Legal marijuana is taking a bite out of drug cartels' profits(washingtonpost.com) |
Legal marijuana is taking a bite out of drug cartels' profits(washingtonpost.com) |
That does not mean there are less drugs being imported, just that less are being seized. I worked with the Border Patrol years ago and it was astounding how they tracked success:
- When arrests increased, they celebrated that enforcement was working.
- When arrests decreased, they celebrated that deterrence was working.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
While I'm in favor of legalization, you should take these numbers and the process that created them with a grain of salt..
If you ride your dirt bike along the border there (I did), then you will find a few dirt roads that cross the border that look heavily used. I spent 8 hours down there and was not approached by any Border Patrol (Saw some from 100 feet away, but no contact)
There is so much stuff crossing the border, in so many places.
https://www.google.com/maps/@31.333054,-110.626566,3a,75y/da...
Why would I think it wouldn't be porous? It's been that way the entire history of the world, why should we change it now?
The legalization of marijuana is a much bigger battle. We will not get all the benefits of the free market unless government regulations are substantially reduced. If you cant buy Marijuana in Target or Wallmart it probably wont suffice.
Recession? Poor private companies groaning under the massive burden of big-government regulation, and idiotic government "interventions" in the market are to blame! Economic boom? The miracle of the free market succeeding in spite of all obstacles! Hail the market! Down with big government!
The difference, of course, is that I don't know anyone who actually takes the "government is always the solution" line, but I do know plenty of people who take the "government is always the problem" line. So, um, nice straw man you've go there.
Granted, there are still multiple factors at work and you need to take several measurements.
I had a friend give me an ounce of Mexican weed last year. That is a fair bit of weed. I tried a sample one night, and then gave it back. It wasn't worth keeping around, even for free. I knew I would just never use it, it was typical Mexican ditch weed and my tastes had gone to better things.
So which beer did you want? Sam Adams, or this Miller with a cigarette in it? The Mexican weed is just disgusting now. Only people on a tight budget will use it, not people with a choice; maybe 10% of the users I know. Everyone else gets the good stuff. Light, fluffy with 20 strains to choose from, tested and graded, and you can pick out the individual bud that speaks to you; or compressed brick that smells a little like coffee or grease and has an unknown THC level, unknown origin, unknown anything.
The only positive attribute to the Mexican weed is price.
This is a really interesting development. There's always been this "gateway drug" argument around pot: once people start with marijuana, they'll move onto the harder stuff. I can imagine that there might be a correlation, but I expect that the causality is the other way around: once you break the law a bit for pot, and discover that it's really not a big deal, you assume that the other illegal drugs are probably fine too.
As marijuana becomes more and more legal in the US, it'll be interesting to see which way the causal link goes.
I think it's still necessary to focus on reducing demand (through education and self-help, not punishment).
Take something illegal and taxing it heavily has a negative impact on the black market's profit and a positive impact on the economy. Truly disrupting the space.
> "The cartels, of course, are adapting to the new reality. Seizure data appears to indicate that with marijuana profits tumbling, they're switching over to heroin and meth."
Essentially legalizing is just getting thing right which was wrong earlier.
That's a rather spectacular claim to make, and indeed, the very first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_India says " All forms of cannabis are currently illegal in India, with some limited allowances made for some traditional preparations." So either you are wrong or the Wikipedia article is, along with all its references, history etc. I'm not a betting man but if I were, I know where I'd put my money...
I saw a sign on the Kansas side of a highway leaving Colorado that said "If you bought pot, leave it behind." Clearly someone had seen an uptick in drugs coming in that way.
It's the same thing that happened when alcohol prohibition was lifted.
> The bill that would legalize cultivation of Australia medical marijuana is guaranteed to become law, with the main opposition party immediately pledging support
/s
I take it you haven't had much debate around the concept of a free-society without government. You bring that one out, and suddenly everyone is a statist that thinks that "government is always the solution", for every problem imaginable.
Heck, I'm an anarcho-capitalist and even I think government should be the solution to every problem. That is, as long as I'm paying taxes. While that's the case they better well be using my tax contributions to solving those damn problems, even if government isn't the "best" solution for them.
>And it's not just price — Mexican growers are facing pressure on quality, too. "The quality of marijuana produced in Mexico and the Caribbean is thought to be inferior to the marijuana produced domestically in the United States or in Canada," the DEA wrote last year in its 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment.
They perhaps didn't elaborate on it (from a good and interesting perspective) as you have, but it was mentioned.
On a side note: outdoor plants grow much larger, and as such have much larger yields.
I have studied ...bunches of stuff. And I believe a huge factor is the fact that marijuana is illegal, so you cross an important legal threshold when you try it and that can become a slippery slope. I think details like that probably matter more than the substance per se. Addiction is hard to solve in part due to shame and all kinds of social reinforcement.
If you have a bad habit that won't get you stigmatized, ostracized and arrested, friends and family can be excellent sources of support for helping you break the habit. But when you can't TELL ANYONE...don't be surprised when a bad habit is exponentially harder to break when deprived of amiable social support.
I've always thought the "gateway drug" nonsense was, in part, due to the realization someone has that they've been blatantly, bald-fadedly lied to about drugs for most of their life. (DARE bangs on about cannabis like it was injecting heroin and PCP with dirty needles!)
And the next thought from there, naturally, is "Okay, now what else were they making up?
(I imagine one can probably find lots of `natural experiments'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment)
To all the magical, healing drugs that are currenly illegal: may you one day be free. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
Synthetic and natural opioids have the same mode of operation on your brain as endorphins. They bind to these things called "opioid receptors"[1] in your brain. There is a biological purpose for the existence of these receptors. Quoted from Wikipedia: "The endogenous opioid system is thought to be important in mediating complex social behaviors involved in the formation of stable, emotionally committed relationships."
Opiates actually seem to have a significant benefit to people suffering from severe and refractory major depression, where all other legal anti-depression medication has not helped them.[2] Now compare this with alcohol (ethanol) -- a substance that recklessly goes around destroying cells in your brain and your liver, which people take just to get rid of some social anxiety. Huh.
It is because of this that they find alternatives/substitutes, which range from alcohol to heroin to suicide. Two people I know have killed themselves because they could not deal with the pain and the medical system failed them.
It's being "dealt with" for sure. I'm not sure the amount of inconvenience and needless suffering imposed is an improvement on anything. I've never abused drugs. Opiates after back pain, minor surgery or a root canal aren't a "gateway" to anything for the vast vast majority of people.
I don't know about recreational heroin, cocaine or meth. I'm going to err on the side of caution and suggest that they're probably something I don't want to see legalized.
OTOH it'd be nice if marijuana advocates would stop treating alcohol as if it's the worst substance known to man. Current DWI laws are not justified with science. Legalizing marijuana and criminalizing responsible consumption of alcohol is not progress. If everyone you know would probably be in jail were it not for the fact they haven't been caught, it's probably not a good law.
Sane pain management should be between you and your Dr. Ethical patient treatment should not be disincentivized because someone has a political agenda.
When I was in my early 20's (20 years ago) I got a job in Phoenix AZ working on a concrete crew. We were building poured in place buildings (something like big box store size). First we would pour the floor. Then the walls on top of the floor and pull them up into place with a crane. It was extremely demanding work and the company beat the crap out of everyone. Very often we would get to work at 3 AM so we could pour before the sun to prevent the mud drying so fast. Lunch time was around 10 minutes and there weren't breaks. If you didn't run at all times... going to get a shovel...run, go for a drink of water, run you got yelled at. If you still didn't run a second time you were fired just like that.
My first day there were 7 or 8 new people. At the end of the day they had fired all the new people except me and one other guy. This went on for a couple of weeks until they had the crew they wanted. I needed the job and it paid pretty well (at the time) so I ran and busted ass like you wouldn't believe. After a couple of months I got let go as well and was very OK with it. It was completely nuts and I'm sure illegal as hell but no one appeared to complain and I'm not sure the state at the time and place would have listened anyway.
The point being... almost everyone on the job site was doing meth. Except me and maybe a couple of other people. I've never been a fan of meth and find it completely disgusting even though I'm not "anti-drug" and I damn sure wasn't about to do it out there. It was expected. The pace was set by meth. When you finally burnt out, you were thrown away and left with mental/health problems. But the building was up and the company owner made money.
That is my fear about legal drugs. Expectations. End results. Even social expectations like booze is now in many places. I want to do what I want to do... not be expected to do anything.
It's a complex problem. I don't know the answer. Maybe part of the answer is to invent better/less harmful drugs that are less easy to abuse and legalize those.
The temptation is strong to ban other people from making different trade-offs than us, because it keeps them from besting us in competition and challenging our value systems. But what right do we have to dictate what other people should value and what trade-offs they're allowed to make with their own lives? My sweat, blood, and tears are mine and mine alone to give and withhold.
And you think this might argue in favor of continued criminalization?
The point is, they make this decision themselves. I don't think that your colleagues were somehow oblivious to the fact that meth is bad. I also doubt that your employer gave them meth disguised as "work-enhancing vitamins" or something. When people do things like that, they see the downsides, and they make this decision regardless.
Is it a bad decision, a mistake, for a person to trade his health and long-term well-being and health for his job? Personally, I think that it is. But I also think that people have fundamental human right to do this kind of mistake, that they should be free to decide it for themselves.
Would you die of hunger if you didn't take this job? I don't think so. Could you and your colleagues find a more relaxed job that would put roof over your head and food on your table? I don't know your situation, but somehow I think that yes, you could. So, you didn't take this job just because it was necessary to physically survive, which would be a different situation.
So, if a person doesn't have to sacrifice his health to survive for his job, but does it because he wants something more — should we stop him from it?
I've heard similar stories about how cooks abusing cocaine to keep up with the pace.
But I'd never made the connection that if it's legal, employers could expect performance-enhancing levels of productivity (more than I guess some restaurants and construction crews already do).
This is also an issue in professional sports and the olympics with athletes taking banned (but legal!) performance enhancing drugs. Similarly in colleges you see people abusing adderall or modafinil to study.
would this apply to gun ownership too?
If every gun and every bullet were marked, all sales (or losses e.g. to theft) required registration with a central registry with the new owner requiring a proper license (including criminal background check, etc.), and distributors/manufacturers/registered owners were held liable for damages in the case of improper use, and with potential for their ownership/distribution license to be revoked, guns would become a lot safer. (Exactly what breakdown of liability is up for debate, but currently there is none whatsoever.)
Almost nobody has a problem with “gun ownership” in the abstract, and some type of gun ownership is legal in most parts of the world. The problems are with e.g. semiautomatic rifles being purchased on the black market and then used to shoot up schools, criminals trivially and untraceably getting their hands on as many guns as they want, people leaving guns lying around in places where children can play with them, or huge numbers of untraceable guns getting smuggled across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Nobel economist Milton Friedman said, "The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in 'On Liberty.' is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual’s own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.”
Milton Friedman interview from 1991 on America’s War on Drugs
https://www.aei.org/publication/milton-friedman-interview-fr...
They watch the evening news, see a big wall on TV, hear Trump talk about extending the wall, assume it's the same wall all across the USA, and then continue on with their life like normal humans.
http://tomohalloran.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wall-noga...
compare that to the photo of the barbed wire fence along the border in the other comment.
I'm genuinely surprised by your experience. Maybe I was simply lucky enough to only talk about border issues with more educated than average people. I guess it's because I was in college when I lived there, and mostly hung out with Latino college students.
We drove past a border patrol depot, and there were literally hundreds of vehicles. "Wow, the border patrol must have a huge number of staff to keep most of those active at once" > "No, those are just for the TV cameras - border patrol doesn't have anywhere near that number of staff"
Other oddities that stuck out for me in the area were that the border ingress to Mexico was literally just a turnstile, and that the distance markers about 20km short of the border on the US side were, indeed, in km instead of miles.
However, it's a perfectly coherent idea: it has a concrete meaning that is easy to understand.
What do you think is incoherent? A plan to build some kind of physical wall (barrier), or a serious plan to keep people from crossing the border outside of the normal immigration process, or both?
Whether it is realistic, plausable, beneficial, cost effective, or just plain stupid is another question.
On the other hand, given the trade deficit he could say, we're pulling out of Nafta, unless you kerb your unauthorized border crossings.
Alternatively he could fine the unauthorized border crossers they catch and partially fund it that way. Or he could institute temporary permits (seasonal whatever) and impose a fee for those. Also fine employers who hire undocumented workers and fund it partially that way.
It really depends on what he means by "Mexico" and "pay". But if he's flexible, and he appears to be, it could be possible.
Trump doesn't help his case by simply headlining "and Mexico will pay for it" over and over, but he does mention practical suggestions (even if you remain opposed to the fundamental concept) from time to time on most of his policies.
Yes, that's the point. For a country whose first words were "all men are created equal" we've built up a mindboggling apparatus for demonstrating that that's not true.
I agree on law and order, but again, isn't it a little crazy that in one state you have one set of laws and then once you cross an imaginary line you get an entirely new set of laws?
except that alcohol currently and historically has generated huge tax revenue. if i were the alcohol lobby, i would make damn sure than no other drugs become legal and taxed.
(I believe Carvey originally made this statement about prostitution, but I'm not sure.)
For example, it frequently leads to a lack of believe in - or even just consideration for - how terrible substance consumption is, over all if not for the sake of nutrition.
Conversely, indoor tends to be more like sharing a bottle of wine with someone - you're going to get far a stronger kick out of it and it's going to last longer. It also tastes much nicer.
I'm not disputing what you're saying, growing outdoor is cheap (virtually free) and therefore attractive. Typically there is little pride involved and the quality suffers. However, well-grown outdoor fills a niche just like well-grown indoor does. It merely has a bad reputation.
Today this is one of the most substantial gateways to heroin use. A proportion of those who have their opoid prescriptions taken away turn to buying more on the black market. High black market prices for drugs like oxycodone lead people to try heroin.
That's one of the dangers of opioids - once external opioids get into the system, it adjusts for them and if they are withdrawn, everything breaks down. Of course, if you are seriously ill, then your other choice - e.g. suffering severe debilitating pain or depression - is worse, so you choose lesser of evils. But that doesn't make opioids something nice and safe.
With alcohol, for most people usage in typical recreational doses is completely safe. I've been using alcohol recreationally for decades without any problems, and so did many people I know. I suspect doing the same with opioids would end very badly (and I'm not inclined to test that hypothesis and don't recommend to anyone).
Or more than the dose and then buy it on the street after they run out. After that gets too expensive they figure out heroin is the same rush.
Beware of status quo bias. Why do you think restrictions are the cautious choice, as opposed to the daring choice?
But problems of this kind could become worse if taking meth were legal. That's my only point.
Given the near-universal appeal of the taste of fructose, as well as historical relevance of fruit to the human diet, makes it seem reasonable to believe that humans are well-evolved to tolerate reasonable levels of fructose without suffering any ill-effects. Even moderate amounts of stored body fat are fine.
Alcohol, meanwhile, is not a nutrient. Most humans have a strong aversion to its taste and must train themselves to consume it and even then the flavor is often heavily disguised. Although the body can derive some energy from ethanol, this is only by way of a complex metabolic process that can cause serious acute and chronic liver problems[1][2]; not to mention the risks of alcohol poisoning. The pleasurable, euphoric effects of blood alcohol serve no physiological benefit and directly interfere with cognitive and motor functions. While there may be some potential ancillary benefits of moderate drinking on cardiovascular health [3], the mechanisms and parameters of this are still not well-known or well understood.
[1] "Acute Alcohol-Induced Liver Injury" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372892/
[2] "Alcohol-Related Liver Disease" http://www.liverfoundation.org/abouttheliver/info/alcohol/
[3] "Alcohol and Heart Disease" http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/alcohol-and-hear...
PS: I don't smoke and have no idea if 'hydroponic' is better for the plant or if it's a proxy for grown in the US and fresh. But, I suspect it's mostly about post processing.
But that number and mine is nonsense. I was being generous in order not to shock anyone. Look up the price to grow crops like corn, cotton, etc. It's < $500/acre. Per acre. When cannabis is grown like every other crop it becomes dirt cheap. Great cannabis does not need to be grown indoors. Great weed is grown outdoors on the west coast all the time.
In a more serious tone, I was alluding to the Domestically grown weed that casual weed smokers buying from passionless business will never get to see.
Either way, I could have pointed out that quality control is one of the more often noted benefits, in theory.
Are you using `Domestically grown' with a meaning that's different from `grown in the same country as the consumer'?
Still stands to reason, as with other industrialized crops, that the selection does still not favor taste over yield, speed and looks, nevermind health factors with regard to the fertilizers and pesticides used. Contrary to what the OP might imply, it's not the best thing since sliced bread. I'm not even going of on the tangent about all natural garening, because the ecosystem has ways to fix itself better than a gardner could treat fungi and all that he can't even see, because then I would sound like a spiritual, paranoid pot head, while agricultural engineering seems amazing, but probably dangerous in the wrong hands.
[LEWIS CARROLL (Charles L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6, p. 205 (1934). First published in 1872.]
If you talk with people in public, is it much better to either use commonly accepted meanings of words, or at least mention your your own definitions before you use them.
> I guess when corporations are people, nations are houses and nationally grown crops may just as well be domestic.
If you want to play the etymology game (for at least as far as a Google query for `<word> etymology' does), `corporations' are some kind of bodies; nations have something to do with being born; and `industrially grown' would mean grown with diligence.
Why stop at domus?
corporation - embodiement
national - from the place of birth / the brood / the natural habitat
industrial - to grow with most diligence will be (expected to be) most profitable, so it's a nice implicit meaning.
domus - green houses, warehouses or office buildings are houses, even the porches and front yard by extension are sub-surmised, why not the acres, too, or market stands, or maybe somebody just heard and used it with an adjacent meaning to denote the embodiments of economy and now has to go with it, rather than admit it was kinda somehow wrong.
That said, I've found I'm more productive with whiskey than without lately.
Once I've built momentum again I just cut out the alcohol entirely. It's kind of like a bootstrapping process, or perhaps boozestrapping..
I can't recommend anyone actually does this though, especially if you're prone to problems with alcohol. Personally, I've far more to fear from RTS games as far as addictions are concerned.
You are describing the ballmer peak (https://xkcd.com/323/). It's a joke, but some truth rings to it. Developing while dealing with anxiety can be crippling so a small amount of booze helps lubricate things.
That said it's easy to get into the habit of drinking very slowly, so never getting intoxicated, but the drinks still add up over the hours. You end up putting down a lot of excess calories not to mention the negative impact on your overall health if you drink 5-6 drinks over the course of a 10 hour coding session over and over again.
I've since found exercise works just as well and is much more sustainable. Something for you to keep in mind perhaps.
Alcohol takes a lot of blame because it is the most accessible and cheapest drug.
Looking at only one side of the equation doesn't make for fair analysis.
I think they already tried a certain approach, about hundred years ago
Why is it that opiate addiction is seen as far far worse than debilitating chronic pain? Why can't the patient make that choice?
The patient ends up with an addiction of opiates; while taking dangerously large quantities of opiates; while still being in pain.
They've still got the pain; they now have two additional problems.
Most people with long term pain need access to pain management services which include other stuff (exercise, physiotherapy, weight loss, psychological therapies) as well as (if needed) opiates.
The thing with fibro is that pain causes reactions that make fibro worse, such as sleep deprivation.
Opiates can break this cycle through a short term course.
Maybe there are no good choices for some long term pain.
Here's the English guidance for managing pain in non-specialist settings, so this is what people should be getting from a regular doctor. (For neuropathic pain).
http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg173/chapter/1-recommendati...
But I believe there is a reasonable point at which people should not be expected to go beyond because it becomes ultimately too harmful for them (ok... maybe that's not our business) and society which has to deal with the fallout (very much our business). Its why we have labor laws. Laws on how long truck drivers can drive without sleeping. People shouldn't have to degenerate into selling their souls and risking the well being of others for short term survival. Society shouldn't degenerate to competition at this kind of level. It really shouldn't.
I do strongly believe in the individual's right to chose. But as with all ideologies, purity generally produces very sucky real world outcomes and a modicum of sense and nuance has to be applied for the thing to work. The powerful shouldn't be able to lay traps for the less informed and then stand back and say "oh well... they chose...they have to accept the consequences while I reap the benefits". That's not how civilization should work.
Are you also opposed to those medians and guardrails on highways that impinge on your freedom to drive off the road when you so choose?
For example, since you bring up roads -- narrower lanes make safer drivers: http://www.planetizen.com/node/80229/another-study-shows-nar...
That's a statement born out of extreme privilege. For substantial proportions of people, there is very little freedom involved: You take what is on offer, or you lose your house or don't eat. One side has an extreme amount of extra leverage, and some of them takes according advantage.
People died fighting for the 8 hour working day because without regulation employers simply did not give a shit if they were working people into an early grave. We have May Day labour demonstrations in large part of the world in part as a result of what is now the AFL-CIO wanting to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket massacre, and restart what was already then, in 1880's, a multiple decades long fight for human working hours.
In other instances, people burned to death because of employers that thought it ok to lock the factory doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorised breaks.
Is that an indication of a free exchange?
For a free exchange, both sides need to have reasonably equal power.
My understanding is that this is just an attempt by gun-control activists to effectively ban gun sales to consumers. How can the gun manufacturer be responsible for how the gun is used? Their job is to make the gun to the advertised spec, not keep the peace. You can't sue the knife-maker when you get stabbed. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "liability for damages in the case of improper use"?
If there were a proper gun registry and if improper gun use resulted in liability for the last documented owner, it would be much more difficult for criminals to hide the guns’ ownership / distribution history, because distributors and owners would have a strong incentive to properly report sales.
In the system we have now, the gun show / flea market / second-hand sales “loophole” is so wide as to basically render gun licensing and tracking requirements entirely useless. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole
Think about the way we currently regulate automobiles. Every automobile has a documented ownership history and registration, and every automobile driver needs to pass a set of tests in order to obtain a license.
Are you unaware of that? Or proposing that we make it even more illegal?
Your own government is the worst offender of this in recent memory.
http://cannabisandpsychosis.ca/more-information/what-do-we-k...
I've never smoked, but I wonder if I'd like my doctor to be high when he operates on me, or for an armorer to reassemble my rifle while high. Does marijuana influence attention to detail? Is there a way to ensure that people don't get high while at work, that they stay sober on the job? Anecdotally, from watching high people while I was in university, I don't think I'd trust their giggling selves with my life.
I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm hopeful that both classical and progressive liberals can find common ground in a basic income. Combined, we are an unstoppable force for human freedom and prosperity.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Hope this helps.
The way to ensure that people do a good job is fire them if they don't do a good job. No need for indirect methods.
I'm not so sure of that. Failing a marijuana drug test means that there's a measurable amount of THC in your body.
How about an eye surgeon that just had 3 big coffees? I think the fact that you haven't smoked makes your perception of cannabis' effects wildly out of step with reality. I wouldn't trust any of the sober university students I knew performing surgery on me.
In fact, it appears to be routine and required of medical residents in the US. Which is ridiculous.
Obviously this doesn't apply to surgeries, and I can't think of a surgeon who would smoke weed and operate. But in a hypothetical situation, it could allow a person to perform better.
However, if your doctor smokes weed or drinks alcohol in his free time, it doesn't make him a bad doctor.
The real world is more shocking. I know many doctors and surgeons who use cocaine. And there are surgeons who will intentionally do bad surgeries because the profit motive is so high.
Three doctors including a surgeon were arrested today (one from Beverly Hills) and are facing 50+ years in prison for insurance fraud.
Human nature is a scary thing.
It's foolish to think people will just throw caution to the wind and get high before doing their job.
Other than that, consumption of cannabis is correlated with a bunch of stuff that an employer may want to avoid (for instance increased impulsivity [1])
Given the fact that employers routinely choose to not hire somebody because of even the slightest misgivings, not wanting to employ a pot smoker can hardly be called irrational.
The first link I got from my search: http://www.torquenews.com/106/chrysler-ordered-rehire-worker...
You can't tell, and 50% of the sales at Tucson dispensaries are edibles and concentrates.
So you will have to judge on the work, not if they are giggling. You should be more concerned if your surgeon is ethically compromised so that he would operate impaired by anything - no sleep, alcohol, weed, prescription pain killers. Same for anyone in a life/death job.
I own a factory, and use it for pain management. When I am using it (that day) I won't drive the forklift or use any machinery. I could hurt myself or others by being lost in a weed fog. Instead I do emails, meetings, R&D, etc. while sitting at my desk. Nothing that would kill me if I stopped paying attention for a minute. Forklifts and CNC machinery can definitely kill you if you aren't paying attention.
Your weed smoking armorer would probably not be using when working on weapons. His life could be at stake for a loss of concentration, and he knows it. It's smart to avoid weed induced problems, no altruism needed. Just cover your own ass.
Note: I am not strongly committed to this idea I am expressing at the time of this writing. I'm not even sure I am at all committed to it. I do think its a relevant position that seems worth considering, if nothing else.
you'd know this already if you weren't naive
Beyond this, most employment in the US is "at-will", meaning that you can be fired for any reason or no reason. [2]
Some things not explicitly listed as a protected class might still pose problems if its determined that the way in which is it enforced is discriminatory. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment [3] http://navbat.com/can-you-fire-someone-for-being-too-ugly/
They are not "under the influence" for those 10 months.
A "marijuana drug test" usually means testing for THC metabolites, not active THC in your blood stream. These can show up on test results a month after you ingested anything.
Imagine if tomorrow you were called in and they did a test to see if you had a single beer/glass of wine in the last month. Would you pass that test? If you would, great.. I'm willing to put down money that most people wouldn't.
Indeed, that's why I hire only teetotalers. After all, if they like to have a drink now and then, there's still a risk that one day they turn up drunk for work.
Two freedoms seem to be conflicting here. Person A's freedom to do legal things in their free time and person B's freedom to not like the other person's choices. I can't stop person B from being prejudiced. However, I argue that person B should not have the right to control person A's legal activities.
I imagine a pothead doctor could even use the fact that he's a pothead to market to other potheads.
Here's something addressing a similar question[0]:
> Detrimental effects of cannabis use vary in a dose-related fashion, and are more pronounced with highly automatic driving functions than with more complex tasks that require conscious control, whereas alcohol produces an opposite pattern of impairment. Because of both this and an increased awareness that they are impaired, marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies.
[0]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10550490902786934
Problem is: a lot of sober people would fail this test. Of course, you could argue that grandma really shouldn't be driving any more if her reaction times are so bad. Or the sleep-deprived father of three. And you'd be absolutely right and justified.
Such a result would be political suicide, though.
Do you believe that breathalyzers result in expensive arrests and trials "for no good reason"? I don't. I don't believe people high on marijuana are as dangerous as drunk people, but I also don't believe they're harmless.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/gu...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/gun-crime-tracing-w...
You also have politicians all over the country who openly admit that they would ban and confiscate all guns if they could. You have half of the Supreme Court willfully misreading the Second Amendment as giving no rights to people, only to states.
It's easy to see where this is going. Everyone who values their right to keep and bear arms will fight tooth and nail against any national registration proposal.
Shall we make them more illegal? Or are you unaware that they are illegal already?
