Also, anecdotally, I can smell a lot less weed in Amsterdam than when I've caught a wiff of it in the US. You have to be walking right by the shop before you smell it usually. I'm not sure if this is a local regulation or what, but I suspect the Dutch would be much less tolerant if their public spaces reeked 24/7 (but no worried about the dog poop on the sidewalk)!
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
I feel it is misleading to call it an "effort", as if the President was struggling against the very agencies that he was elected to lead, decisively. Congress is supposed to be the slow-moving deliberative rule-making body.
If he really did struggle, it would say a lot about the growth of the administrative state and would highlight a constitutional health issue.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/26/health/fda-menthol-cigarettes...
In a presidents first term they are incentivized to do just enough to not piss of the other side enough to get some crazy numbers out but do enough to appease the current voters that they tried.
But then in the second term any worry about being re-elected goes out the window.
Like I am still convinced that Obama was in support of gay marriage before he publicly said it, and just waited until after he was re-elected. At that point what was he going to loose?
Will nonviolent drug dealers be released from prison?
Is that a thing?
Let the experiment begin.
The long term effects remain to be determined.
> It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids
Hopefully the first step but not the last.
No, really, they're prepared to concede that water is wet? Shocker!
My personal opinion is that most people won't be able to regulate any large caches of the above-commented drugs... but after one or two rides on Salvia most'll keep a wide birth [which I recommend as "the worst experience possible; if somebody suggests you try Salvia they're bullying you; try something else"].
The experience of existing for a short time without the concept of self, experiencing zero sensory filters, and finally having your brain rebooted as it has a kernel panic (and going through the brain kernel load process as it does so) is mind blowing.
It’s enough to convince you that we live in a highly advanced simulation. Or one could just be high af.
Also I’m pretty sure it was based on an old version of Linux because I’m convinced I saw the kernel message “Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039“.
QED God is a programmer. :-)
This entire thread is full of people who seemingly feel compelled to comment on things they are completely ignorant about, which one would hope to see less of on HN.
This will be nice for certain things, particularly payment processors for dispensaries, assuming that card processors don't continue to get in the way (don't see why they would).
But this won't fill the huge skill gap in public sector computer security due to weed getting in the way of clearances, for example. And for people in non-legal states, they will have to continue to use black markets to get it or gray markets like the "THCA" loophole (thanks unfortunately go to Trump for that one).
We shouldn't tolerate politicians delivering us half solutions when it's on issues that don't need compromise due to popular support!
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/07/biden-weed-executiv...
It’s all a game. The sooner you realize it and that there is no option but to play the game, the better you and everyone else will be.
And the game never ends and cannot be beaten. Any bs like “just don’t play the game bro” ok then go live on Mars and make a game there. Don’t drive on the roads, don’t use any utilities, and try to self exile.
I like to see democracy as a system that in it's most basic mode of participation is more like a negative right: You don't wish for a thing and get it, instead you can prevent things you don't want from happening again. That is why track record should be much more important than promises. Nowadays the political debate in the US seems to be even beyond promises: it has become purely symbolic where they expect you to fill in the blanks.
If you want more specific things from your democracy you have to invest more time, vote in local elections, maybe run yourself, write to representatives etc. This is especially the thing you should do if you are unhappy with all options. Earn your right to complain.
¹ what they say doesn't count at all — check their track record, laws they passed, how numbers developed during their last governing period in comparison to neighbouring countries etc.
Good one.
The President can’t unilaterally do anything on this. Congress still doesn't have the votes - in either party. The courts couldn’t. Nor HHS, or AG/DOJ and the DEA. The latter two didn’t and dont harbor favorable views of rescheduling. The DEA process merely kickstarts another process, that is uncontested but slow.
That doesn't preclude the reality of political machinations for someones remaining in office. But its disingenuous to suggest its bread and circuses only.
From what I gathered the DEA was looking at this over the past few years.
It wasn’t a Presidential decision.
But Congress can only go far back so agencies are racing to put out regulations now so that a potentially hostile Congress in 2024 can't undo what they did easily.
See for example net neutrality from the FCC, FTC regs, airline refund regs from FAA and more.
Yes, all of this might help in the election, but if this were really just about elections, you would see these announcements in September and October.
Sure things can take a long time when people want to slow them down or don't care about them. But things can move extraordinarily quickly when it comes to moving billions of dollars into the pockets of friends. That's basically my point.
(unfortunately everyone doesn't agree on the definition of these terms)
(also: "But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?")
See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...
Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo. The author was heading in the right direction when writing about economic education and fighting misinformation, imo that's the correct path, we can't permanently fix stupid since our brains are all basically completely broken, but we can mitigate. Utopia may be unreachable but I think we can improve.
The same could be done for basically all political offices. Essentially, any person with any political power would need to be able to justify them holding that power for every second they hold it, and the moment they can't, or the people decide they can't, that office should be abolished.
Many early human societies organized this way.
We call it democracy, proudly wear pins saying "I Voted!" and shame on you if you ever criticize it.
If you voted for the winner, and you don't like what they're doing, it's your fault for voting for them.
If you voted for the loser, and you don't like what the winner is doing, you need to shut up and accept the result of the vote.
If you didn't vote, that's your own fault for not participating.
--
The CGP Grey videos on The Rules for Rulers actually makes me less cynical about all of this.
"The DEA’s proposal, which still must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, would recognize the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. However, it would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use."
It is in fact because they were ordered to do so by the US FDA, who by law decides what schedule drugs should be in. It started with MDMA, then LSD, Psilocybin and marijuana. In that order. They signaled the DEA to reschedule all those things because, in fact, they are legitimate medicine and I cannot help to wonder if that started with MAPS (maps.org) applying to do trials with MDMA for PTSD and being *beyond* due dilligent.
The FDA will collect data from any relevant agency whenever something (at least drugs( are applied for $whatever use. I have heard through the grapewine that the FDA were downright furious to learn the DEA had lied about MDMA for years while veterans are killing themselves daily. Much of the DEA data supposedly showed a ton of deaths attributed to MDMA just because a pill with a logo was being sold as if it was MDMA, while in fact it was sooooo many other dangerous things. The US DEA lies about just about everything. These substances are not depency-forming like opioids. If the DEA of any US alphabet soup move their lips they are lying.
The empathogen and psychdelics are not even habitforming: Do you know what happens if you do LSD daily for a week? I do, You can lick an entire sheet on the 7th day and hardly feel a thing, which I know because I have. Israel has been leading the way in marijuana research for decades. 90 year old holocaust surviors inhale marijuana vapor,for PTSD. I find extreme relief from PTSD myself using marijuana vapor: The nightmares stop, and suddenly I sleep 8 hrs a night, a few days of that I almost forget I have PTSD. Then I moved back the "richest nation of earth" (and it can go fuck itself) and essentially have to be a criminal to get regular sleep to function keep a job and not live in a perpetual nightmare. WE have Bedrocan / Bedrolight, but nobody can get a script for it because of all the nonsense authorities and socialized medicine/psychiatry thinks about it. Terminally ill cancer patients have begged to try it and at least on one occasion die 6 days after the news that he got denied died, in hospital from accute opioid poisoning. THey kill cancer patients with opiods all the time.
And WTF are DEA doing with offices in Copenhagen, Denmark?! They set up shop there and suddenly swedish police (SSI) has endless kilos of cocaine to plant and don't want the labs analyzing it following swedish law (the law say to destroy within 3 months of seizure and lab analysis and it has been all over national tv in the Scandinavian nations they Police active tried to stop them destroy man y many kilos of it, 9kg of which they were caught planting.). Oh, and SSI police have a tendency to become cocaine addicts. -All that cocaine with no oversightmakes it an occupational hazard, I guess.
IMHO, if you go to war for me, you deserve the best treatment available for your injuries. MDMA assisted therapy trials have helped veterans I know personally. I stoppped drinking liquor & wine the first time I tried marijuana, 20 years ago. The UN removed cannabis from the narcotics list in 2020, for decades it was embarassing: None of its cannabinoid components ever went on it as no narcotic effect were demonstrated they were listed as psychotropic substances, along with caffeine, psychdelics, nicotine, alcoholm etc. The original Opioum conventions had a clause specifically permitting businesses to have upto 500g for resale in small quanties to adults. That is how Dutch Coffee Shios exist. The UN listedcannabis in the 1930's under the __assumption__ of opium like effects, nobody what was in marijuana until late in the 60s, many years after the 1961 Narcotics treaty.
I am still waiting for the war on tylenol, which has killed over 100k in US a year for decades. Remember when opioids killed 100k a year in the US? The entire world does, yet most people dunno about Iran's struggle: almost half the afghan heroin ends up i Iran, has for decades. Afghanistan makes about 80% of illicit heroin.
That is completely false:
"an estimated 458 deaths due to acute liver failure each year"
1. The re-scheduling will happen (90%), the administrative hurdles will be cleared. Only counterexample I could find was Kratom in 2016, which was the reverse of this situation, and the DEA dropped the proposal at the public comment stage.
2. Trump will not reverse it if elected (80%). He's been pro-states-rights on cannabis (or outright legalization) going all the way back 1990, and has criticized Biden on this.
3. Unlikely many US states that outlaw it will change, but I do predict (75%) at least one major European country will follow suit within a year, given Germany beat US to the punch
4. Effects in the US will be minor, outside of weed stores using the banking system as another comment pointed out, since most enforcement is state level.
5. But if there are changes, the best evidence we have on this comes from state legalization, where the effects are estimated to be huge (+3% state income, +17% substance use disorders).
The Psychotropic Substances Act modified the existing schedule, but left other acts in tact - those other acts are the ones being modified by this nonsense circus.
The problem I have is that no one is talking about the potential consequences when they're talking about legalization. My 70 year old mom is going to parties with her friends where they all have a new habit of smoking marijuana because "it's legal and safe". Regulators, politicians, and advocates only hail the positive effects of marijuana and no one is talking about the cognitive risks involved.
The reason probably is because I think most people agree that it's stupid to send people to jail for smoking marijuana. But they're conflating the idea that decriminalization is good with the idea that marijuana then must not be bad for you. And this is wholly not true, and I wish more people were talking about this.
Btw, I know I will probably get downvoted for this because marijuana users don't want to face the fact that they might be dampening their long-term cognitive potential but please go do a full review of the literature—you will begin to share the doubt that I have.
Regardless, stronger plant just means you smoke less to get the effect, right? It's not so strong that a single puff puts you in the ground.
Is it so strong it precludes medical usage?
These drugs are escapes for people - and a lot of them, especially younger kids get completely hooked on the escaped from reality from these drugs (including alcohol).
We should instead be limit the use of these drugs and have teams dedicated to studying why people are turning to these instead. It's OK to have them on the weekends, but most people I know who smoke weed are on it the majority of the time. Alcohol isn't much better - most do limit it to after hours / weekends, but there are a few who tend to overdo it.
From a biased point of view, I've had a few young family members and friends who turned to weed as their go-to for their daily lives, and it has changed their lifestyle, made them far less willing to live out their life and pursue actual goals. They definitely had both the potential and backing of their families (mid to high class) to do great, but chose to instead live a life of 'rotting away' in their words. Out of them only one has turned their life around (still smoking on weekends) citing that it made them not want to do absolutely anything in their day to day life.
if something could be done about the thc content -- that will be nice.
weed isn't exactly harmful -- but long term it will be interesting to see the consequences. now already a lot of people are paranoid due to weed use.
Have we learned nothing from the Mueller Investigation? How are we all still falling for unsourced stories 5 years later?
Then hopefully the f... UN can do that too.
I'm totally shocked that the UN has such a hard and shitty drug policy.
Leaving a treaty means you change your relation to the other signatories and possibly a regulatory body that took part in developing the treaty. Sometimes it's cheap, sometimes it's been a justification for horrible atrocities over decades and decades.
In this case the latter is true. Ditching the UN convention is almost like saying you owe a lot of people restitution for the nasty things you did.
Which is why the UN needs to take the blame for the convention on drugs to go away, the signatories most likely won't.
Reagan had his War on Drugs, which resulted in the imprisonment of an order of magnitude more nonviolent drug offenders: https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs
> The entire process can take from a few months to several years, depending on the complexity of the issue, the volume of public feedback, and the urgency of the reclassification.
Making it a schedule III puts it back in "Doctor prescription" territory, and since there's now a legal route to getting it, a lot of these businesses that have operated with impunity are breaking a different set of laws if it's schedule III. No doubt that laws and decriminalization statutes would need to be updated to comply federally. Banks may be able to be used, but only if you're a registered pharmacy. It's really just a lot more questions and a lot more people to profit on the chain to selling it.
Most of the world still treats it as an illegal substance. In the US we have definitely allowed popular sentiment to make it appear much less harmful than it is. I'm not sure it belongs in schedule I, but it certainly doesn't belong OTC.
So it appears that US rescheduling would bring drug policy closer into alignment with the UN than before.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/world/europe/cannabis-uni...
Now, there may be some procedural red tape to go through, but it would be odd for the UN to reject such a change when their own scheduling agrees with the change.
This is the origin of what you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_...
Which is what this was based on: https://www.who.int/teams/health-product-and-policy-standard...
Which was the impetus for what you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Drug_Abuse_Preve... The above is a "DEA" schedule of drug classifications that the government can play around with and bullshit us on. Many of Cannabis schedules have already been reduced based on specific compounds of THC under other treaties enacted before the 1978 alignment from above. These domestic rescheduling may have an affect on legal charges or banking, but cannot address the overarching classifier of Schedule 1 drugs which is the UN based on the 1st link.
A systemic review of 26 studies [1] in 2019 found that:
"Although variability in the cannabis products used, outcomes assessed, and study quality limits the conclusions that can be made, modest reductions in cognitive performance were generally detected with higher doses and heavier lifetime use."
The American Journal of Psychiatry [2]:
"Long-term cannabis users showed cognitive deficits and smaller hippocampal volume in midlife. Research is needed to ascertain whether long-term cannabis users show elevated rates of dementia in later life."
This study published in JAMA [3]:
"...among 3385 participants with cognitive function measurements at the year 25 visit, 2852 (84.3%) reported past marijuana use, but only 392 (11.6%) continued to use marijuana into middle age. Current use of marijuana was associated with worse verbal memory and processing speed; cumulative lifetime exposure was associated with worse performance in all 3 domains of cognitive function. After excluding current users and adjusting for potential confounders, cumulative lifetime exposure to marijuana remained significantly associated with worse verbal memory..."
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7259587/
[2] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Just like with alcohol, if your life is trash: bad job, no friends, no relationship, then turning to weed or alcohol can be seen as an escape from your life and eventually it will take over.
But if you are in a good headspace, then what is the problem really? I can meet some friends and get plastered with them for a weekend and not touch booze for a month after that because I have work/family commitments that would make getting drunk impractical,
I am fairly certain that weed can be used exactly the same way.
Having a few drinks with friends or alone after a a hard day's work is fun. Smoking a joint with friends while sunbathing on the beach is fun. Getting high every day and drunk everyday is a problem but it doesn't have to be that way.
A lot of them naturally moved away from smoking when its purpose was served too.
It doesn't have to be exclusive or. People are looking to fix these issues. In the mean time, we don't have to ruin people's lives by convicting them as felons.
1. Attempt to ban it.
2. Accept that people are going to get high, and try to limit the harm.
The first has been a complete and utter disaster. The second -- e.g. applying the same rules about who can use it and where they can use it as alcohol -- is the only sane option.
Prohibition is about as effective as abstinence-only education and for many of the same reasons. We can either work with how we wish people would behave or how they're actually going to behave.
Maybe we should consider banning drugs for medical reasons too...
Hell, even if you added the drug that blocks the opiate receptors into the water supply like fluoride so everyone is getting dosed, addicts will just switch to bottle water. Legislation does not prevent anything. It only increases those deemed as a criminal.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit...
Edit: to the downvoters, I look forward to future academics and politicians being absolutely shocked when it turns out the absence of evidence is in fact not evidence of absence and there are a myriad of negative health and societal consequences from legalizing marijuana use
Would you ban coffee? How about sugar?
There’s no point in caring too much about anything or anyone else. Free will and all that.
Not my problem. I have insurances and pay for services.
I’ve pretty much accepted that most people are just there to destroy society. So I stopped caring about anyone but myself.
The only people I will get up and help are my direct blood relatives.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, it may be illegal, but it is everywhere, along with everything else.
Singapore is restrictive, but that's across the board anyway.
Let's not forget that betel nut is everywhere... another plant based drug.
How is it more dangerous than cigarettes or alcohol?
Prescriptions are basically a formality. There are a certain set of symptoms you have to describe to a doctor in order to get any particular drug, then you go to a doctor and get the prescription. It has to be this way because many of the conditions have no non-invasive tests to determine if the patient is lying and as much as the DEA would like it to be the case, doctors are not supposed to be cops and they can't be effective doctors if they have to play CYA all day.
But at that point all the law is doing is propping up pharma profits and inflating healthcare costs by routing recreational use through the insurance system, and screw that. If you want to eat pot brownies then you should a) pay the market price, not a tax to corporate shareholders, and b) pay it yourself, not stick the cost on everyone who buys health insurance.
Other than that, nothing is likely to change unless states walk back the laws they've already passed.
Remember, it's already illegal on the federal level for these businesses to exist, and that isn't stopping them.
It's really just a few dinosaur pearl clutchers that are preventing it from being descheduled entirely
Obviously there are outliers and certain cultures where domestic policy was also heavily at play (Japan). But many European countries didn't view weed as particularly problematic.
Maybe you should volunteer to teach them, you make it sound so easy.
Meanwhile, try to inform yourself about the effects and usefulness of the above substances.
Those are the sources OP is asking about. In point of fact, it would help if AI could provide the sources it used to determine it's response, that way users can verify it's accuracy.
But the point is: if there are open concerns you would be stupid to finalize a project earlier than you would have to. On top of that comes political calculus, but I work in an european University where elections don't matter that much and our senate would also have a tendency to finish most things towards the end of an administrative period.
It’s not like any other country in the world is any better. All countries have problems. My friend is one of those rich liberals who left the country for EU bouncing between Spain Germany and Netherlands before settling in Germany. Now he complains about life there and thinking about Singapore..
I’m from a 3rd world country. Corruption and people treating others like ants is common. It’s why I grew up without running water or power there because of some asshole.
The best outcome is you try to win, because I didn’t choose to spawn into this hybrid RTS game with basically a free for all rules GTA online server.
You need money, planning, and resources to ensure your safety and prosperity.
If you magically eliminated all suffering in my life, I'd still enjoy a beer at dinner.
Roller coaster rides are fun and cause a release of adrenalin in me, which leads to feeling hyperalert, excited, and energized. That's fun! I don't want to live in a society that wouldn't let me enjoy adrenalin releases.
This morning my wife told me she loved me, and I enjoyed a nice wash of endorphins from it. What's wrong with enjoying that?
The common thread here is that there's not a clean dividing line between "bad" drugs and "good" drugs. All animals enjoy certain chemicals. We're evolved to. That's what makes us (in nature) dig into food that's healthy for us, and drives us to reproduce. A mind free from drugs is going to die of misery in relatively short order.
Putting it another way nearly 3 quarters of citizens want it legalized. That's massive. It's as close to unanimous consensus as you can get on a hot-button issue like drugs.
So glad that they brought us civilisation!
I'm hoping other knowledgeable people will also weigh in on this topic.
So, you're acknowledging that changes to legal charges, banking capabilities and so forth are benefits that come from this reclassification, but you're also calling this change "utter bullshit" and a "red herring"?
Banking, isn't necessarily limited by the UN treaties - but since huge amounts of cash are flowing into cannabis businesses that are unbanked, it means Wall Street is without a massive influx of investment capital and return opportunities. Allowing the DEA to make changes to a schedule may help remove domestic barriers so banks can capture what they don't directly control.
I can't remember if it was Frederick Nitzsche or Alistair Crowley who said there's only one thing you can do which is truly your own will; that definition seems to me inherently deterministic in a way which violates other people's ideas of free will.
I've seen (and been confused by) a Young Earth creationist fundamentalist Baptist, who cleaned not to believe in evolution "because [he] believed in free will".
"Consciousness" apparently has around 40 definitions.
A large dose of ketamine literally disconnects yourself from reality. Weed makes you tired.
That doesn't seem to clear cut with the recent failed (and now backpedaling) experiments regarding decriminalization and legalization of most drugs.
In contrast to the "war on drugs" which has been extremely well funded, and implemented to the cost of our own liberties, tried for years and has not been successful either.
Of course government gets involved in personal choices. Every crime committed by a person is a personal choice. Interactions between parties are interactions between people. The distinction you're trying to draw here doesn't exist.
>Reclassifying schedule 1 Drugs requires the approval of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the UN.
In response to the person above you in this comment chain, you then suggested that their understanding was wrong and that they're "falling for the bamboozle". I'm not sure how the NYT piece is false or a bamboozle, given that it clearly states:
>The vote by the Commission for Narcotic Drugs, which is based in Vienna and includes 53 member states, considered a series of recommendations from the World Health Organization on reclassifying cannabis and its derivatives.
So, at one point you say that the Commission for Narcotic Drugs needs to be the commission to approve the rescheduling, but when you're told that they did in fact do that, you then tell us that that's wrong. I would love to be steered in the right direction here, if you don't mind.
Edit: It makes sense you think I'm being hostile by pointing out facts since that's what you took issue with to begin with.
Edit: It's not that I think you're being hostile by pointing out facts, it's that you're telling me I am "intentionally missing the point", which is not true, and you then said that I'm not interested in learning about complex drug laws and would rather buy into political nonsense. Call it what you want - hostility, being an asshole, whatever - but it's certainly not helpful nor productive.
Clearly, there are lines being blurred here. In your first post, you said that a specific commission was responsible for changing the classification, and hey - that commission actually did do that, regardless of whether or not it was under a different treaty. Because there are multiple treaties, this is a very complex issue and it should be crystal clear that I'm having trouble sorting it out (I even said as much in my first response). That's why I'm asking you to help explain it to me, and instead of saying, "Sure bud, lemme help," you're trying to paint me as some kind of ignorant asshole. And I never "took issue" with anything, I just highlighted that it was confusing.
Good for you for understanding it! I don't, hence my ask.
Edit 2: And I usually try not to do this, but it seems like I'm not the only person who is confused here. Your comment got downvoted to the point that it turned grey, while my initial response asking for clarification has four upvotes as of the time of me writing this. Seems to me like there are other people who aren't understanding your point.
And you have no issue putting words in my mouth. I said it was close to three-quarters, is "massive" and that you can't get closer to unanimous than that.
> Call it whatever you want but don't dismiss it.
29% want to lock up the other 71% for consuming a plant. And we don't know for sure that all of that 29% are entirely clean themselves.
So why not dismiss it? Why does the 29%'s opinion matter here? If 29% of the population said you should jail people for premarital sex, or smoking, or wearing shorts, or whistling in elevators, would you take them seriously?
A simple majority or supermajority is more than enough to legalize or abolish anything. Pretty much no issue requires 100% of everyone to agree.
---
The buying public: the "bewildered herd" (a term here borrowed from The Phantom Public) must pay to understand the unseen environment by the mass communications media. The irony is that although the public's opinion is important, it must pay for its acceptance. People will be selective and will buy the most factual media at the lowest price: "For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps." The media have the social function of transmitting public affairs information and their business profit role of surviving in the market.
Nature of news: people publish already-confirmed news that are thus less disputable. Officially-available public matters will constitute "the news" and unofficial (private) matters are unavailable, are less available, or are used as "issues" for propaganda.
News truth and conclusion: the function of news is to signal an event, and that signalling, eventually, is a consequence of editorial selection and judgement; journalism creates and sows the seeds (news) that establish public opinion.
---
Not only is access to information now completely free, but it's not even uncommon that a regular person is more well informed on any given topic than either the media or ostensibly highly informed political figures. See: Gell-Mann amnesia effect. [1] Outside of classification, we have all have access to, more or less, the same information. And, at this point, it's absolutely common to see high level political figures and the media both making plainly factually incorrect statements and implications, that are not only disputable but simply objectively wrong.
If anything, the real bias in society seems to do more with people believing what they want to be true, instead of what is true. Of course the exact same bias also has clearly infected politicians, the media, and so on.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
NFTs are an entertainment / art product. Them having non-zero value is the same as the original Mona Lisa selling for more than a perfect replica.
What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> Not to mention the market irrationally rewards short term good (or even bad) and long term bad behavior, but it does it consistently, so no long term good behavior can ever win out. See: oil and gas industry.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
> All solutions that try to handwave people out of the equation, which includes market based ones, are the wrong path imo.
Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
Not strictly. It could also represent the ownership of a house. Usages like that are not widely-adopted, but NFTs are so much more than art.
Well, sort of, except that "added ownership value" is a scam - links to an image are encoded on-chain, not the image or even a hash of an image. People think they're buying art when instead they're buying a URL.
> What about the stock market are you darkly hinting at?
> I'm not sure what you are talking about. Could you be more explicit, please?
Sure thing. The current organization of capitalist society rewards actions that increase profit short-term, such as stock buybacks at the expense of layoffs, and not actions that increase profit long-term, such as sustaining a labor force that maintains and builds upon institutional knowledge. Institutions "get away with this" by leveraging the coercive nature of capitalist society (work, often in bad conditions, or die), but because the coercive short term actions are the ones that are rewarded, this will probably lead to total systemic collapse, like when the British pushed the American colonies too far and completely lost control and their entire colonial investment... and again in India, some Caribbean islands, etc. Not to mention all the slave revolts throughout history. Extractive, compulsory, coercive capitalism is only ever a short-term gains focused mechanism.
The greater example for our era though is climate change. There simply aren't "market forces" that can punish extractive behavior and reward sustainable behavior. Because it's cheaper to mine and burn coal in the short term than it is to do material science research and build good solar panels, the coal burning companies win out. Under capitalism, where political power correlates to capital, this means they can leverage the State to give them even greater incentives, and throttle the last remaining channel for long-term good-for-humanity projects that might not necessarily be profitable anytime soon: government sponsored research. See: exxon promoting climate misinformation despite being totally aware of climate change in the 70s: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
Under capitalism, long term gain requires high short term capital investment, which of course comes with risk, and the risk is too great to invest in sustainable technologies when you can keep burning oil. The collapse will come with environmental collapse, or, even if we invent incredible carbon-sequestering technologies, when the oil and coal simply run out. That won't matter though, because the political power of coal-burners will have become so great that they can just leverage the State and its monopoly on violence to continue to serve their needs as they see fit.
So TLDR capitalism rewards things that are bad for the earth and the people trying to live on it.
> Sounds like a straw man? Who is waving people out of the equation and how?
George W. Bush https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/environment/stefanik-mar...
Manufacturing consent in this context would require the gradual but systematic elimination of every major platform and medium that might publish narratives contrary to the desired one, and that's simply not possible. And even if it were, that clearly artificial homogeneity would itself drive distrust. See the USSR where the government not only directly controlled literally every single medium for communication, but also strictly ideologically filtered for admittance (or exit) from the country. Nonetheless this led to widespread jokes like, "Why do we have two newspapers, Pravda (meaning truth) and Novesti (meaning news)? Well that's because there's no news in the truth, and no truth in the news."
So we can even go one step further and say that to manufacture consent you need to not only eliminate all dissenting views, but you also need to somehow hide that from your public and make them believe that what they are reading is free to diverge from the official narrative. Chomsky, of course, hit on this exact nuance with his famous quote, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." But now a days you can no longer limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, because with the internet you can find communities where basically any view, no matter how fringe, is the norm.
Yes but only one that applies here.
From oxfords: "Internal knowledge or conviction; the state or fact of being mentally conscious or aware of something."
I disagree, I think they're both very clearly defined. Both in the clinical and law sense.
I am deeply confused by much of BDSM, but I am aware that some people report enjoying the experience of not having any control, of their ability to choose being taken away from them.
Can you also give an example of what you mean by "free will" such that your chosen definition does help?
I dont see how I could exist, knowing that I can do things, without doing things.
Hence they are inextricably tied, to me.
---
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
---
[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
Why do you think they’re forcing TikTok to change ownership? US corporations are much easier to control.
Here's what I mean by manufacture of consent - the system knows your "syntax": the set of memes you'll respond to, and can deliver any message over that channel. Note that another person's "syntax" may be different, yet the same message can be delivered to both of you while maintaining the illusion of information topic diversity.
It's also possible to eliminate a viewpoint by associating it with people who are crazy, or otherwise unpalatable. By spreading stories about a select few people on the right, for example, the mainstream media has now manufactured a "far-right" label that can now be used to mean "anything a Berkeley coffee shop customer would disagree with". Here's a recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/alternative-for-germany-afd-... After a few pages of ridiculing the supporters they interview a single person, a chain smoking mother of 8 from Eastern Germany. The implication of course being: if you listen to anything these people say, that's who you are. Never mind that even chain-smoking mothers of 8 are supposed to have representation in a democracy.
Or you can stop an effort to create some financial accountability with a simple "they are with the Russians" and leave it at that.
This sort of propaganda/censorship package is tried by literally every single collapsing empire, and it just backfires horribly every single time. The only modern feature will be propaganda bots, but that will likely be even worse. Because the thing is, you can't just convince people that 2+2=5 by screaming it at them endlessly. The only time propaganda really works is on topics that people know absolutely nothing about and have no preformed opinions - like certain wars. But even that tends to very liminal, and then once people realize that things weren't exactly as they were led to believe, they're now that much less trusting of you.
I think your own example also emphasizes this reality. AfD isn't unique. Such parties are skyrocketing in popularity all throughout Europe. See the Sweden Democrats [2] who may soon become the largest party in Sweden. If you took out the ad hominem attacks against them, that Wiki page would be about 10% as long. Yet not only is the propaganda failing to change minds in the desired direction, if anything it seems to be having the exact opposite effect. Like always. But if politicians, let alone countries, were capable of learning from the past - then we might not find ourselves where are today, playing history on repeat like hamsters going around on a treadmill, with little but technology offering a refreshing change of scenery.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
There's very few if any fans of what played out in Portland, for instance. Overt drug usage exploded and became a much worse problem. The exact opposite of what proponents had hoped.
Some will say "but they didn't do it right" or similar - tired arguments we hear every time pet policies fail.
It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
Ideas don’t execute themselves and when someone doesn’t deliver the goods, it is human nature to question their decision making ability in the first place.
Being defensive or arguing nuance is fine in theory, but in practice bad outcomes tend to reinforce biases.
I would prefer fully baked ideas that are rigorous and practical rather than purely utopian and just hoping for the best. One does not roll out underfunded programs that play with safety and health.
So... like almost every government program? What makes you convinced it can actually be achieved in reality? With real people, real politicians, real budgets that get robbed for other pet projects down the line...
Even if it was achieved in reality - let's pretend to wave a magic wand - what is the expected outcome? Fewer people doing hard drugs than before? That seems difficult to accept given all consequences will effectively be removed... how many celebrities (with effectively unlimited resources) struggle their entire lives with drug abuse - in and out of rehab, etc. It seems it's better to prevent people from becoming addicts in the first place, vs. attempt to treat/mitigate addiction after it has formed.
The novel thing in world of illicit drugs is that fentanyl is very hard to dose correctly, so death rates are higher than before. That new fact on the scene makes long term comparisons difficult. But, I would say given the dropping crime rates of the last 40 years, we're doing better than the previous waves of "tough on crime" policy including drug wars from the 1980s and 1990s, despite incarcerating a lot fewer people. So I think these "experiments" absolutely are working. That effectiveness may however be overshadowed by the specific dangerousness of fentanyl in the illicit market.
We're trying the other way and failing right now. Perhaps we should figure out why...
This is often said - but what do you actually mean by disaster? Hard drug usage is objectively lower in strict enforcement areas vs. non-enforcement areas like Portland was briefly.
What's the measurement for success?
It seems, from a casual observer's perspective, we have fewer people trying hard drugs when the consequences are strict and known. We have more people trying hard drugs when the consequences are removed.
Neither system will achieve 0% drug usage - so which policy results in fewer people trying hard drugs?
It's not "the number of people who try hard drugs", which isn't a particularly interesting or meaningful number (lots of people, including myself, try hard drugs but never end up hooked on them and are productive members of society).
Try "the amount of harm caused to society". The drug war destroys more lives than hard drugs. It's a policy failure.
Again, this does not seem as clear as you attempt to present it.
In areas with decriminalized hard drugs, drug usage dramatically increased. It has a direct impact on the lives of the users, and also secondary impacts on the lives of everyone around them and/or has to deal with them.
Drug usage is not the so-called "victimless" crime some position it as. It has a lot of effects on society as a whole.
My actual issue with this is:
a) it should have been done sooner. Waiting until $election_year to do something popular has severely damaged the growth of cannabis industry
and b) it's another executive branch rule by decree that could be reversed as soon as 6 months from now after election day.
Do you own weed stocks or something? How is the growth of the cannabis industry supposed to be the mandate of a government?
Also to answer your question about weed stocks: I used to own cannabis stocks but dumped them about a year ago. Big mistake! They've doubled in price over the last week presumably from this news.
Not everyone agrees though. I don't want it legalized or normalized more.
And no I doubt this will rouse the pot smokers to vote, perhaps mail in, as they don’t have to do actually anything.
While you can make some amount of case that the timing makes it a manipulation, is this really the manipulation that bothers you?
I would rather there be no manipulations. But in a country that divides itself on infantile identity politics, fight fire with fire.
It is not a fair game. You can’t demand perfect intentions around this issue when politics is full of much worse actors.
It’s obvious to everyone that the democrats are losing their bread a butter voters, young people and black folks. This gets waved around for the nth time and everyone gets excited.
On the subject of not having a mental representation of what this means, I have also been pondering recently about "literally unthinkable thoughts", which may directly sound like the same kind of paradox, but is at the meta-level and about the same kind of (apparent) paradox (that isn't a paradox at all for the people using the terms in those ways): https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/30-13.54.02.html
Personally, I've never heard that definition of free will, to know that you are choosing; and for occasions where I don't even realise I'm making a choice (e.g. when failing to notice I've been given a false dichotomy, or which fork of a road I take on long walks), I still have what I would call a conscious experience of them… but then, for me, "consciousness" is usually "qualia" (but if the sentence is more complex then it may also be for example one of "not asleep/comatose" or "not subconscious/pre-conscious").
Likewise, my default (in the absence of further context, e.g. being on this website) assumption when I hear "free will" is that the person using those words means something like a supernatural soul, but the underlying physical phenomena which is actually backing this is some combination of hidden information and being too complex to predict, which is why we also witness animism in various forms
Policies are implemented by politicians and government drones, are beholden to budgets and meandering political sentiment of the population, etc. ie - they will never be implemented "correctly" - so we should pick the policies that are the hardest to get wrong and/or have the least negative side effects.
It may never be achieved, regardless of my or your personal views on the subject at hand I think reasonable people can agree if you try and do something but do it poorly, and it doesn't work, that's not necessarily a failure of the thing but more a failure of the execution.
ex: I'm bad at welding so therefore welding is not a good way to hold two pieces of metal together, is an invalid/incorrect conclusion.
It wasn’t successful and massively contributed to the proliferation of organized crime.
Absolutely. I'm no stranger to the impact of drug abuse, as I've had family and close friends become addicts.
Even so, the drug war is way worse. It adds violence and danger to drug use, making it more dangerous for users and those in their proximity. It increases policing and police militarization and violence. Punishments for possession destroy families and career prospects.
Every ounce of prevention bought by the drug war costs a pound of pain.
> Drug usage is not the so-called "victimless" crime some position it as. It has a lot of effects on society as a whole.
Responsible drug use is pretty victimless. Drug abuse has victims. But that's no different than alcohol, and banning that also caused way more harm than it prevented.
Our prisons do a horrible job at rehabilitation. Our prisons themselves contain lots of drugs. Our prisons are, in my opinion, immorally run. As a nation we believe in retribution and are fine with prison rapes and other abuses that occur there.
The drug war has been a disaster in terms of cost/benefit regarding how much we've spent on it. It's been a disaster in terms of civil liberties. We Americans like to think we are free but walking around with $10,000 in cash will, if found out by police, result in it being seized. Civil asset forfeiture has caused many innocent people to be punished. It has been a disaster in terms of our national incarceration rate. Incarceration for drugs targets poor and minorities. Rich people rarely go to jail for drug use. For example, Rush Limbaugh got a fine and drug treatment.
Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it.
> https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/seattle-pot-shop-cr... for example
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-28/marijuan...
One of the first to open a few years back got hit early and everyone seems to have learned the lesson.
>"The owner says around $15,000 of products and items were stolen from the store."
It doesn't mention anything about cash.
"Smash and grab" in weed shops doesn't usually have much to do with having piles of cash sitting around (though I'm sure that might happen too) - it's the product that thieves want to steal because it's got no serial numbers, it's pretty light-weight and easy to run out with thousands of dollars worth of product, and it's easy to resell.
If there's any cash in the register that's often secondary to grabbing a few pounds of high-quality product. 3 pounds of high quality weed can be valued at $20k. I doubt there's that much in the cash register at the end of the day, and good luck getting into the safe. It's much easier to run out with 3 pounds of weed.
I mean... I can leave a 2000 USD Macbook for a toilet break in Starbucks over here without any issues and have done so regularly.
Schedule 1 -> banned from the financial system.
Schedule 3 -> OK to use the financial system.
How the DEA schedule and the financial system interact is still unclear. The important part is that once regulations are updated weed businesses won't be restricted from access to the financial system. There may be some more regs around that access, but I'm sure they'll be worked around.
This is not true.
Here is a legitimate business selling schedule 1 drugs: https://www.caymanchem.com/product/10801/mephedrone-(hydroch...
Regulatory Information: DEA Schedule I
With a schedule I DEA license, you can buy this product, and the manufacturer can deposit your money into a bank.
That's why I'm not sure moving marijuana from schedule 1 to 2 or 3 will really change much from a banking perspective.
Marijuana dispensaries will still be violating federal law, no different than if they were selling sleeping pills illegally.
You already answered this already :)
> the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially
Schedule 1 means illegal under (nearly) any circumstance, commercial dispensaries fall under “any circumstance.” Drug scheduling is just a tiered system for classification in order to determine which rules to apply to its sale, distribution, and possession of the substance.
(Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I don't think I'd want 50+ illegally-correlated transactions on my financial record that the government could lump into other charges...)
Here in Ontario Canada I can walk into a local neighbourhood cannabis store (one of many on every block, it seems) and make a purchase using my debit or credit card. I'm not sure if any of them even keep a cash float although I imagine they must, just in case granny comes in "for medicinal use". Alternatively, I could just go to the government-run web store and get home delivery through Canada Post at no extra charge.
Assuming banks/processors don't decide to restrict them for other reasons.
Edit: yes
https://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/tax_implications_reclassi...
Does alcohol consumption show up on credit card bills and filter back to insurance companies?
This also assumes that grocery stores aren't aggressively aggregating and selling sales data, esp. those from Membership Cards. Insurance companies would love to get a hold of that data, not only for alcohol, but things like sugar and junk food purchases. I'd bet my hat they're already doing so.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
> Jack Riley, a former deputy administrator of the DEA, said he had concerns about the proposed change because he thinks marijuana remains a possible “gateway drug,” one that may lead to the use of other drugs.
>“But in terms of us getting clear to use our resources to combat other major drugs, that’s a positive,” Riley said, noting that fentanyl alone accounts for more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. a year.
What I'm curious about is how marijuana availability links to consumption of other drugs including hard drugs, alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers and antidepressants. I hypothesize it may decrease these.
Ah, I see. Somehow I doubt that if the US announced it would withdraw from this treaty, to be replaced by an amended version, we'd be invaded immediately by all our (former) allies and be driven straight into the sea. Like, I'm sure there are governments even more obsessed with cannabis than we've been, but like, they'll have to get over it sometime.
I don't consume it really, but if I did I'd never pay for it online with a CC processor or anything that goes through an American data centre. The US is way too crazy about this stuff, and an overzealous border control agent armed with information he shouldn't have can ruin your whole day/week/life.
Trust me, you don't want to see a fast-moving American government.
Gallup polled support for legalization being in the minority, as recently as 2010. [1]
Now factor in the demographics of voters vs adults in general, and the timeline is the opposite of surprising.
[1] New High of 46% of Americans Support Legalizing Marijuana https://news.gallup.com/poll/144086/new-high-americans-suppo...
The gesture of the freeing these two brave whistleblowers is much more important than you think. Noam Chomsky calls this censorship flak of his five filters.
> If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’. This is the fourth filter. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation.
So legalization may still be a political hot button, but give it time. One party supports it, one party opposes it. Dan Patrick, Lt. Gov. of Texas, is going to push the state to ban hemp-based Delta 8 products in the next session.
One party is regressive, one party is receptive and secular.
The only reason why it's not legalized yet is because 1) many politicians are old enough to be brainwashed to believe in "reefer madness", and 2) many voters are old enough to do the same, so politicians who don't believe in it still have to pander to them. But this is a problem that solves itself over time, which is why supporting weed legalization becomes more socially and politically acceptable.
I mean, just this year, 12 US senators wrote an open letter asking DEA to legalize weed. This would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, yet here we are.
If it's not all legal 20 years from now, I would be extremely surprised.
See cannabisstudieslab.com as an example of the kind of non plant touching research that Cannabis Studies majors have been doing due to the Schedule I status.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts had lost his job. He was thrilled to "only" have to pay $1000/mo for insurance on the Marketplace for his family of 6. And he confirmed it wasn't even a "Cadillac" plan!
If my back hurts, I'm probably going to reach for weed over a visit to the doctor because $10/day is a potentially more affordable than needing to shell out $8k for back surgery or physical therapy treatments for years. Maybe I get lucky and the pain goes away, or I can focus on finding a new job with better health benefits and still come out ahead financially.
I agree with the sentiment but it seems far more reasonable to stop criminalizing something so human as a step towards the goal, rather than put the goal before the metaphorical horse.
so we definitely need psychedelics rescheduled.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/ https://treatmentmagazine.com/cannabis-2020-this-isnt-your-d...
A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition.
The next step for society would be to attempt at changing opinion, but what are the unintended consequences? The answer is, bad news.
Not sure how the DEA can consider itself a serious organization.
It’s a single data point that is indicative of an entire system.
The war on drugs failed and has caused more deaths than any drug.
And the criminalization of cannabis and psychedelics over the last several decades ought to be criminal - based in no reality of science.
The DEA is a failed organization and continues to be.
Got to make sure the doctors get a cut by requiring prescriptions.
Whatever you think about the effects of Marijuana on yourself or society, it's clear that it should have never been outlawed in the first place, and wouldn't have been outlawed if not for the factors above.
It seems that the fentanyl crisis has finally defeated the archaic drug policy in the states, but not in the way you think. If alcohol and tobacco were outlawed in the US, it would immediately become impossible to buy them without risking getting a deadly dose of fentanyl. Legalization of marijuana, controlled legalization, is the only sane answer.
(And this is coming from someone who doesn't partake)
Calling it: CVS and Walgreens will move into the medical market for this. You think these little shops will be able to process health insurance payments when that sector gets in on it? lol
I don't think they'll carry intoxicating forms of marijuana, though. (I've never seen a CVS with alcohol, but that could be because of how my state handles liquor licenses.)
- Consolidation is already happening in a lot of ways, in some cases despite state laws designed to prevent it
- Consolidation by big tobacco seems less likely than probably other major industry incumbents (in the long run, I’d bet on companies primarily oriented around alcohol)
- Federal posture since Cole (when first states legalized recreational, partially rolled back under Trump/Sessions but seemingly not as much as was feared at the time) is largely what prompted strong local laws; it’s based in analysis of interstate commerce; federal legalization could have a similar analysis without undermining existing strong local laws; the tradeoff would probably be large disparity of justice between states (on party lines)
- A much better outcome would be a central rule not just to legalize, but to more strongly incentivize justice for people affected by draconian laws in the first place. This is a pipe dream, but it should be the focus because any compromise will start with that.
I smoked for 15 years, turns out quitting was easy, once you undestood the way the addiction works, but nobody considers that they developed oral fixation from sucking on a potennt noootropic habit forming substance all day,
But then we have Silvy Listhaug (politician): Marijuana will continue to be banned because she is a mom, she told the reporter photographing her smoking cigarettes. I hope she gets lung cancer.
Personally, as a monkey with a lump of fat in my head called a brain, I think drinking fat solving solvents are a bad idea for that reason alone.fMRI scans shows white brain tissue in drinkers literally dissolves over time.
The increase in marijuana use is mostly due to 3 factors:
* Nobody is hiding anymore.
* We become more people every day.
* More & more people realise alcohol sucks.
The UK and CAnada's offcial stance on alcohol is that there is no such thing as a safe amount of alcohol consumption.
The war on drugs is going well in Norway: Cocaine & MDMA purity averages above 80%, Racemic amphetamine is cheaper than hash now, and the hash is good as anything you can find in dutch coffeeshops. ..and it is all getting cheaper at the same time. The war is being lost so bad the police have stopped issuing Narcotics stats 2 times a year as mandated and dropped it to once a year. Last year crystal meth averaged over 99% purity, 99.2%-99.6% according to Kripos Crimelab!! 5000 mafia families in Europe alone funds their organized crime with proceeds from the artificially high price of cannabis caused by the ban, legalizing and taxing it resoanbly would snuff out those and would be a massive blow to organized crime. GHB is fueling a rape epidemic here. Oh and you can legally buy poppy seed and grow them here...
I do expect big tobacco to move in aggressively if weed is made legal.
I don't mean half-assed decriminalization here and there which still feeds very healthy criminal ecosystem and for end user of say weed doesn't change a zilch in anything, I mean same legal treatment as tobacco and alcohol, we don't prescribe that for anxiety do we, its all fun and chill and introspection (for me). Its 2024 FFS, and we see idiocy live where politicians are lying in the cameras to please old conservative folks for next elections.
I want to buy edibles, happy to pay any tax they slap on it. I want to buy a single joint, of strength and power I want to choose. Or vapes. Not some overpriced mediocre shit from paranoid desperate illegal immigrant standing in dark corners of shady parts of cities. Give that man an honest job on some weed farm or distribution system.
Regardless, unless Congress does something to make it legal nationally, we'll still have the state frameworks. Just hopefully avoiding the most draconian criminal charges.
this is the main cinsern for me
Why not? Laws of scale would drive the price down while improving the profit margins, both clients and investors would win.
I think some inefficiencies are important, especially when scoped to "who can do this thing the cheapest?"
But marijuana enjoys high markups, pseudoscience "health benefits", and is becoming more and more acceptable to Americans each and every year.
What else will I spend my billions in revenue on if I can't advertise and have to hide all my employees?
Though maybe you want your drug dealers to be unproductive, for society's sake! I may take this back...
1) Govt says cannabis is the most dangerous drug.
2) I try cannabis, nothing bad happens.
3) So when the govt says drugs are dangerous, they are incorrect? I guess I can't use their rating system and will have to base it on my own experiences.
There is a trust penalty for over-classifying drugs.
And then of course picking up your cannabis from the popular pharmacy chain means you never had a reason to introduce yourself to a dealer, who may stock cannabis alongside other drugs.
Cannabis isn't intrinsically a gateway drug. All the gateway-ness flows from the social structure surrounding its misclassification.
1) Govt says cannabis is the most dangerous drug.
2) I find someone who will sell me illegal thing.
3) I try cannabis, nothing bad happens.
4) Vendor has other items for sale.
I remember a teacher telling me drugs make hair grow out of your teeth. I figured if drugs were really that bad they wouldn't need to lie about what they do.
Now that it's legal in Germany I'm going to grow my own, and experience the (surprisingly common!) miracle of harvesting the exact legal limit of 25 grams from 3 plants ;)
Cannabis IS a gateway drug, indirectly, by means of social contagion. It's simply a catch-22 because the government (and media, and both sides of the political spectrum) has completely destroyed their credibility with the people.
Teenagers have had plenty of excuses, through loss of trust in the self-anointed's reputation of exaggeration, to (rightly) assume the government is outright lying or masquerading the facts about all substances.
So when artistic pieces of blotter paper of unknown orgin start making appearances in high school's around the world in 2014, students had 0 reason to believe they were dangerous; after all, "cup of orange juice man" had already long been debunked.
Many kids have died, directly because of this DIS-education.
Oxy/Hydro's are the actual gateway drugs; recreational/unfettered use, alongside the constant social pressure, will (nearly always), cascade into more dependent use of more potent opiates, then opioids.
When fent-laced pills finally starting working their way into the aging supply of real Percoset in the hills of Appalachia, three generations of drug addicted families had already resigned their fate to a long, painful retirement of addiction.
By the way - these same, ("simple, flyover, farmer, uneducated" by blue/'learned'/democract) people trusted their government to get hooked on these, remember?
If it is a surprise to you that the vast majority of Americans distrust the DEA, FDA, or CDC, or CNN, or even FOX then you have never left the conform of your post-modern urban hell-scape.
source: i am veteran of the war on drugs
Not so much of a gotcha.
Depends how stoned, but people routinely drive while using medication that affects them far more than being a bit stoned.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/
> Cannabis users perceive their driving under the influence as impaired and more cautious, and given a dose of 7 mg THC (about a third of a joint), drivers rated themselves as impaired even though their driving performance was not; in contrast, at a BAC 0.04% (slightly less than two “standard drinks” of a can of beer or small 5 oz. glass of wine; half the legal limit in most US states), driving performance was impaired even though drivers rated themselves as unimpaired.
> This awareness of impairment has behavioral consequences. Several reviews of driving and simulator studies have concluded that marijuana use by drivers is likely to result in decreased speed and fewer attempts to overtake, as well as increased “following distance”. The opposite is true of alcohol.
I'd be more weary of people under the influence of anger, benzos, or other psychiatric drugs.
In my experience, cannabis is a performance enhancer in these cases, increasing awareness rather than decreasing it. After all, it does improve ADHD symptoms.
There is probably some form of bias here, as I don’t remember all of the good drivers, but not a day goes by where I don’t see drivers wandering into other lanes, performing dangerous undertakes, lane changes, or generally being terrible drivers, and you have to wonder why.
A lot of phone drivers, for sure, a lot of ignorant pricks too, but I’d bet on a lot of inebriated drivers given their conduct.
Example of a shocker I had today, I was turning right out of a resi street, a car with no indication stopped to let me out on my right, but it wasn’t safe (very tight, little visibility) so I waved him along. I stayed there for appx 30 seconds until I realised he wanted to turn into the street I was pulling out of. He didn’t indicate once. Just a completely wild disregard for any form of road etiquette, not to mention the Highway Code.
I’ll report it from my dashcam, but I doubt anything will be done by my local police force.
I think we need far more stringent fines and forced retests (along with removal of licence if they can’t meet the standard of a learner) for anyone committing a road traffic offence or blatantly breaching the Highway Code out of sheer ignorance.
I'm not saying that this should be legal or that it's okay to do it, but it's really much less of a problem than one would think. Certainly much less so than drunk driving.
I've long wondered if this will be a trend across the country.
The real question though is, will more or less people who try cannabis now that it's legal, know when to stop experimenting when offered harder drugs? The fact that we don't see 15 year olds making bathtub moonshine leads me to believe that there is a limit somewhere for most people. Cannabis has not been difficult to get in the US for decades if you have even a modicum of self-determination. If everyone who has abstained until now suddenly gets the urge to try cannabis, I doubt that will totally destroy that self control after a few hits. Just like many people can go to a bar and know when to stop drinking even though there are likely somewhat inhibited by the drinks they have already consumed.
Regulations and social expectations of where you can smoke should be as-strict as tobacco smoking, if not more since weed is just so much more stinky.
Quantitatively, marijuana smoke is less carcinogenic than tobacco smoke.
There are so many different points of view on that topic... I think that debate will go on and on
This is just the same principle as private organization boards of directors delegating the minutia of running the organization to the executives and their teams. If you think it would be madness for hiring decisions on individual contributors to be made by board votes, then you should support the delegation of rule-making authority to executive agencies.
Yes, it means that changing the executive might change the rules. Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire. And voters remain free to replace the executive the next time around, if they want to see different rules. These are all features, not bugs.
There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.
It isn't, because the board can replace the executive leadership at any time, whereas the President can only be replaced every four years and isn't elected by the legislature whatsoever, bypassing checks and balances.
The proper way to delegate minutia to an administrative agency is to have them propose rules that Congress then votes on. The rules might be a thousand pages long and 99.9% uncontroversial, so those rules get rubber stamped, but controversial changes have to go through the political process because it gives Congress the opportunity to refuse.
> Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire.
But that's not how it works, because now you've inverted the default. Before you needed a majority of the House and Senate and the President's signature in order to make a change. Now you need all that to undo the change a President makes unilaterally -- implying that the President would veto it and the legislature would need a veto-proof majority. It's not the same thing at all and is handing too much power to the executive branch.
> There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.
There is value in allowing the executive branch to remove bad rules unilaterally, in the same way as the President can veto a bill. Allowing new rules to be created without the appropriate process is tyrannical.
Note that there are only either 538 or 100 voters, depending on which position in the executive branch.
You typically see flip flop rulings on issues that half the country actually does not support.
Abortion is probably the biggest issue and that's because a lot of the country does not support it and this has not substantially changed in over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
Another contentious issue has been gay marriage but support for that has only risen over the years (although much more slowly), so generally that is another issue that I don't expect much flip flopping on: https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-hol...
I'm sorry, am I reading the data incorrectly, or your comment incorrectly?
> Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?
> 2023 | 34(any) 51(some) 13(illegal) 2(no opinion)
According these data, the vast, vast majority of Americans support the right to abortion, correct?
And even if what you are saying was true (it isn’t) isn’t that the entire argument for democracy in the first place? “Politicians make good policy because they want to get re-elected” is how we should hope things work.
Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to reexamine the scheduling of marijuana in October 2022.
Nearly a year later in August 2023, the HHS wrote to the DEA recommending that marijuana be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III.
A month ago, the DEA was still "writing [their] recommendation" on what they should reclassify marijuana to (if any change was to happen).
And just now, April 2024, the DEA agreed with HHS (as reported by AP, DEA hasn't confirmed this yet).
So no, this isn't "just happening" now, this has been going on for years.
[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-30/hhs-calls... [3]: https://twitter.com/DEAHQ/status/1772987478548287891
Then you have to have security, your staff is high 24/7, banking is a mess..
Growing might be more pleasant than running the shops but then you better like agriculture
That's fair as well. Being invested in cannabis is a whole other beast.
Coming from the US, Massachusetts specifically this was a major step backwards. Granted we are spoiled, especially in my region where there's 2-3 shops per town but I was not expecting it to be that hard in progressive Canada.
Edit: I looked it up and only the "SQDC" (1) is authorized to sell Cannabis. 1: https://www.quebec.ca/sante/conseils-et-prevention/alcool-dr...
Quebec is an oddball, they did provincially run them. They are quite available still, search 'cannabis' in google/apple maps and they'll be available.
So .. all the countries in the world, e.g. Japan, China, Singapore, UAE, etc., etc., where marijuana is very illegal, failed? It seems to be working just fine for them. Since we can provide numerous counter examples to your claim isn't your claim instantly invalidated?
When I visited Quebec in 1997, I saw a lot of people openly smoking cannabis in public. Once I smelt weed, turned around, and saw a kid, probably about 12-14, just sitting on a bench in public smoking a joint. I wasn't in a shady part of town, either.
pffft... source? I know about 1 person who grows their own for every 100 who smoke.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/
https://treatmentmagazine.com/cannabis-2020-this-isnt-your-d...
If the <current government> was doing good things that the people wanted during the entire term, then they would not need to resort to moves like this alleged one when the vote is coming up. It's only if they're not doing good things that the people want that they would dangle something shiny to the electorate.
I would be surprised if there is not some string attached to this that doesn't take place until after November. That's a good thing though, becuase it was seeming more and more like the current administration was sabotaging itself. The Democrats need the youth vote.
https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/47th-edition-spring-2024
Young people always have bad turnout anyway, so it doesn't matter if they find a new excuse to have it.
(Also they did do student loan reform via SAVE and have forgiven about 9% of loans IIRC. Probably shouldn't have though, it's inflationary, and as you can see from the above poll nobody even appreciates it.)
L2s fix this (~immediate settlement, cents in fees), but it's another layer and another account for users to manage (which is annoying).
Not one that will work for the purposes of the Controlled Substances Act, as I understand it. I believe permissible use of a Schedule III has to be pursuant to a doctor's prescription for an FDA approved drug.
See this useful report: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11105
Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, without other legal changes, would not bring the state-legal medical or recreational marijuana industry into compliance with federal controlled substances law. With respect to medical marijuana, a key difference between placement in Schedule I and Schedule III is that substances in Schedule III have an accepted medical use and may lawfully be dispensed by prescription, while Substances in Schedule I cannot. However, prescription drugs must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Although FDA has approved some drugs derived from or related to cannabis, marijuana itself is not an FDA-approved drug. Moreover, if one or more marijuana products obtained FDA approval, manufacturers and distributors would need to register with DEA and comply with regulatory requirements that apply to Schedule III substances in order to handle those products. Users of medical marijuana would need to obtain valid prescriptions for the substance from medical providers, subject to federal legal requirements that differ from existing state regulatory requirements for medical marijuana.https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/step/early-intervention...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909735
> The government authorizing a product for sale doesn't force you to consume it.
And you missed the point entirely. The government doesn't need to force when it can seduce, and it doesn't need to lie (except by omission) when it has liberal surrogates spreading misinformation like what you just did. It's convenient for them when majority opinion always works out that way. Where do you think those opinions come from? The same concept works in reverse when you have relatively safe drugs banned solely because of sensationalist headlines resulting from one or two edge cases.
But even if it's not massive, it's still extra profits that could be made.
Meanwhile these are cash-only businesses, so if you're gonna steal then go for the money. Esp. since most dispensaries I've seen do a reasonably brisk business.
Which in turn will increase the number of studies.
Which will in turn provide more support for eventual legalization.
Research being blocked (often by the DEA) was one of the biggest hold-ups.
They'll definitely look at their options for the marijuana business as they can safely do so legally.
To add a bit, the importance of some inefficiencies are lost when viewed strictly through an investor lens. E.g., investigative journalism is expensive and largely inefficient regarding the profitability of a newspaper. Redundant inventory/equipment is largely inefficient until low-probability events effect supply. Small businesses may be inefficient but provide economic stability to a non-urban center etc. etc.
For example, banks often had special "night safes" allowing small business owners to drop off bags of cash outside of branch opening hours. Some businesses would get daily armoured car visits to collect the day's takings. There were even supermarkets with a system of pneumatic tubes allowing cashiers to transfer money to the back room without leaving their stations, so their tills never had enough cash to be worth robbing. You could also get safes with a deposit slot, so employees could drop the takings into the safe, but didn't have the combination needed to get anything out again.
Assuming these all still exist, there are options for keeping cash secure, and getting it off the premises fast.
Of course, by similar logic they could store all the product in a safe out of hours. Jewellery stores manage to store loads of diamonds without getting robbed, after all...
Wickard v. Filburn United States Supreme Court case Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, is a United States Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the regulatory power of the federal government. It remains as one of the most important and far-reaching cases concerning the New Deal, and it set a precedent for an expansive reading of the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause for decades to come. The goal of the legal challenge was to end the entire federal crop support program by declaring it unconstitutional. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)
Bigger companies can pay a lot more because they are more productive. And further research has shown its the same pool/type of people at each.
Notwithstanding grey-market limitations, people have their motives for accepting the inefficiency of starting or staying small. Potential, for example.
So you do an ATM transaction, but the money goes to the dispensary somehow. I do not know how it works on the back end, but I've used it as a customer. It's lovely and can even be done over your phone.
They'd be insane to not go with that name.
What is going on is that not that weed is 'half-legal' in the states. It is fully illegal. What is true is that the federal enforcers have more or less decided to leave people alone when the state allows the use of Marijuana. Pre 2017, the exact same thing was happening across Canada where local jurisdictions allowed cannabis use and sales, and the RCMP basically turned a blind eye. Vancouver is the most obvious example, where there was actually a decline in the number of dispensaries after weed became federally legal.
This is really exciting to see.
Meanwhile in Schedule III it's a judgement call. Schedule III drugs like K or steroids are drugs we know are useful, your doctor can prescribe them, your hospital pharmacy has them, but we also know they get abused. That sounds much more like marijuana, and, to be honest, alcohol. Can we justify Schedule III for Marijuana and yet not for Alcohol? It's at least a serious question whereas the Schedule I status was just nonsense.
I can see tobacco becoming effectively a Schedule III type substance, made only when it is deemed necessary for some reason and not generally available - New Zealand tried to set off on that path, the UK is attempting it now, unlike booze (or marijuana) which has a population of people who say "Hey, that's fun, don't take that away" the smoker are almost all against smoking, they see it as an unpleasant mistake they made rather than a choice they're glad to have taken.
Still curious to see how this may affect cannabis commerce. Will CVS have cannabis extracts behind the pharmacy counter?
Which is Ø. ‘Secondhand smoke’ is just an excellent reframing of ‘smell I dislike.’
However, the result is that I get to tell you fun facts such as the US interstate highway system having a higher rate of accidents and a higher rate of accident fatalities per vehicle-mile traveled than the Autobahn, in spite of the fact that hundreds of vehicles are hitting 180+ mph (300+ km/h) on a daily basis over there, while American highways mostly tend to be limited to 55/60/65/70/75 mph depending on state and road type.
Heck, even the US adopting more of a Dutch/Belgian model would be better than what they use now. The bar to get a license is so low in the US that it's not really surprising how many people die in car accidents over there.
I say all this as an American who got their license the day they turned 16. I will never forget that during the driving exam, I was given the option to skip the parallel parking section in exchange for 1 point off of my score. The alternative was, if I hit a cone marking the edge of the course, I would fail outright. Of course I took the point off and walked out with my license! This was suburban Dallas in 2010? Funny enough, in 2013 I moved to Kansas and worked in a downtown area where parallel parking was basically a requirement. I took me about 2 months to get comfortable navigating into any spot on the street without rubbing my tires or being insanely crooked. Now that I live in Europe, I'm glad I had that experience because it's served me well regularly ever since.
You must purchase your cannabis from a select set of suppliers chosen by the government (yes, the very same ones your competition must purchase from), you are not allowed to offer discounts/freebies on cannabis products (only rolling papers or similar non-psychoactive products). It is still illegal to operate any kind of venue that allows consumption, so while you can decorate your retail space like an Apple store or a Pier 1, you can't run trivia nights or do movie screenings or anything that might result in people patronizing your business over the one next door offering the same product for $0.05 cheaper.
Pre-legalization, I could go to a store (not legally operated) and look at the bud in the jar, smell it, and make decisions based on something other than a sealed package with no artwork or description on it. Some stores even offered consumption of "dabs" which is a great model: those things cost a lot of money and aren't really fun to have in your home and maintain, and it was very competitive with "a pint after work". All of this went away after 2017.
(sorry!)
It's up to each city/county if they allow any stores at all and their own regulations / licensing.
A recent change a lot of shops seem to be going through is removing the "lobby waiting area" (so 2-3 shop "in private") and just adding more shelves and display cases while building up a huge line. Never liked the farce before (and probably a holdover from when they were medical only) so its a nice change.
It’s probably better to say “nearly all CU withdrawals” because they don’t have a perfect monopoly.
Perhaps gummies/edibles would be covered under some circumstances -- but to be a prescription or even an OTC "medication" it has to go through FDA approval to demonstrate efficacy and document the side effects, and it will have to be manufactured to pharmaceutical standards of potency and purity, which will make it more expensive.
I think it will most likely be like alcohol: sold for recreational use, age-restricted, and not medical.
(Although anecdotally the best results are obtained from taking mostly CBD with a tiny bit of THC; it appears that the latter does something that makes the former's effect more potent. So you see stuff like e.g. 20:1 CBD:THC pills around - can't get high on that, but very effective at pain management. However pure CBD pills are still more common.)
Having a government which restricts personal freedoms too much for the sake of "societal good" may work in the short term or for specific issues but is clearly a negative in the long and broad terms. See the "west" of today for evidence of personal freedom combined with not-overly-restrictive-legislation being the most successful method of handling these things.
Do you acknowledge the failure of prohibition?
A bigger factor is that the Canadian prohibition was only controlled at the federal level in the first place, like all Canadian criminal law, so only the federal government had to legislate to change it. The provinces have however done lots of subsequent legislation to regulate the details (e.g. distribution channels and the exact minimum age limit) in a wide variety of ways.
Or, if someone gets his way, just 1
The ballot is a lie. You're actually voting for an elector, not the President.
In practice, the general voters typically see the electors vote the way the populace in their area voted, but that's not always the case.
When is that not the case?
I believe it would be a violation of current electoral law for electors to fail to cast votes as apportioned by the results of their state's general election.
In my view, being detached from the outcome of the general election in a state isn't the problem with the electoral college currently (though maybe it was in the past).
Rather, the problem is that the all-or-nothing apportionment of electoral college votes within most states often creates outcomes that wildly diverge from the national popular vote. But I think the idea of splitting up the general election vote tallying by state is a good one, because I think running one giant national vote would be more of a contentious logistical nightmare than it already is.
But if it were up to me, all states would apportion their electoral votes proportionally, and each state would get a lot more votes. That is, say California is allotted 10,000 "electors" and 57.25% of their votes go to one candiate, 39.67% goes to another, and 3.08% to a third, then the electoral college votes would be 5,725, 3,967, and 308, respectively. This would reach outcomes extremely close to a national popular vote, while still using the electoral college in a way that is no less ceremonial than it is today.
Turns out legalization of a drug doesn’t lead to massive increases in consumption. Who knew.
Definitely kneecapped the black market though: most moved to the legal side and black market prices cratered.
Users have doubled: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264862/cannabis-consumpt...
Use among users has also increased 20%: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962353
Same happened after alcohol prohibition: more people consumed after the ban was lifted, but consumption was safer. But rarely people that didn't consume during the prohibition went on alcohol binge after the end of the ban. They just drank a couple of beers per week, maybe even a glass of bourbon twice a year, now that they can buy and consume it safely.
Thus the stats you linked doesn't necesarily show a "massive" increase in use, but many people using it sparsely now and many people now admiting to use it that were using previously. In fact, while statista.com shows a 100% increase, the second and more controlled study shows only a ~20% increase that makes more sense (far from massive).
Looking at historic trends the point where pot was first legalized for recreational use isn’t obvious. If anything the long term upward tends started long before legalization which didn’t seem to have significant impact. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
Then there are these incredible 10mg THC infused lemonades that are amazing.
On the other hand, the novelty of legal weed only lasted about 4 months for me. Because the store was there and there was this selection I never had access to before I wanted to try different things and was smoking more than I would have normally. At the end of the day though it is all still just weed. It is fun for me but only once a month at most now.
I also don't know a single person that didn't smoke weed because it was illegal and now they do because they can go to the store and purchase it legally.
I think that the polling has doubled for users because people can answer the poll honestly when weed is legal. The idea that weed being illegal is keeping 50% of the potential weed smoking population from smoking is utterly preposterous.
If anything, what is interesting is how many people who would never try weed when it was illegal, will still never try it when it is legal. They may say it is because it is illegal or they don't want to smoke but you can't sell them on 10mg legal lemonaid either.
I've personally known people with terminal cancer who wouldn't use marijuana to manage pain and nausea because it is federally illegal. They suffered more than they should have. Is lower use always good?
I think of the thriving microbrewery scene (vs not just Budweiser et al but so-called "premium" beers from megabreweries that don't hold a candle to the local stuff).
I also wonder about the degree to which psilocybin might be following THC's path, wrt state vs federal laws....
before Roe was overturned I would have considered myself pro life because I don't believe in late term abortions, but with the new legal landscape I've become effectively pro choice because the new laws are so extreme that they ban life saving health care that has little to do with the life of the unborn
I wonder how many are like me
Rx under DEA scrutiny is nothing like rec or laughable state controlled medical 'recommendations'. You pull that shit as a provider on controlled scripts and your charts get audited, your DEA license gets pulled.
So something that you'd probably be interested in are the turn away studies.
https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study
The studies ask questions of people seeking abortions who ultimately can't because the law prohibits their abortion (usually because they waited too long).
One interesting finding of this study is that a big reason people wait too long is because getting to an abortion clinic is just too hard. In the Roe world, in some very large states like Texas there were just 1 or 2 abortion clinics for the entire state.
Late term abortions have never really been very common. That's because as you get later in the process, just doing a c section and adoption would generally be the more preferred route. When they do happen, it's pretty much always due to non-viability of the fetus.
And, this isn't directed to you, but another fascinating part of the turn away studies is that it's fairly common for people seeking abortions to be in long term relationships with children. For those people, financially supporting another child isn't really an option and adoption is really socially taboo. (Imagine explaining why you aren't pregnant anymore and why you don't have an infant child).
This is part of the strategy against abortion. Make unreasonably short abortion windows (six weeks is often before many women even determine that they are pregnant) coupled with restrictive regulations designed to make the process as difficult and long as possible including multiple visits and mandatory waiting times. Throw on top of that the attacks on the few places which provide these services and you've got a situation that makes it extremely difficult for anyone not wealthy to get a legal abortion.
I believe there are many, on "both sides."
I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.
The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.
We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.
> I wonder how many are like me
>I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.
>The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.
>We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.
This settles into a duopoly, with periodic swings depending on macro-level events, as naturally both sides align with a "good" and the other "bad" in an all-relative social moral grandstanding power contest.
90%+ of abortions are essentially birth control.
The moral, social, political, biological, religious, physiological, cultural, and constitutional subjectivity of the matter juxtaposed against the objective nature of (current) (nominal) child-birth is easily the most difficult topic to reach common ground between the most vocal extremes.
All the while, most people agree late-term, medically unnecessary abortions are abhorrent.
My point was that they could be doing what people want for the entire duration of their term, rather than in the last few months. To use an analogy, it's like a student getting bad grades all year and then doing a bunch of extra credit assignments when they're worried about failing the class.
Different forms of democracy have various trade-offs, what your describing is the trade-off of representative democracy.
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
AFAICT it’s the federal laws about pollution.
Imagine a noncitizen in that situation being able to tell a border officer, or a citizen being able to tell a security clearance investigator: "Yes, I do use THC. Here's my prescription and the bottle from the pharmacy." and being confident of no negative repercussions. Wonderful progress compared to where we are now.
My parents are still alive and they were alive when THC was legal.
This is what's bonkers to me, THC being criminalized happened very recently.
Interesting point of history, the Federal US Government has actually been running a small medical program for almost 50 years. https://www.mpp.org/policy/federal/federal-governments-medic...
You could already get THC script, in that context this seems like a half hearted concession for flower to stall and poison legalization efforts by giving a victory poisoned with DEA licensing that inserts the nasty tendrils of the weed hating DEA into medical flower.
I know of several grocery stores without pharmacies or a local Rx license selling 1% hydrocortisone/hydrocortisone acetate - Schedule 4, 3, AND 2, simultaneously.
No different than buying Tylenol at a gas station.
Almost objectively, we all have anecdotal memories of being overwhelmed by tobacco residue in a car, room, clothing etc.
^ Not like "someone just smoked a cigarette in here, yuck" but more like "this room is destroyed from 20 years of tobacco smoke, we can't sell this".
I would suspect that very very few people have ever sat in a car and said "someone has smoked cannabis in here for years, it's destroyed."
That said, I imagine it would only get done if they really wanted to throw the book at you...
it's just a function of time and process, and while you can dispose of plants and bury money in your back yard, you can't undo old bank transactions. 20 years later those records may not be a thing, but last year sure will be...
Of course people are still being convicted of weed and firearm, but it gets recorded as gun law violation and nobody cares, cuz left hates guns and right hates weed, so they'll never repeal it.
DEA isn't kicking down doors to bust dudes doin 'roids, mostly nailing low-hanging fruit like doctors who blatantly spam fake steroid prescriptions
Now that it’s “legal” I wonder if that was what was holding it back before.
But you really see that reflected in the doubled number of users which is probably the more relevant number.
Then it was legal for like a year until feds realized they didn't need to follow the Constitution and they just outright made it illegal, no matter if it's actually interstate.
And if you're truly abusing it and costing them massively with fees, they can always close your account.
Also, Maine and Nebraska don't always give all the electoral votes to the same candidate. I'm not sure the process in those states, though.
I don't really have much of an opinion on how the election could be better, but there are some interesting ideas.
1. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/317793-people-were-a...
I pasted the first link I found but since you're trying to insinuate something about my motives:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/irisdorbian/2023/10/19/weed-arr...
> The exact figure was 227,108 arrests. Of that number, 92% were for possession only. This number is a slight jump from 2021 when the FBI reported a total of 219,489 arrests for marijuana.
Your point being what? That 220k arrested is a dramatic improvement over 300k?
Weed offenses do not not precedent over unlawful spying, espionage and the countless more lives it would save for their actions. Unfortunately those people are overseas and you seem dismissive of the American evils such as collateral murder. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw
Literally beheading him won't put off the next person like him. His current punishment is probably enough to put off anyone sane.
Assange isn't a whistleblower just by founding WikiLeaks any more than Musk is a brain surgeon by founding Neuralink, he's the figurehead.
Manning and Snowden get that title, but not Assange.
Madoff's sentencing is why SBF's parents taught him to disregard the law. If you don't understand the idea of figureheads being important, what would happen if the president was shot, or if Dali lama was chosen by china? America would still keep going as would tibetan Buddhism. The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone. HN is a platform and I'm sure we'd still exist without it, assange definitely does deserve credit.
> what would happen if the president was shot
Judging by all the presidents who have been shot, at most an airport gets named after them or a statue gets built.
> or if Dali lama was chosen by china
Not much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11th_Panchen_Lama_controversy
> The leaks seems to have stopped much more since assange is gone.
"Seems"? Plenty of new ones listed on the Wikileaks website.
> assange definitely does deserve credit
For what? Snowden went to… a newspaper. Didn't need Wikileaks. Plenty of whistleblowers did the same before Wikileaks. It's a new brand, but not a new thing.
Also, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find someone to accept it as payment, since they can convert it to cash too. And the sort of landlords/suppliers/employees willing to do business with a dispensary seem like exactly the sort who would accept Bitcoin.
In fact, I'd say the same of anyone even people on traditional drugs.
I’ve heard every drug under the sun affect adhd for people lately, so I don’t know if that’s a divining rod for truth.
Had a guy say Fentanyl really helped his adhd… hm okay. I think our definitions and condition criteria need to separate into more discerning terms for a lot of medical conditions
You mention that "results will change", but given that it's a lit review, I'm not sure which results you're talking about. I'm sure you read the contents of the link, so I'll ask directly - which study in particular did you find issue with? What do you think they did wrong?
There's also the two different strains - they have an effect on why marijuana studies have conflicting results. The researchers source bad weed because the IRB has made it impossible.
I understand it all 'looks' solid but the sourced weed, the difficulty of finding quality participants before legalization, and the IRB has led to some interesting data. I think it will take more time, society is not there yet.
Alcohol studies get tons of funding, and have been studied for years and years. nearly 40ish? Weed didn't earnestly get looked at until the 2010s. Mushrooms have conflicting results according to him, and he's seen Kratom fail every study he's tried, and he tried a great deal to find some proof with that.
If you're going through all that hassle, it's much easier just to be a cash-only business in the first place.
Keep it in a safe somewhere undisclosed instead of a retail storefront everybody knows is holding a ton of cash, or spend it.
The point is that it moves the cash from the publicly visible location to somewhere nobody knows to rob.
"Unsound ponzi scheme" could just as well be applied to any fiat currency. It has all the same rules (early entrants are more privileged in "the game" and can invest to out-perform younger players). It is very odd to hear people applying such qualitative judgments like this when the alternative is a currency that is actively debased by its issuers. Or do you think the inflation we've all suffered under isn't a problem?
I show up and convert cash to bitcoin, presumably losing some of its value to exchange fees.
Pay the merchant my bitcoin, who then has to convert it back to cash losing more of its value to fees so that he can pay all of his staff, suppliers, utilities, etc...
Why not just skip the bitcoin step and save time and money?
But you smoke a cigarette in an enclosed space and I’ll still smell it in a couple days. I think it must be the tar and other additives, and now I kind of want to find someone who smokes natural tobacco to come do it and see if I’m right.
Well the static, bright yellow pole didn’t waltz into the side of your car now, did it?
People are so ignorant it’s actually unbelievable.
https://x.com/WorldBollard/status/1781394728899993984
Edit: reminds me of my neighbour who dropped his motorbike because a car pulled out on him from a fuel station. I asked how fast he was going, he said with absolute conviction he was doing no more than 5mph.
When I told him that was too fast he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
As someone who hits the road most days, whether in a car or on a motorbike it’s absolutely crazy to witness the state of affairs going on on the roads.
My uncle, who isn’t far off 80, but very fit and healthy has given his licence up this year after some pressure from family - I’ve been in the car with him driving and he isn’t safe, he can drive for sure, but he isn’t fast enough to respond to a bad move by others, nor if there is an accident ahead.
I’ll be personally removing my mother’s car when she is unfit to use it too. I don’t care what it costs in taxis or public transport, I don’t want her risking someone else’s life, nor her own, over the ability to get up and go immediately, rather than wait 10 minutes for a driver.
I’m grateful that they are willing to accept this and agree, I’d like to think my mother has another 10 years or so in her at this stage, but the moment it’s clear she’s not fit, that vehicle is gone.
In WA, it felt like it was a pretty even 50/50 split (maybe with a heavier lean towards cash) between places accepting cash-only and those that accept debit as well (in addition to cash obviously). I dont remember any that accepted credit cards. All of this is a more recent situation though, as I still remember that just 6-8 years ago, pretty much every single place used to be cash-only. I also noticed some dispensaries experimenting with rather unconvential methods at different points in time too (e.g., Uncle Ike’s using a payment terminal for like a year that worked similarly to a regular debit card one, but it was using crypto as an intermediate medium on the backend to process the payment).
In NYC, it feels like everyone just accepts cards like usual, from grey-market ones to the legal ones.
However, I infinitely prefer the WA situation with cannabis over the NYC one for bajillion other reasons that are entirely unrelated to payment methods.
Probably a good number of people don't.
It's also the product that's the target much of the time - it's got no serial numbers and it's light-weight, and easy to resell.
They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.
Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.
You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.
This is lazy thinking.
Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.
Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.
This is disgracefully elitist. White collar crime hurts more people.
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
I have heard from a very reliable source that the ATMs in most weed shops on the Eastside of Seattle dispense cash because you're going to be required to pay with cash at the counter. There are allegedly a few exceptions, but the majority of shops accept only cash and the ATM dispenses bills.
He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught
I was also lucky enough to grow up in a place that provided generous benefits to people who couldn't see well enough to get a license - free public transport and 50% subsidised taxis. Having access to this mitigated the loss of economic opportunity significantly. Where I'm living now I don't get those benefits, but I'm in a position where I no longer need them.
Have you used WikiLeaks? When was the last time it was consequencial or noteworthy?
Here's a recent article with Julian assange. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/julian-assange-wi...
> He regrets that WikiLeaks is no longer able to expose war crimes and corruption as in the past. His imprisonment and US government surveillance and restrictions on WikiLeaks’ funding wards off potential whistleblowers. He fears that other media outlets are not filling the vacuum.
That was simply the first search result. There's also the podcast interview:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie...
(If you're going to argue that 51% != 50%, you missed the point)
> Have you used WikiLeaks?
I've been to their website.
I've not had any reason to leak stuff.
Which do you mean?
> When was the last time it was consequencial or noteworthy?
You tell me: https://wikileaks.org/-Leaks-.html
> Here's a recent article with Julian assange
Feels like a double-standard, given how you're arguing about SBF.
"He regrets", "He fears".
Meanwhile: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=war+crimes&iar=news
And: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=corruption&iar=news
So, right back at ya: have you ever used any other news source besides WikiLeaks?
Crypto scams are... completely unrelated? It's like being worried about using a bank account because there are ponzi schemes that use bank transfers.
How expensive do you think weed is? You can get baked every day for two weeks for $50, probably less
For instance, Fannie and Freddie don’t recognize your income, so getting a mortgage is difficult.
The pay isn’t that great either, but they get a discount, and for a lot of people weed is one of their bigger expenses.
That is the benchmark you are competing against.
That's why I specified "for the consumer", who is typically the person that is going to make a purchasing decision.
Using crypto for dispensaries has been tried, and it hasn't gained traction in the many years that its been an option. If you introduce friction (by forcing people to transact using a novel payment form), you are going to lose customers. The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/surrender-your-guns-pol...
It should also be noted that while DEA is instructed by the executive to not go after cannabis users in states where it's legal for recreational use, there's no equivalent directive issued to ATF.
So imagine you're in a car, get pulled over, it smells of weed so the cop executes a search, and he finds a pipe in the glove compartment. You're getting arrested for PDP there 100%. Even if it genuinely wasn't yours, you stand very little chance of acquittal. Beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean 'is there some other viable explanation' because there literally always is. It means is it reasonably likely that one of these other explanations is what really happened.
>922 g (3) ... who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
It takes the same amount of time to make change for the consumer as the store. Or more, because now you have to wait while they make change for the person in front of you, then for you on top of that.
And nobody wants to be at a store which is more likely to get robbed. Not only do you lose your cash, you could lose your life.
> The fact that the very few dispensaries that accept crypto continue to accept cash and debit should tell you what consumers like.
There are multiple consumers. If you can get half of them to use Bitcoin, you have half as much cash on hand to lose in a robbery, and on top of that half as much incentive for someone to rob you to begin with.
Some software engineers do partake of the weed. So yeah I’ve met them.
Tattoos, piercings? They’re just people.
Getting high isn’t a sign of larceny
You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.
I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.
But he is high every single moment at work by your reasoning, yes?
"And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day,"
Be careful in dealing in generalities and infinitives.by your own logic, your brother is simply an exception that proves a rule.
Your own words have worked harder against you than anything that any of these replies stated.
It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.
But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.