Rolling Cannabis Politics Thread

Piece in nytimes about the Brooklyn DA not planning to prosecute low level pot offenses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/nyregion/in-brooklyn-proposing-to-end-prosecutions-for-low-level-marijuana-offenses.html

hey, any word on all the "no cannabis money in banks" stories of last year? has any of that been resolved?

also, what's going on in washington? anyone there would wants to comment? seems like i only hear about stuff going on in colorado

WA has been slow to roll this out, though a few weeks ago they announced the locations where sales will take place (hey, a block from my house! that'll be weird). Right now they are awarding licenses to growers, processors, and sellers. No one business can do more than one step, and each step is taxed, and each step is permitted. WA liquor control board is a very conservative body, and unsurprisingly way slower than CO. The growers can now start legally growing, I think, or we're close to it, and then in 12 weeks it can start to be processed, then sold. So we're looking at summer.

in the meantime dozens of quasi-legal delivery services have popped up. I mean of course there's always been delivery, but now the feeling is that no one is going to F with what they're doing. supposedly they (I) pay sales tax.

the sales location thing has been fascinating to watch. being in the city a thousand feet from a park, school, police station, federal building, transit center (and more) has made for very few locations. None in downtown seattle, none on capitol hill (1 at 23rd and union but more CD), six in Sodo, an industrial area. At least one of those is near a light rail station. None in the majority-minority part of the city. one a block from my house.

can't be a 1,000 ft from a police station? that's weird.

frankly the only one of those that makes any sense is a school. and that's still dumb.

yah what if booze had the same restrictions

whoops not cop shops but A new state law says you can have a licensed retail store for recreational marijuana, but it can’t be located within 1,000 feet of many facilities: schools, parks, transit centers, arcades, or libraries. In Seattle, that 1,000-foot rule means most of the city is off-limits. Smaller cities may have no eligible sites.

I live in a small university town in WA and I heard July 1st for the opening of the three stores we're supposed to get but I'll believe it when I see it. Please note when I moved here 8 years ago (prior to liquor store privatization) there was exactly one place to buy liquor in town; apparently soon we'll have three times that many to buy weed. Lots of smaller/more conservative places have moratoriums in place and won't allow any at all, or won't for a year or so after everything sort of settles down.

I'm not sure if the WSLCB is inept or overly cautious or just wanted CO to go first and see what sort of problems they encountered but it's kind of annoying.

I'm also right near the Idaho border and I'm curious about how all that's going to pan out - the hippiest town in Idaho is right over the border from me, not sure if they're going to just throw their hands up and resign themselves or if they're going to crack down hard somehow. I was also reading something last week about places in the eastern suburbs of Spokane actively hoping to get business from places in Idaho that are decidedly more conservative than my neighbors.

None in the majority-minority part of the city.

This is interesting because there are soooo many dispensaries on Rainier, including three clustered together just a couple blocks from my house.

yeah, weird right? Everyone will have to go up and over beacon hill to sodo and Georgetown.

arcades?

ha do arcades still exist?

Apparently!

http://www.arcadelocations.net/PlaceSearch.php?state=Washington

we have a couple in SF

https://news.vice.com/article/legal-pot-in-the-us-is-crippling-mexican-cartels

cool

i know this is a sentiment shared by everyone in this thread and anyone advocating legalization, but i've been thinking a lot about how completely ludricous, utterly bonkers, fucking batshit crazy it is that anyone would give enough of a shit about cannabis that they would spend billions of dollars to keep it illegal and try to incarcerate the millions and millions of people who use it. i mean, at some level i have always that thought this, going back all the way to my early stoner days as a teenager, so it's not a new revelation. but something about the larger media attention on legalization and the CO and WA state experiments have just kind of made me feel that there is not even a remotely good or even reasonable argument for prohibiting it.

like it's long entered a territory in which i think you are just a fucking buffoon for thinking it should be illegal.

Oh yeah. It's complete lunacy. The only people left opposing it are either completely maniacal insaniacs or people who stand to lose their jobs in the drug-war.

Two groups with an inordinate amount of power over the American political process, it should be noted

It's complete lunacy.

Like any psychoactive drug, cannabis can be abused enough to fuck up your life, usually as part of a larger mix of drugs and alcohol. Stories circulate in society about this kind of abuse and it forms the nucleus of opposition to legalization. It causes people to focus on the potential for harm in legalization, while being blind to the massive harm that's been caused by prohibition.

Locking up millions of mostly young people and funneling billions of dollars to murderous thugs who sow corruption wherever they operate is surely worse than any societal harm we are preventing through prohibition, but you have to recognize there will be various problems associated with legalization, too. It is a trade off, but a hugely beneficial one, taken as a whole.

i use cannabis to fuck up my life errrrrrrdaaaayyyyy http://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/musique/rasta-rap/vil-rappeur.gifhttp://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/musique/rasta-rap/vil-rappeur.gifhttp://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/musique/rasta-rap/vil-rappeur.gifhttp://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/musique/rasta-rap/vil-rappeur.gifhttp://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/musique/rasta-rap/vil-rappeur.gif

oh! you poor dear

can i just
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-rcmNLv8k

I'm not going to stop you...bottoms up

i wish i could remember how to put a youtube video on loop because i kinda love that

Urgh, that video is terrible. Adolescent cannabis culture is even worse than hippie cannabis culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/the-bud-light-ification-of-bud.html?_r=0 about mass-market weed to arrive in the future

some very sloppy writing though:

The plant is relatively cheap and easy to grow, and not complicated to process either.

two paragraphs later:

The inefficiencies continue to pile up after the harvest. Marijuana has to be cured, then trimmed, before it is sold, and much of this work is still done by hand. Workers use scissors to cut away tough outer leaves and expose the smokable part of the plant. It’s a labor-intensive process...

so a labor-intensive process done by hand, but it's not a complicated process

ime that's accurate. it's time-consuming to harvest but not complicated. and definitely easy to grow.

i get the point though, it's complicated now but won't be in the future given standard agricultural technology used for widespread legal crops. it just could've been written a little better, imo

looking forward to a How It's Made episode about big ag marijuana cultivation.

http://hemp.org/news/content/us-house-vote-again-amendment-defund-marijuana-raids

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=0

such a dumb piece

so many lolz

"I drank this entire bottle of vodka and got TOTALLY SICK why didn't anybody warn me??!?"

maureen can't master her high

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--6KcIrYoq--/npoehdvui8zfjnhsmvjo.jpg

Ha, this reminds me of once when a woman told me about how scary weed was because the first time she tried it she ate several cookies and got really weird and I almost told her how stupid she was until I realized it was a totally inappropriate setting to cop to weed usage.

pizza is terrible, I ate one once and felt totally gross afterwards

it's okay that you got hella fucked up, drugs do that sometimes
if it ain't your thing that's cool too
just, you know, don't write an NYT column about it

maureen doob

curling up into a fetal position and staring at the wall sounds more like a psychedelic kind of freakout rather than cannabis.

some people (me included) get hallucinatory or audio hallucinatory effects from weed

which, along with the intense paranoia, is why i quit smoking grass pretty much as soon as college was over

I get visual hallucinations (really just pretty patterns and lights, not something that would make me freak out) if I'm reaaaaaalllly high but thank fuck it doesn't give me paranoia

man, i wish it didn't for me. it's kinda the most prominent side-effect or at least it was then. I'm certainly curious what the intervening time has done for my body chemistry but my guess is that with the steady improvement of the quality of weed, that candy bar woulda laid me the fuck out with delusions of evil bellhops too