Should Marijuana be legalised?

People might do that more if those products were sold at huge markups with a big tax hit.

imho decriminalization is first and foremost either a civil rights issue (re: incarceration, racial disparities in arrests and sentencing, etc. etc.) or an urgent health crisis issue (re: opening up channels for research and access given possible medical benefits, potential to circumvent or reduce the opioid epidemic and other crises). in that light, wondering whether you might get a stoned babysitter is baffling to me - - - you could end up with a stoned babysitter right now! no doubt millions of people now living have had at some point been supervised by a stoned babysitter. the world keeps turning. meanwhile people are dying and getting thrown in jail.

anyway if you're concerned about the potential costs of recreational drug use, those are all better under a decriminalized status quo, right? if someone's abusing something and needs to get help, the thing itself being illegal can be a huge barrier to them seeking out that help, or to others setting up and funding programs to help them.

xp Josh are you actually arguing a point here or are you just posting

not that I haven't been guilty of just posting many times in the past but

No, I'm just posting.

The stoned babysitter thing I brought up was just as an example of cannabis not being "harmless," per se. It has an effect, which has ... effects. Which aren't always wanted and can be negative. Which, sure, is true of lots of legal things, but like I said, that's more of an argument against those things than for more of those things. Which I'm not making one way or another. It's just a discussion. Or concern trolling or whatever the fuck. If you guys all believe to a one it's a settled issue and full steam ahead, it won't keep me up at night. I've got no dog in this fight and the more people out of jail for dumb reasons the better. Maybe lock the thread for a few years and come back with "should it have been legalized?"

I once burned the bread at Subway when I was high at my shift during high school. I don't know what would've happened if I had to bake some kids.

Not trying to get on your case, Josh - - - just that your musings seem a little detached from the real stakes of the conversation, or maybe sort of on a parallel/red-herring track to the reasons being advanced for legalization, rather than answering them. Tbf my own thinking about this issue has shifted a lot over the years as I've been exposed to a lot more on the social-justice aspects and as the medical picture has become much more complete; I imagine that if this poll had been conducted five or ten years earlier, the results might not have been so lopsided, and this would be more of a lively debate thread instead of one that feels like the social consensus has been finalized.

If the question is just, why should "those other legal things are harmful" be an argument for making a harmful thing legal, then the answer is, "it's not." People bring up the existence of other legal harmful things not to say that every harmful thing should be legal, but to say that the world keeps turning despite numerous harmful things being legal. Many or most of them, we seek to regulate in ways that minimize that harm: speed limits and seat belts for cars, chain link fences next to dangerous abandoned quarries, "do not inhale" labels on poisonous chemicals. All of those things get ignored and people suffer, but we could throw it back at you and say, "so is your suggestion that we create a parallel carceral state for fence-climbers and paint-huffers, just so as to avoid being hypocrites?" More reasonably: it seems like you're just halfway to making an argument for legalizing it but with regulations and restrictions, which is what 99% of legalization campaigners are saying anyway, right?

millions of people now living have had at some point been supervised by a stoned babysitter

my favorite tortoise album

jic what the fuck are you on about ? i think you need to go smoke and think this over

And they have their clientele, enough to stay in business, but you never really see people going in and out.

Washington state collected a total of $319 million in legal marijuana income and license fees in fiscal year 2017, all but $4 million of it from the state’s marijuana excise, or sales tax. [...]

The report also shows that ... the marijuana excise tax income to the state for fiscal 2017 of $319 million grew by almost $130 million from the prior year.

Those June 2016 LCB projections covered fiscal 2015 through fiscal 2019. While they may ultimately prove to underestimate actual end-of-year marijuana excise tax revenues to the state, they nonetheless show sharp growth expected.

[...]

Sales of legal marijuana in Washington state have climbed up to $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2017 , up from $786 million in fiscal 2016, and $259 million the year before.

Maybe lock the thread for a few years and come back with "should it have been legalized?"

You already posted upthread that you have been unable to determine via google whether it has even been legalised in Washington or not

and then don't post about what you thought about

if they want to regulate cannabis by giving it an age limit i think that's fine since there's some evidence that it can have deleterious effects on developing brains (and particularly pre-schizophrenic brains) but honestly i should be allowed to grow as much as i'd like to in my home bc seriously we should not be looking for reasons for the govt to be regulating what free people grow on their private properties. yes, i also believe ppl should be allowed to grow poppies if they want.

I was about to write back to Dr. C but

You already posted upthread that you have been unable to determine via google whether it has even been legalised in Washington or not

What are you talking about? I was just asking how it being legal in the US (where it is legal) compares to places like Amsterdam (where it has been legal for longer), in terms of enforcement, restrictions, regulations, etc.

you said that you couldn't figure out whether it was more or less legal, and strict, and regulated, in Washington or Amsterdam

it is not legal nor regulated in Amsterdam

QED

and also FFS

it is not legal nor regulated in Amsterdam

Huh?

Now I'm just confused. I was asking if it was *more* legal, and strict, and regulated in WA/OR/CA than it is in Amsterdam or *less* legal, and strict, and regulated on the west coast than it is in Amsterdam. Where I thought cannabis was legal?

The stoned babysitter thing I brought up was just as an example of cannabis not being "harmless," per se.

Arguing from hypotheticals like this is a very bad idea, because whatever you imagine has no regulator or limitation in the way reality does. If you know of a stoned babysitter anecdote where some great harm occurred, that would constitute anecdotal evidence, which is of notoriously poor quality for making wide generalizations. But imagined scenarios are not evidence of any kind for anything.

Yes, people do this all the time. But people make terrible decisions about the world when they allow imagination to take the place of experience, evidence, or something grounded in some kind of reality. It's like Europeans thinking they'll see Native Americans in feather headdresses walking around the streets if they visit Denver.

they're all too stoned now to walk around in their garb, quite sad

That is such a weird and specific analogy

i was about to say

Geez thread a buzzkill now

OK, you don't like that one, I'll crank out another one. It's like people not visiting Yellowstone Park because they imagine they'll be eaten by a grizzly bear or a cougar, because they imagine this happening and it is vivid and frightening to them.

Sorry didn’t mean to buzzkill wondering if it was based on a real experience

Here's some that are highly applicable and verifiable.

When Oregon had an assisted suicide law on the ballot, prior to any other state having such a law, the opponents bruited the argument that Oregon would become a mecca for suicide tourism, with suicidal people coming from all over the world to kill themselves here. The law passed and no such thing has even remotely happened; it was imaginary.

Sarah Palin notoriously hypothesized that the ACA would absolutely lead to the creation of "death panels"; it was a given that these must be created in order to ration out scarce dollars for expensive life-saving surgeries. There was no other possible outcome. These were imaginary, too.

The usual criterion for imaginary examples to be persuasive are that they engage a deep fear and have at least a shred of plausibility, like the hordes of "illegal immigrant rapists", based almost exclusively in people's imaginations.

Huh?

Now I'm just confused.

Now?

I was asking if it was *more* legal, and strict, and regulated in WA/OR/CA than it is in Amsterdam or *less* legal, and strict, and regulated on the west coast than it is in Amsterdam. Where I thought cannabis was legal?

It is not legal in Amsterdam, they just don't prosecute possession of under 5 grams.

If you cannot figure out whether it is *less* legal, and strict, and regulated on the west coast than somewhere it is illegal, then you have not been able to figure out whether or not it has been legalised.

millions of people now living have had at some point been supervised by a stoned babysitter

my favorite tortoise album

― jolene club remix (BradNelson)

bold repositioning by the jehovah's witnesses

/millions of people now living have had at some point been supervised by a stoned babysitter/

my favorite tortoise album

i am a stoned parent most of the time

tbh i think it helps me to be a more empathic, loving, and engaged parent

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/i-want-to-be-a-420oldfatlesbian-when-i-grow-up.html
doing good work out there

Medical cannabis is already legal in Illinois, marijuana has been relatively decriminalized as a street offense, we have a new overwhelmingly elected Democratic governor who campaigned on legalization, who has even assigned a number to the amount of revenue to be raised and has incorporated that into his budget, we have a Democratic super-supermajority in the house and senate, and there is last I checked strong public support for legalization. And yet, as far as I have seen, there is a good change the actually pretty modest legal cannabis bill being discussed right now won't pass in three weeks. Kind of nuts.

And three weeks pass ... and I was wrong. Looks like Illinois will become as far as I can tell the first state to legalize marijuana through the legislature.

FIRST-EVER THC OVERDOSE: A Louisiana woman who died in February was killed from THC overdose, a coroner reported. This is the first-ever recorded marijuana overdose. https://t.co/Puf0JCzrVO

— FOX 5 DC (@fox5dc) June 7, 2019

reports say some are skeptical

i love how the coroner just kind of casually describes his theory like he's making it up on the spot

so she stopped breathing because she was soooo chilling?

After watching that John Oliver bit about coroners, color me skeptical as well. Sudden death while high is not the same as sudden death by high.

I would not be surprised if there were not some isolated incidents that come up do to people being extra with crazy dab tokes. Like you see people straight knocked unconscious . That can’t be good for you right?

due to*

But death?

Bong RIP

lol

that coroner sounds super high

i learned about the dire state of coroners from Frontline -- https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/post-mortem/

this one sounds like a real dope!

"What if, like, she died because there wasn't *enough* THC in her system?!"

"Maybe what she was suffering from was not too much THC but too little TLC."

(I feel a little bad for those, RIP)

lol old lunch

But death?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 7, 2019 9:11 AM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark

idk have any of you ever took proper dab hits from a rig ? shit is no joke

pretty sure there hasn't been a time in history were one could instantly take such concentrated doses of THC instantly.

i guess probably the highest risk is like passing out and cracking your skull on something but i'm just saying .

When I see people doing that I can't think of anything else other than people smoking crack, so sure, I can totally imagine somebody dying.