally. Some of the obvious points that I can think of are:
1. Career politicians don't want to seem "soft on drugs or crime". This seems to be changing, but it's a slow roll.
2. Agency funding. The DEA gets a ton of money to enforce these federal laws. This has many layers to it and it seems much more complex than what I'm aware of, but I can imagine that all the people who currently get paid to enforce the ban on cannabis would be against this because there would likely be decreased funding to them (or at the very least, their roles would be changed).
3. Lobbying. Many people might want cannabis to be legal, but a lot of business do not because it could hurt their business. Big pharma has made a ton of money from prescription drugs that might possibly be replaced by a plant that people can grow on their own. These companies pay our representatives, and then representatives vote in their interests. One of the reasons cannabis was made illegal in the first place was because of a paper company that felt threatened by the use of industrial hemp.
4. In addition to the points related to money above (agency funding, lobbying), there are private prisons that make money from offenders of the current crimes in place. Police departments can get easy revenue from fines related to cannabis. Big pharma doesn't want legal alternatives to their drugs. Cartels also have an interest in keeping cannabis illegal. Alcohol companies may even be incentivized to keep it illegal so that alcohol remains the vice/drug of choice (this seems to be changing, major hard beverage companies have invested in cannabis companies).
These are some of (not all) the main reasons for why I think it's taking much longer than we would like.
But: Racism. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-marijuana-illegal-in...
and on the flip side some democrats aren't great about it either, but it's far from the lockstep opposition on the republican side.
personally I think democrats are fairly likely to bring it up as an easy victory lap before the 2022 elections but it's highly likely that republicans will filibuster it anyway to prevent democrats from "getting an easy win" . and that's about the state of the things - republicans are just 100% against it and democrats are tepidly for it but don't really have the political control to break lockstep opposition, even if they were agreed within their own party. It's easier to work at a state level but obviously that leaves huge problems with federal enforcement and various legal logjams.
it's largely a problem of republicans, if there were only a few republicans willing to cross the aisle it could probably pass, but it's more important that democrats be denied political "wins" than to do what's good for their voters, and what their voters overwhelmingly want. Like I said, probably look for it to be brought up sometime in 2022, unless democrats lose their senate majority in the meantime in which case probably 5-10 more years (republicans ain't gonna do it, just like they didn't under trump).
would be the easiest possible "crossing the aisle" ever, if republicans were the least bit interested in good governance, but they're not.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/2-republican-lawmake...
Is it a competitive/recruiting move to have unskilled workers prefer working for Amazon over Walmart/Target?
Do they believe it will increase employee retention?
There must be some business reason, otherwise they wouldn't lobby they would just allow it.
Larger candidate pools is probably the biggest thing. But they might also realize that drug tests for weed aren't really that great because it stays in our bodies for so long compared to other drugs that could be used on a Friday night, and not show up in a drug test taken on the following Monday.
> Is it a competitive/recruiting move to have unskilled workers prefer working for Amazon over Walmart/Target?
Having people prefer to work at Amazon is a plus, this goes back to the larger candidate pool.
> Do they believe it will increase employee retention?
I can't speak on their behalf, but it could if an employee prefers to work for a company that does not drug test them for cannabis. If their other potential employers are drug testing for cannabis, it's an incentive for the employee to stay.
Employees at my local Home Depot here in Washington, openly wear clothing that carries obvious cannabis related brands, imagery, and wording. I am seeing it more and more in other F500 type companies as well.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-effects-of-...
https://practicalneurology.com/articles/2015-oct/recreationa...
"Those with cannabis dependence at the first three or four follow-up visits experienced significant cognitive decline from three to eight IQ points. This was noted in the persistence of cannabis users and those with cannabis dependence."
You are a free person, but why impose this danger on everyone? You can always skirt the law if you decide so, why make other people in their most formative years dumb?
I remember reading that quite a lot of people didn't like Elvis too for his provocative dancing and believed he'd have a corrupting influence on the youth of the time.
In retrospect these things didn't turn out to be so bad after all.
i think rather people are cheering for freedom to choose to do or not do it, in the land of the free. you know that stuff we are always promised?
</s>
The only thing I've encountered is a drug test at the time of onboarding, and then never again.