Rolling Cannabis Politics Thread

i think the legalization ballot measure is going down fwiw, but the fact that it's a question is amazing even given the state of bud politics here.

vast majority of la dispensaries needing to ROLL with the punches meanwhile
http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_15235255?source=rss

they're pushing to get full legalization on the ballot in oregon this fall

Also, I don't know how it works, but if it makes people feel more comfortable maybe a mod can unindex this thread from google? (If not, can we move it to 77 or something?)

― Mordy, Sunday, June 6, 2010 12:37 PM (4 hours ago)

I've done this, though if it's kept to politics rather than personal habits, I don't know how necessary it was.

i hope it's not just a lolcollege idea to want to see see all drugs legalized. obviously we're not talking crack being freely available to schoolkids from the corner shop here; there would besome kind of sliding scale of control, e.g. cannabis as free as tobacco, e/speed/coke over the counter at the pharmacy, heroin perhaps only on prescription for registered addicts. i really don't see the benefit in having any substance completely criminalised. it does not effectively discourage use; it turns ordinary people into criminals - at best merely for usage/possession, at worst for having to commit crime in order to maintain a supply; it enables an enormous criminal trade; it means there is no control over substance purity. if drugs were under government control they would be clean and pure, they could be taxed to help fund treatment for addicts, and there would surely be a huge reduction in drug related crime.

ok maybe things wouldn't be quite that rosy. but it's clear the current system is a complete failure. and in general while i'm far from libertarian i am a strong believer in personal liberty and the idea of the government having such a strong say over what i choose to put into my body is anathema to me.

no i don't think the lolcollege thing refers to what you're talking about, just a certain type of libertarian thinking. i don't believe in drug criminalization either for the same reasons as you said, it has done a lot of very bad things to america in my opinion.

Full legalization is a LONG way away. The area of law I practice in, employment, is one of the areas where this is really clear: The California Fair Employment and Housing Act, or FEHA, recognizes the use of some prescription drugs, and mandates that employers, in certain situations, must accommodate the user of those drugs if the use of those drugs somehow limits their ability to do their job.

But it doesn't provide the same protections to medical marijuana. The way in which the Compassionate Care Act of 1996 was drafted, it addresses only the criminal aspects as it pertains to patients. It doesn't address employment aspects, or any of the other ways in which marijuana can impact lives. The CA Supreme Court ruled that employers do not have to accommodate compassionate care users for precisely this reason - the Act doesn't address employment law. Kind of a legal punt, but it drew attention to just how narrowly the Compassionate Care Act is drawn. There was an Oregon decision recently which arrived at the same rationale. Now, if two of the most pot-friendly states in the country have rulings like that on the books, the 9th circuit is not likely to hold another way if a case were to make it that far.

But the decriminalization has been good. And, in reality, no cop is going to bust you for a joint or a dime bag. Driving while doing smoking/stoned? Another story, as well it should be.

no cop is going to bust you for a joint or a dime bag.

if you have the right color of skin

I doubt we'll ever see pot legalized, though it would be so convenient if it was. OK, maybe not "ever," but I really seriously doubt it'll happen in the next 20-40 years, or so long as we have Mormons in the U.S.

Rev otm, and if you're in the "wrong" neighborhood, you'd be surprised how small an infraction you can end up in handcuffs for

no cop is going to bust you for a joint or a dime bag.

if you have the right color of skin

― donk quixote (The Reverend), Monday, June 7, 2010 10:02 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

I used to work at a diner where for dishwashers we hired convicts who were trying to get back on their feet, and they were mostly black guys that had been in jail for years and years after being busted in this way. Legalization is in a large part a civil rights cause.

i think the legalization ballot measure is going down fwiw

why do you think this...? I haven't seen any authoritative polling to-date.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/31/local/la-me-0601-poll-20100529

i just have a feeling. people don't pay attention to propositions, even this one, until the ads start ratcheting up and the opposition has a lot of boogeymen to unleash, not to mention opposing the measure more forcefully in the coming months is low-hanging fruit for both of the likely gub nominees. from what i've seen, trying to put myself in the shoes of the 'average voter' the pro argument as articulated feels kind of ad-hoc but that could change too.

Besides the Office of National Drug Control Policy, who funds opposition advertising? Someone said the cigarette companies spend a lot on opposition advertising, but I couldn't find any data to support that. Anyone here know?

cigarette companies are all broke I thought

I would not be surprised if it were religious people (cough cough Mormons). If there *were* a national vote, you bet the Mormon Church would do a Prop-8 style $$$$ push to shut that shit down. I promise.

are tobacco companies even allowed to spend campaign money? so many lawsuits/civil suits have crippled the industry

xp

If there *were* a national vote, you bet the Mormon Church would do a Prop-8 style $$$$ push to shut that shit down. I promise.

I can see this happening. at the same time, most of the country does not love Mormons, much less being told what to do by Mormons.

like what is the percentage that thinks Mormons aren't "really" Christians...? it's pretty high iirc

Well, sure, but it worked w/Prop 8, right?

And it's not like they would advertise, "WE, the MORMONS, want you to never smoke pot! And also we don't really have multiple wives. Brought to you by THE MORMONS."

Sponsored by the Mormons For Curtailing Your Fun Committee for America (c)

At any rate, this topic of converrsation ("will pot be legalized") always kind of feels like a mass funtime of projections of the speakers' pasts & desires. I, por ejemplo, would love for pot to be legalized, but grew up in a community where smoking weed was tantamount (in perceived riskiness & evilness) to smoking meth. This informs my perspective. I imagine someone who grew up in a less conservative area, or had pot-smoking parents, would have a more optimistic view. ANd someone who thinks weed is bad, and has never smoked it, would naturally be more inclined to say it's so not gonna happen. I feel in some ways like there's no way to know.

i suspect in my lifetime we will see the states where it's been cleared for medical purposes legalize it wholesale; everywhere else will be in sort of limbo between where we are now and full legalization

It seems to me that once it's become fully legalized in a few states, it'll be de facto legal everywhere. They can't exactly set up state border patrols to make sure you aren't buying in NJ and driving it up to NY, or whatever.

still pretty illegal in lots of europe, despite amsterdam

Europe's different

As far as I know, Prohibition was repealed everywhere all at once, but an interesting comparison might be individual state tax laws on vices. Technically, afaik, it's illegal to buy alcohol in NJ and then drive it into PA, but this obviously happens all the time, whenever someone in Cherry Hill picks up a bottle of wine and then drives to his friend's place in Philadelphia, and it's de facto legal. How can you enforce that kind of law?

wrt CA as an avowed pessimist the fact that they gathered the signatures still feels like found money, bottom line is i think the radius of 'public consciousness raising' for legalization hasn't extended nearly as far as the medical angle, which tbh still relies on compassion for the very very sick to get over (medical cannabis is not going away but it's still plenty begrudged among the majority of counties and municipalities). i mean i hope that's an antiguated view of how politics move in 2010 but yeah, prop 8. think we can just wipe away the culture of prohibition w/o at least will n' gracing it for a minute, it just can't be that easy, right?

yeah, i guess i would liken it blue laws around here. like, you would probably never ever be able to just pop by dispensary/ package store in the state of Tennessee and buy a nice bottle of wine and some white widow for your dinner party. but if you were pulled over and had an oz cops would just be like eh, whatever - as long as you aren't smokin & drivin (someone will obviously need to build some kind of breath-alizer for weed if it's ever to be legalized i'm guessing)

56% of CA supports legalizing weed as of a couple months ago

xxposts

shakey i posted a more recent poll upthread fwiw, but again i think it's too early to hang your hat on either one

Wish 538 would run something about it.

yeah I agree - margins are probably soft, and we haven't seen any marketing really get started yet

xp

As I indicated upthread, while there are still federal anti-drug laws and while Congress is dominated by anti-legalization sentiment (think Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennesee, ad infinitum), even if California voted to legalize pot, the Feds would be able to render that vote moot, by independent DEA raids, federal prosecutions, and what's worst, by almost certainly withholding vast amounts of federal funds for all kinds of stuff - from Medicaid to schools.

CA would relent within months.

It looks like the Federal government is moving away from enforcement, not towards it. It's hard to imagine Obama giving the order to resume the raiding. (I thought that had stopped, btw?)

yeah they have and Obama's made it explicitly clear that prosecuting marijuana is not a priority

Also, I don't know how this would actually play out politically, but with a right-wing totally committed to limiting federal power for probably the next six years, and a left-wing with a large group that is pro legalization, I can't see a lot of people pushing for federal enforcement.

no one's winning the White House with CA's votes either - state might take a dim view of a sitting president waging financial war against it, esp when it's in such dire straits already

withOUT CA's votes sorry

Hard to imagine there is anything a sitting Democratic president could do that would stop CA from voting for him. I think if Obama wanted to, he could act against CA's economic interests with more or less impunity.

just thinking of a president winning w/o CA makes me hear hoofbeats xp

a right-wing totally committed to limiting federal power

The right wing's commitment to limiting government definitely does not extend to the DEA, or to any action that could remotely be construed as "soft on drugs". One has only to look at the past 40 years to see this is true.

mainstream right-wingers still want pot smoking deadbeats in jail. limited federal intervention just means states can pass their own draconian laws against it, right?

Yes, but once you've opened the door to states passing their own draconian laws, you've also opened the door to some states totally legalizing it.

Nope. The argument would be that you can't have it legal in one state, because it would become a staging area for growing and then exporting pot to other states. Which is true enough.

CA needs a new cash crop!

It's time to return to an agrarian economy, dude.

I'm with Wm. F. Buckley on this issue. Ending pot prohibition makes sense to me in a dozen different ways. But legalization is not about to happen. Decriminalization of small amounts in self-selected places is the best you can get in the present climate.

if california successfully legalized it in a way that made a ton of $ for the state, I could imagine lots of things happening faster outside of california

Abbott vetos SB3, which would have banned THC products in Texas had it gone into law.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/22/texas-thc-ban-bill-greg-abbott-veto-senate-bill-3/

lol

https://40thward.org/2025/08/notice-of-intent-2415-25-w-peterson-avenue

Feedback on this proposal was mixed. While the majority of neighbors indicated support for a dispensary at this property, a significant number of neighbors indicated concerns with the dispensary ownership. Neighbors indicated a discomfort that the majority of the ownership are former police officers who may have previously arrested others for marijuana possession and would now be profiting from cannabis sales. Due to these concerns, this particular dispensary proposal did not receive a majority of neighbors’ support.

so THC products are about to be federally banned again?? thanks a lot assholes, especially you John Fetterman, the guy who explicitly ran on a "I will legalize weed" platform

Wait, were they ever federally legal?

Only 22 Dems voted for taking out that provision. Truly baffling.

“baffling”

it’s funny, at some point in my time off I became more cynical than milo

I didn’t see that many Democrats in the Senate caring enough to actively take a stand against weed. They’re useless and indifferent but have mostly learned to not flip the bird to the Democratic base on such a low stakes issue.

Yeah they have been federally legal under the farm bill. I mean, McConnell’s right that the THC loophole was not the intent of the original law. But also obviously weed should be legal and all of this is ridiculous.

I worry a little that it could be a step toward a federal crackdown on legal states. Maybe they wouldn’t do it because the politics of it aren’t good, but it would be a way to wreak havoc in blue states. Send in troops, the whole deal.

nothing could make weed more uncool lol

i'll take what i can get

👍

I think RFKJ is high as a fucking kite most of the time, he was probably the whisperer that pushed this through

Opening the door for private equity to buy up weed operations and gut them.

https://scontent.fslc3-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/657155311_1858930625018500_8501602696881213279_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=13d280&_nc_ohc=D2ZkfF02UScQ7kNvwEFinuG&_nc_oc=Ado7fjC44QVQYZ93xSy2iw42kIglguKmnjgN4uhOY6UyIOtEqYScy4c36TsHLYJteTdhy09YtEyOJk1iDQBDx5Pf&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.fslc3-2.fna&_nc_gid=n_T9j4JtO8tbtTqL0Pmkhw&_nc_ss=7a32e&oh=00_AfzCXflQvG0VReIIDn37HoLPaRmhGKYeFnZzuPm2ady34A&oe=69C7CF92

the interesting thing about this to me is that ptsd symptoms and depression don't seem to be measurably improved by cannabis (which tracks with my personal experience tbh). that and cannabis use disorder is a real danger.

it seems like other psychedelics have more potential when it comes to alleviating ptsd, anxiety and depression afaict. lsd in particular had a notable effect on improving depression in a recent study i saw that i can't recall?

of course thc/cbd definitely helps with certain kinds of pain.

i'm noticing the drawbacks more and more of my own use.

i'm pretty evenly split on the times it makes me less anxious vs more anxious. that wide range with it sort of favoring less anxious but insignificantly so feels familiar to me.

i haven't read the full study, just a precis, so i think depression may be covered in another section. probably worth taking the time to look through the whole thing.

can you link that article?

don't bogart that article, my friend

ok so the image came across my facebook feed, (i know, a fount of reliable info), from william wallace a generally reliable source on health. i don't have a gift link to the study itself unfortch. this is his summary fwiw:

The largest review of medicinal cannabis for mental health just published in The Lancet Psychiatry.
54 randomized controlled trials spanning 1980 to 2025. 2,477 participants. Nine psychiatric conditions. Every outcome GRADE-assessed.
The results are in the figure. Most of the confidence intervals cross the null line. Anxiety, PTSD, psychosis, opioid use disorder: no significant effect versus placebo across any primary outcome. For depression, there was not a single RCT to analyze. It is one of the top reasons cannabis is prescribed and it has never been tested in a controlled trial.
Where signals did emerge: cannabis use disorder, device-measured sleep time in insomnia (the only moderate-certainty finding in the entire review), and tic severity in Tourette's (combined CBD and THC only). Autistic traits showed a reduction, but both contributing studies had high risk of bias.
One finding went the wrong direction. Cannabinoids increased cocaine craving compared to placebo.
Across all conditions, cannabinoid users were 75% more likely to experience an adverse event than placebo. For every 7 people treated, 1 experienced a side effect that wouldn't have occurred on placebo.
27% of adults aged 16 to 65 in the US and Canada report using cannabis medically. About half are using it for mental health. More than a dozen US states list PTSD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana. Interestingly, the regulatory framework approved the product before the trials were run.
Cannabis has legitimate therapeutic applications. Epilepsy. MS spasticity. Certain pain conditions. The evidence there is real. But for the conditions millions of people are actually using it to treat, the RCT evidence either shows no effect (to this point) or doesn't exist, yet.

sorry for any mischaracterization in my words above i am not exactly good at reading and interpreting this stuff.

Here's the study.

thanks!

Feel like this has always been the weakness of the medical cannabis argument, that it rests almost entirely on self-reported anecdote. Of course I think everyone has understood that the medical campaign was mostly a way to get legalization on the political map, kind of a stalking horse. Now that so many states have legal weed regardless of prescription, it seems like it's still useful to figure out what conditions cannabis is actually beneficial for, so these kinds of studies are helpful. But the bigger thing is just that a lot of people enjoy getting kinda high. (Me too!)

Anyway, if RFK Jr. can roll back the clock to the "wine is good for you actually" argument despite evidence to the contrary, I won't gainsay anyone asserting the medical benefits of weed.

One thing I have found weed to help me with is IBS. I guess the muscle relaxant aspect is what does it. And it's no solution, just provides a few hours of relief...would have to be high 24/7, which is obv not on, but during a flare up it can help, and ends up being less risky than imodium (which can easily bring me too far in the other direction). Never heard anyone else mention this.

it induces peristalsis!

so yeah totally. see also, giving cancer patients an appetite when on chemo

map that is a super interesting study, thanks

Interesting. I have fairly mild lifelong IBS, and I've just never paid attention to whether cannabis improves it. Although my symptoms tend to hit earlier in the day, and cannabis use tends to be evenings-only, so maybe I wouldn't notice.

Those videos you see of it affecting dramatic changes in certain conditions are impressive. Heck, my wife told me half of the discussions on one of the mom groups she frequents is about menopausal women relying on edibles to get a good night's sleep; for sure it seems more calming than alcohol before bed. On the other hand, I remember when my MIL had glaucoma and looked into cannabis, and she found she'd basically have to be high all the time for it to make a slight difference.

Findings of that study not a particular shock, imo. There is just so much going on chemically that I imagine even if it had clear benefits it would be really difficult to isolate them, which aiui is one of the reasons it's been relegated to the schedule 1 category, not that it is on par with heroin or whatever but because there was no clear, consistent medical application (i.e. take x mgs for y result). It's probably more akin to multivitamins and whatnot in terms of nebulous effects and benefits, but because it's psychotropic it's not like you can safely shelve it at GNC or whatever.

One thing I have found weed to help me with is IBS. I guess the muscle relaxant aspect is what does it. And it's no solution, just provides a few hours of relief...would have to be high 24/7, which is obv not on, but during a flare up it can help, and ends up being less risky than imodium (which can easily bring me too far in the other direction). Never heard anyone else mention this.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Tuesday, March 24, 2026 5:33 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have heard it helps a lot with crohn's.