One major effect of this is that weed stores will be able to use banks and payment processors legally once the regulators catch up.
Weed being illegal on a federal level has had some interesting effects. Because of these laws, all legal weed has to be grown, processed, and retailed within a single state. So much industry and local employment has been created by the legal barriers in place.
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
I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
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 bet that in the US, no health insurer will ever pay for an insured person's marijuana.
I bet that CBD will be covered very quickly, because it really does work very well for so many things, so it shouldn't take long to have enough studies clearly in support of it.
Are there strains of marijuana high in CBD but almost absent of THC?
I'm not sure exactly how this works, but you can get CBD as pills with no THC in them.
(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.)
Yes
Yes but the trick is mostly just harvesting early.
Magnesium supplements work very well for many things, too, but are there American insurance plans that pay for it?
I agree it's unlikely. THC may have some medical uses, but smoking it certainly does not.
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.
I'll happily take the other side of that bet.
You described a worst-case scenario. I’d rather smoke Marlboro Greens, and I promised myself 20 years ago I’d never spend another penny with them.
the marlboro man has traded in his horse and cowboy hat for some natty dreads and a gravity bong. Joe Camel now sports a wook blanket and a heady crystal wrap. can't wait to see what the overly happy and diverse Newport pleasure party goers have adopted
lol
You must not have seen the same Newport ads I did
"You've come a long way, dude."
Marboro Green with 200 hundred additional chemical additives for your enjoyment.
Aka the 'backdoor removal of social security'
LOL @ Marlboro Greens :-)
They'd be insane to not go with that name.
I could see them carrying CBD in pill / gelcap form. (It pretty much snuffs out my migraines.)
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.)
CVS in Illinois definitely sells liquor. They seemed to switch to it around the same time they publicly announced they wouldn't sell tobacco anymore.
Walgreens sells cigarettes, cigars, basic alcohol (beer, wine, hard seltzers etc), occasionally liquor, nicotine patches & packets, and snuff. They sell OTC Narcan, and now OTC birth control. They moved into the last two items pretty much immediately upon availability.
They'll definitely look at their options for the marijuana business as they can safely do so legally.
'Time for them to perform due diligence and refactor their operations to take advantage of the new legal landscape to retain competitive pricing inorder for' all these small/mid sized businesses don't get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps.
American corporations are great at retooling their business/supply chains for different products (see how quickly everyone moved into hard seltzers).
I do expect big tobacco to move in aggressively if weed is made legal.
Hasn’t really happened in Canada. I think a small-player alcohol company did move in, but only after the bubble popped.
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.
Marijuana use has massively increased in the US as states have legalized it.
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
20% increase in consumption isn’t exactly what I would call 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...
I’m surprised it’s not more personally if the numbers are accurate. A lot of pretty casual users in professional jobs were mostly not going to find a friend of a friend to do an illegal transaction with. But they’ll go into a dispensary now and then.
But you really see that reflected in the doubled number of users which is probably the more relevant number.
I'd bet alcohol use went way up after prohibition too. Both in number of people consuming, and on how much they consume on average.
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?
If I could face consequences for using drugs, I will deny it even after being positive in a test. Of course, once legalized, I'll have no problem saying that I used in once or twice a year. Being it legal, safer and out of the dangerous black market, there will be some new users.
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).
I have had my first legal weed experiences in the past year in New York and even the lowest THC % at the legal weed store is stronger than anything I use to get on the black market when weed was illegal.
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.
Big tobacco might have stayed out of the fray but since legalization the vape giant JUUL owns and operates dispensaries.
Juul is Big Tobacco.
Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies), acquired a 35% stake in Juul Labs for $12.8 billion on December 20, 2018. Altria is the largest tobacco company in the United States.
Lobbyists don't care about uncapturable black market money. The legal market has led to massive increase in legal, taxable money, so now is exactly the time for big tobacco to start salivating over the idea of capturing all of those transactions.
Denver definitely had perverse consequence. people eking out a living selling weed on the street quickly turned to... harder substances. people will get their dollar and people will get their high
Pabst already makes THC seltzers for the California market. Big business is already here, folks.
Hopefully, the small/mid sized businesses hold a niche in the same way that craft brewers have maintained their existence (until they get acquired).
Agreed -- but I think nobody knows quite how it'll play out.
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....
Being gulped up big corporations is good. They will much more efficiently serve the market. SMBs are notoriously unproductive.
Though maybe you want your drug dealers to be unproductive, for society's sake! I may take this back...
Can't say I've ever felt that massive corps and the people that work there are super productive. In many instances they seem less productive than government.
If the small companies were productive they'd be big companies.
This assumes that every small company wants to be a big company.
Except the many that are productive because they're NOT big companies.
What SMB has the luxury of being notoriously unproductive? Economies of scale are very real and tend to make larger businesses more efficient, it's true, but you'll find that causes SMBs to be lean and mean to remain competitive.
There are many many ways to look at this data, but here's one: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr....
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.
Your implied point that prices will drop with the introduction of interstate competition and access to finance and interest by mega-corps is well taken. You are certainly correct, there.
Notwithstanding grey-market limitations, people have their motives for accepting the inefficiency of starting or staying small. Potential, for example.
Corporate dispensaries, which are very prevalent, are notoriously lower quality
Even without nationwide economies of scale, Michigan regularly has businesses selling weed vape carts for <$10 apiece. I don't know how much cheaper we want the weed to be, honestly. It's already at least 10x cheaper than the cheapest alcoholic beverage on a buzz-for-buzz basis.
Yes really good point. Won’t it still be up to the states to decide what the regulatory environment will look like — eg they can choose to preserve these jobs through existing regulatory frameworks in the same way that certain goods cannot be shipped to certain states
Note, they're only planning to move it from Schedule 1 (alongside heroin) to Schedule III (alongside anabolic steroids and ketamine). So, it won't be fully legal in the same sense as alcohol.
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.
One very important thing this does is get rid of a really glaring error. As a Schedule I drug, Marijuana supposedly is completely useless, its only role is as a potential danger and that's why nobody must have any - except, we've known for many years a bunch of people find it useful as a therapeutic drug, so that's clearly wrong and the Schedule I status is an error. Perhaps there shouldn't be any Schedule I drugs at all, the idea seems misconceived, but certainly if there are Schedule I drugs, Marijuana doesn't belong among them.
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.
Yeah, I largely agree. Alcohol is broadly available/legal due to historical quirks, not sane regulation in relation to other similar (social impact, not chemistry) drugs. Same for tobacco to an extent.
Also booze is really easy to make. Marijuana is hardly difficult but if you ain't got any plants somebody has to smuggle them to you, whereas if you've got a bunch of say, apples, or potatoes, or berries - which are just food - the only thing that prevents you from having booze is constant oversight to ensure you don't allow the food to be converted into booze.
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.
Shit, you can accidentally make alcohol.
I read TFA after commenting. I think that is even more interesting; it’ll be very helpful for better understanding the safety profile of marijuana.
Still curious to see how this may affect cannabis commerce. Will CVS have cannabis extracts behind the pharmacy counter?
Under Wickard even all-in-state marijuana trade would still fall under the Interstate Commerce clause and be subject to federal criminal statutes, regulations, and taxes.
Yep, some people tested this same theory out for firearms (or was it suppressors?) all produced and sold in one state in accordance with state laws. Of course the Feds shut that down and the courts agreed. The only reason they don't do this with pot is because they don't feel like it.
I believe that case is not resolved yet.
Maybe it was the other case from that same state where they said state law enforcement couldn't assist the feds in enforcing federal gun laws.
My one big Supreme Court wish is that Wickard gets shot down. I could actually see it happen with the current court.
Wickard does seem pretty gross.
Keeping in state doesn't help. It's still interstate commerce even just picking a plant and smoking on site non-commercially. Just walking an object within 1000 ft of a school, non-commercially, is interstate commerce.
According to a really old SC decision that rests on shaky foundations at best.
They'll never give it up. It would mean the end of the civil rights act, and tons of popular regulatory regimes that apply to in-state only trade. And the return of in state over the counter machine guns.
Relevant case:
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)
This discrepancy had the effect of jump starting the prominence of large chinese gangs in the marijuana and fentany and money laundering business in the USA, incidentally contributing to home shortage because they bought homes in California to grow pre pandemic and in Oklahoma now. There’s lots of older articles about California but some recent OK news https://www.kosu.org/news/2024-03-18/gangsters-money-and-mur...
Interesting use of italics
I thought it was of most relevance that gangs stepped in when the comment I was responding to was more concerned with larger companies and them being Chinese is a weird detail since one would have expected one of existing gangs in USA already like those with central or South American cartels instead.
I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or other mega corps
Why not? Laws of scale would drive the price down while improving the profit margins, both clients and investors would win.
There are more people involved than just clients and investors.
I think some inefficiencies are important, especially when scoped to "who can do this thing the cheapest?"
I think some inefficiencies are important
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.
A couple quick thoughts, having worked in the legal cannabis industry (now a few years out):
- 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.
Tobacco smoke killed ALL my grandparents, well, well one of them would have died from alcohol use, as he was a fisherman and they drink a lot. My uncle died from liver and bowel cancer, the liver cancer stems from alcohol consumption, or rather it's metabolite, acetaldehyde, which is _scary as hell_: It makes cancerous scar tissue of whatever it touches, thats why alcoholics die from liver failure: it becomes all scar tissue and cannot regenerate, which is part of its function (the average adult has a liver 3 years of average age). It is also what gives the alcohol buzz. He was not a heavy drinker, but only drank wine and aqua vit/liquor, 1-2 times a year he would get shitfaced -- he was a funny drunk. I miss him. I miss all my grandparnts, they were the best and did not deserve Emphysema , lung cancer and so forth. Grandma taught me soldering, welding, basic ircuitry, how to ride a bike, composting, growing veggies, all about berries in the wild and helped me save up for my Nintendo NES,encuraged mt curiosity...I would beat the crap out a tobacco exec if I crossed paths with one, a part of me wants to torture them.
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...
... what?
It's also made touching the financial aspect radioactive- none of the big credit cards want to have anything to do with it so all transactions are cash, which makes things more difficult/risky for operators.
Also made research very hard too.
The research component seems the biggest boon from this. I assume Schedule III is much easier to get approved for.
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.
I've got my tinfoil hat on but I totally believe this to be due to the lobbying efforts of big tobacco. Purely because cigarette sales continue to decline and vaping is becoming more and more regulated and, therefore, less profitable.
But marijuana enjoys high markups, pseudoscience "health benefits", and is becoming more and more acceptable to Americans each and every year.
I don't even think that's that tinfoil hat-y
What else will I spend my billions in revenue on if I can't advertise and have to hide all my employees?
it's another good reason to advocate for more state autonomy . prior to 80s savings & loan crisis and then financial collapse, small family run banks were thriving too
Those restrictions are probably just more grist for lobbyists, gotta keep milking it
It's sometimes even smaller than states. Many waterways are federal, meaning islands have to grow their own in order to avoid having to transport weed from one part of the state to another part of the same state across a federal waterway.
I think they would make so much MORE money by making it federally regulated and generally accessible... the problem is that also takes away some incentive to keep spying on citizens in the name of drugs and related bad guys.
Big tobacco means even more pressure to normalize it, globally, via UN just like they pushed it down the throat of every nation worldwide including those where its sacred plant for millenia like India or Nepal. US reversed decades of severe oppression and is leading free world (I know Canada, I know) so there is massive hope our idiots in EU and elsewhere will seriously wake up, even if in some primitive cargo culting effort.
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.
Big corps are already an issue. They may not be able to move product over borders, but they can move money and resources
Finally!
Then hopefully the f... UN can do that too.
I'm totally shocked that the UN has such a hard and shitty drug policy.
Wasn't that a project of Reagan's?
I believe the concept of drug 'scheduling' was introduced in the Controlled Substances Act under Richard Nixon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cannabis_laws_in_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
There was a debate in the early 80s on whether the country should concentrate on treatment or enforcement. Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies. He usually chose the wrong approach.
Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies. He usually chose the wrong approach
That doesn't seem to clear cut with the recent failed (and now backpedaling) experiments regarding decriminalization and legalization of most drugs.
It's more like the stuff that doesn't work is being pushed again.
On it's surface it seems to have worked better than these experiments. Otherwise the experiments would not be getting rolled back...
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.
This is a very un-nuanced take on what happened in Portland, and lines up with what the uncritical and uninformed national reporting about Portland has been saying.
It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
Bad execution undermines otherwise good policy.
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.
And... when dealing with humans - policies are often not enacted like we thought they would be in our head's under ideal conditions.
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 was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.
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.
What makes you convinced it can actually be achieved in reality?
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.
You strike me as the type of person who doesn't know that US urban crime decreased in 2023.
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.
What does that have to do with treatment programs?
Well, enforcement is a form of treatment - just not the form some might want.
We're trying the other way and failing right now. Perhaps we should figure out why...
Enforcement is not a form of treatment, regardless we've been trying enforcement since the 70s and it's been a disaster. Why would you want to double down on that?
Enforcement is not a form of treatment, regardless we've been trying enforcement since the 70s and it's been a disaster.
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.
There is a lot that I could talk about, but America's prison population comes to mind first. America has the largest prison population in the world, and they're essential a slave class. They get fewer rights and are forced to work for whatever company wants their labor.
....but what do you actually mean by disaster?
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.
Those policies were not well funded or implemented, we should keep trying alternative solutions to the status quo.
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.
tried for years and has not been successful either.
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?
What's the measurement for success?
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.
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.
Are you familiar with prohibition and its effects in the US?
It wasn’t successful and massively contributed to the proliferation of organized crime.
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.
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.
The approach promised in Oregon failed because the original intent of the decriminalization was to also increase support for rehabilitation. This never ended up happening, so drug users were thrown back into the situations that got them into drugs in the first place, instead of being given a way out.
SE Asia/East Asia at least have much harsher attitudes on drugs. US is pretty forgiving to drug users &c.
US is only lenient when compared to even more severe steamrollers of human rights. Executing individuals for drug possession is absolutely unconsciousable and unacceptable. Incarceration being less diabolical does not mean it is not still highly diabolical. Countless lives were and continue to be destroyed.
Selling hard drugs for a profit is diabolical. It also ruins lives.
Yet alcohol remains legal.
You're welcome to start making your own alcohol and then selling shots on the street. I'm sure you'll notice the difference very quickly.
Compared to selling hard drugs on the street? Technically what you're describing is against the law, but given that people are selling hard drugs on the street, I doubt you could get the cops to care.
That is not what we are talking about and you know it.
The state killing people is always unjustified since you can't prove 99%+ really did the crime. In fact, we can show the states and feds have put to death many of their own innocent citizens.
Hard agree.
Thailand legalized it.
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.
Tobacco too
You're not wrong, but I'm thinking more about the things that are marked as illegal today.
Forgive my ignorance, but why does anyone care what the UN thinks about this subject? They cannot, and will not do anything about anything anyway...
It's a matter of treaty law. States punched out a treaty on drugs and then promised each other to stick to it, pressuring other states to buy in.
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.
Great news. A very sound move. Indeed, marijuana is much less dangerous of a drug yet considerably harmful in cases of chronic use in unreasonably high doses therefore should be controlled some way. What seems problematic nowadays is teenagers smoking too much. Also the idea of stoned people driving cars sounds scary. To me it seems it should be as available and legal as alcohol and cigarettes are, no less, no more.
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.
"Also the idea of stoned people driving cars sounds scary. "
Depends how stoned, but people routinely drive while using medication that affects them far more than being a bit stoned.
In response to uninformed sibling comments reflexively fearing cannabis use in drivers, see here:
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.
I find it far more likely it has not been studied to the degree alcohol has been, and as a larger sample of users is tested these results will change.
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
Ethanol is a poison, what, outside of prejudice, would make you find it more likely it's simply a lack of studies? Maybe it simply hasn't reached me, but I never even heard about cannabis being chiefly blamed on a car accident, mind you, people can drive recklessly sober, but, again, if anything cannabis is going to make them be more cautious. For one, surely you have heard of the "paranoia" that cannabis users often get at higher doses, where they feel distant objects are closer than they really are.
After reading through that paper, it's pretty clear the authors were thorough in their research. They're referencing many of dozens of studies with many thousands of participants.
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?
Next we'll have studies seeking to prove drivers who drink enough to reach the Ballmer Peak will have a mind in the utmost condition for driving.
I'm not surprised to see decades of propaganda and clichés have done their work on many of us.
Everything I've seen suggests that weed mimics or even exacerbates ADHD symptoms, where are you getting that it improves them?
There are studies. I think it's simply that ADHD tends to have anxiety at its root or at least it's a major component. Cannabis is also procognitive in appropriate dosages.
i think driving is probably already dangerous enough without adding cannabis or any other psychoactive into the mix
The culture around driving in the US is the problem. Many states will hand a license to pretty much anyone over 18 with nothing more than basic reading comprehension and eyesight required. Contrast this to say, the driving culture of Germany. There, everyone (not only minors) must undergo a rigorous training that is both broad and deep in scope. In addition to everything you'd expect, they also learn vehicle maintenance, basic first aid, performance driving skills (like the kind you'd pay to learn at a racetrack in the USA), and above all else, a deep respect and appreciation for the importance of following the rules of the road, leading to rigorous adherence to driving laws and etiquette that many Americans would find borderline anal-retentive.
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.
This has been my experience as well.
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.
well then i hope you lobby your representatives for bike lanes and public transit because america is a highly medicated place
Both of the above are illegal, though very hard to enforce.
I think that also sounds pretty scary. Seeing the state of drivers in the UK, without knowing what they’re under the influence of, if anything, it’s a pretty damning sight.
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.
or texting or otherwise looking at their phone while driving ...
The biggest problem is not the self-harm aspect but rather the social ramifications.
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.
Stinky is very qualitative. Maybe you grew up around tobacco smokers and so don’t mind the smell? I hate it.
Quantitatively, marijuana smoke is less carcinogenic than tobacco smoke.
The smell from marijuana smoke lingers and travels in a way tobacco smoke does not. Most people other than users find it significantly more offensive than tobacco.
Disagree. If you’re at a concert and someone smokes weed everyone is like “right on”. You smoke a cigarette and people want to fight you.
What does this have to do with how the respective smells linger?
It's less offensive of an order as the complete shit that's in cigarettes and it also doesn't stick to your clothing and linger in the same way.
Subjective but I feel like it is less harsh on my lungs secondhand too
Any burning organics will be different sample to sample, and any "smell" judgement of such will be subjective.
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."
I don’t care about a car or home destroyed by tobacco use. Those are easy for me to avoid. Sitting on my porch and nightly taking in the smell of weed from a neighbor 50 feet away is a different story. That doesn’t happen with tobacco smoke. The smell of marijuana travels in a way tobacco doesn’t.
I hate both. Hence I said it should be as strict, if not more.
I'd say putting a very large class of people into "the system" has produced a worse outcome than the drug itself would ever have had.
We don’t regulate where people can smoke tobacco because of the smell, we regulate where people can smoke tobacco because of the health impact of secondhand smoke.
It’s hopeless. Both Washington DC and New York pretty much constantly smell like weed even though people are not smoking on the streets. Its not a particularly bad problem and doesn’t bother me but I could see some people being bothered by it.
Coming from a longtime marijuana friendly state, I've noticed that it has also lowered the stigma of other "hard" drugs. Since weed is no longer the socially-acceptable illegal drug, others like cocaine has taken is place.
I've long wondered if this will be a trend across the country.
This makes sense when compared to other legal drugs. Alcohol is only seen as a problem if you get shitfaced in public. Cigarettes were/are the more acceptable form of smoking when compared to cannabis. Now that the line for cannabis is moving, it makes sense that something else will come take it's place.
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.
A typical stoned driver is someone who drives half as fast as the speed limit allows. That's how the cops spot them usually.
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.
While no impairment is obviously ideal, I'd much rather share the road with someone who's had a few puffs than someone on a cocktail of legal psychoactive prescription medications like antidepressants, SSRIs, amphetamines, hypnotic sedatives, etc.
It's actually wild what the executive can get done in an election year... With the side effect of dangling bait for legislators to take a contrarian, nationally unpopular position.
Election year and not to mention that the President's numbers are in shambles with younger voters. This move feels extremely transparent to me.
Well I mean: doing things that people want them to do to get elected. Not the worst problem?
It’s pandering and on the edge of buying votes. Unlike Student Loan “forgiveness” which was a direct purchase of a vote.
And no I doubt this will rouse the pot smokers to vote, perhaps mail in, as they don’t have to do actually anything.
If everyone buys votes using one issue or another, using cannabis to buy votes should be the least concern of anyone.
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.
The timing is complete bullshit. Politicians “pocket” issues like this and pull them out during an election year “look how much I care about you!!! Vote for me!!!” They could have and should have done this a very long time ago.
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.
are you really going on a downvote revenge spree? lol
On HN you can't downvote a direct reply to your own comment, so vuln did not downvote your reply.
It's wild to me that people think "buying votes" is a bad thing. The whole point of democracy is to align the interests of the state's leaders to its population. If anything, politicians don't buy votes often enough!
Politician runs on a platform of 'Hey 51% of the population, if you vote for me I'll take the other 49%'s money and give it to you!', proceeds to win by 2%. Democracy in action!
Of course not, that's how democracy works!
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.
it should have been done sooner.
Not everyone agrees though. I don't want it legalized or normalized more.
I wish it was completely legal and completely non-normalized.
What about reclassification?
as severely damaged the growth of cannabis industry
Do you own weed stocks or something? How is the growth of the cannabis industry supposed to be the mandate of a government?
Regulation shouldn't cause harm for causing harm's sake. We already know prohibition doesn't work, so why did they drag their feet on repealing regulation that is both harmful and ineffective, is my concern.
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.
Ah, I agree. It is a good move with a side of bullshit.
Yeah, he's doing something that's reasonably popular among everyone. How dare he?
A third of the population, 111 million citizens, do not want it legalized. I wouldn't consider that "popular among everyone". https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/10/facts-abo...
Your own link says it's 70% in favor of legalization and 29% against. 29% is as close to "a quarter of the population" as it is to "a third of the population" - 400 basis points.
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, just to clarify, you're actually taking issue with me referring to 29% as one third, while you have no issue referring to 70% as 100%? Either way, there's still over a hundred million human beings living in your country that disagree with you. Call it whatever you want but don't dismiss it.
while you have no issue referring to 70% as 100%?
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.
Honestly the biggest uptick of weed use I've seen in my peer groups is in the >= 50 set for pain management, sleep, and...fun.
Yeah, now that it's "windows open" weather, we are smelling it a lot; source is definitely in the over 50 demographic.
My favorite was the cancellation of a ban on menthol cigarettes because it would turn away black voters despite the NAACP ardently encouraging the ban[0].
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/26/health/fda-menthol-cigarettes...
Similar to paying off random citizen's student loans?
The bureaucratic process will take about two years. It's definitely not getting done in time for election.
If it takes multiple years, then it gives voters a reason to support the candidate that will support the process post-election. Basically, vote for Joe if you want Mary Jane.
It has been a multi-year effort to get the DEA to reclassify marijuana, starting in 2022. It starts with the President telling the HHS to provide a new recommendation to the DEA, and the finally for the DEA to decide what to do on that recommendation.
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
The President is the chief executive of both agencies. He didn't need to have one agency recommend it to the other for consideration over a multi-year timescale. It could have been executed within a few weeks to a few months. The office of the President knowingly chose a prolonged approach.
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.
In fairness we do also see the opposite, which is kind of a problem with the 2 term system.
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?
I think it dovetails with the Administration's recent pausing of outlawing menthol cigarettes which has been reported as adversely effecting African Americans. It's blatantly political, which giving the people what they want and all, but it's disingenuous when these things only occur at election time. The President could have done this on day one.
On one hand I'm very happy with all the recent policy changes coming down from different federal agencies, but on the other there's a very high likelihood that they will all be reversed a few months from now if/when a new administration takes over. That is always the downside of executive rule. With Congress unwilling/incapable of acting though I guess this is the best we'll get.
What bothers me is that all these things are only happening because it's an election year and the incumbent doesn't have great polling numbers.
Well, politicians doing what people want in order to get reelected is kinda the point of democracy.
There's no need to talk down to me.
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.
Your chief complaint is not new, it's nearly as old as democracy itself.
Different forms of democracy have various trade-offs, what your describing is the trade-off of representative democracy.
Is also partly the fault of voters for being so darn susceptible to recency bias. Do a lot of good at the start and then reach a lull and everyone's gonna hate. Timing can and has cost elections.
They've been working on this for two years, it was announced they'd do it in 2022.
Yeah, but based on the guiding principle of democracy (govt by the will of the people), you'd hope to see them do that immediately instead of waiting years and years to do it when it is most strategically advantageous. I know politics is gamey like that by nature, but it sucks to see. The lag time between a policy becoming overwhelmingly popular and it actually being implemented is often long enough to radically alter the course of millions of peoples' lives.
While this is true, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At some point, we decided as a nation to only care about politics during election years. Participation rates for local elections is near an all time low. If people were more involved with the process, I would imagine that we would see more movement in Congress as a reaction to the will of the people.
If doing it at the end of his term gets him more votes than the beginning, that means the voters want to see it done towards the end.
They only dangle the carrot when they need something, ie reelection.
Yeah, if only every year were election year....
You obviously haven’t been paying attention as these rule making processes started literally years ago that’s how much red tape there is to get through.
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.
Bunch of Holden Caulfields imo who just refuse to 'vote for phonies' and still haven't grown uo
It started in October 2022 (a month before midterms), if anything a skeptic would say that's more confirmation timing is suspect.
This is misinformation.
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
{{Citation needed}}
This kind of rule should be made by an executive agency, empowered by a congressional delegation of that rule-making power to that agency.
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.
voters remain free to replace the executive the next time around
Note that there are only either 538 or 100 voters, depending on which position in the executive branch.
No, the President exerts significant control over executive agency policy, and is elected by many more people than that.
The President is elected by the 538 electors of the electoral college.
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.
Or 9 voters
Or, if someone gets his way, just 1
That only works if the rulemaking happens based on scientific reason rather than politics.
... no, it works in general, for the reasons I went into in my comment.
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.
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.
Maybe, maybe not. Support for the legalization of marijuana has consistently only gone up for 50 years and even more than half of conservatives supported it in 2023: https://news.gallup.com/poll/514007/grassroots-support-legal...
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...
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
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?
the wording of the questions aren't good, but the states that have recently banned it certainly seem to be catering to the 13% who say illegal under all circumstances, due to the extremeness of the actual laws passed
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
pro life because I don't believe in late term abortions
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).
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.
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 wonder how many are like me
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.
At least it'll be one fewer "both sides" argument to be made.
I'm sorry but after seeing how american gradually get into worse and worse drugs, and seeing channel 5's video on people using tranq... yeah I think complete ban on drugs for non medical reasons is the best choice.
People wanna get high. There's a plausible hypothesis that we invented farming to have a more reliable way to make beer. We have 2 main options:
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.
3. Make our society so pleasant to live in that people want to experience their day-to-day lives with their minds free from drugs.
Why? Drugs are fun. I drank a hot cup of coffee this morning and enjoyed the warmth, taste, and way it made me feel. Those were all pleasant sensations that would be hard to get another way. Why shouldn't I be allowed to experience them?
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.
This is the "limiting harm" part of 2.
Drugs aren't just an escape from suffering. I have a very good life. I also like having a beer with friends or, yes, smoking weed with friends. That amplifies an already positive experience.
If you magically eliminated all suffering in my life, I'd still enjoy a beer at dinner.
In what sense is your mind free in a world where psyotropics are prohibited? LSD and psilocybin aren't addictive or habbit-building, think about that. Don't knock it 'till you try it.
Yes, because Prohibition was such a ringing success. Just because someone says you can't do something does not prevent someone from doing that thing. If people want something badly enough, they will find a way. When that want has progressed to being a literal need from addiction, the ways found will become more and more bold/risky.
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.
I downvoted you because while it may not have been successful at getting Americans to stop drinking, it was effective at reducing violent crimes caused by drinking, as well as the negative health effects such as liver cirrhosis. The anti drug control crowd has done a great job commandeering popular opinion on this topic. I found this (non-academic) article informative to this end.
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
Well, minus the whole organized crime thing, which is a pretty gigantic elephant in the room.
Yeah, it seems pretty disingenuous to call Prohibition a success because one stat went down.
Make money for yourself and live your best life.
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.
Ah, that American rugged individualism. That's why y'all can be homeless in a blink or medically bankrupt.
What’s the alternative?
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.
I've watched the same videos, and the impression I got was that the main gateway drug for tranq was prescription painkillers prescribed legally by a doctor.
Maybe we should consider banning drugs for medical reasons too...
Outpatient opiods being prescribed to the degree they were 20 years ago was clearly wrong in hindsight.
Which means ban tobacco and alcohol as well?
Don't forget coffee...
In addition to prohibition being impossible (and a policy failure in every case where it has been tried, without a single historical exception - one of the most consistent policy outcomes in all of political science), it also isn't cognizable to define the word "drug" for the purposes of your calculus here.
Would you ban coffee? How about sugar?
tranq is an adulterant added to fentanyl. I don't think that is apples to apples here. The entire opiate ecosystem is honestly insane at the moment. The only street drug available is fentanyl and it's often mixed with the vet drug tranq which is horrible for humans. It prevents wound healing. I would say there needs to be some kind of harm reduction done in this space too because apparently fentanyl cannot be stopped.
Ring ring, 1920s are calling, they want their prohibition back.
Great, now do psilocybin, LSD and MDMA.
DMT and mescaline too.
Do all of them. To me, government exists to mediate interactions between parties. Not to get involved in personal choices. If someone wants to rip fat lines of coke, good for them. Not my business.
We don't live in libertarian utopia, let's first focus on substances that are *obviously* misclassified, the ones cited before have actual benefits, the most obvious one being psilocybin.
Do they need to have benefits? Whether they are beneficial or not people are using drugs like MDMA. Making them illegal has only caused harm.
I'm just saying it's an easier sell, if we legalize these the demand for harmful drugs will go down too.
Do you think people who rip fat lines of coke will never interact with society in any way that affects you?
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.
Legitimate crimes have a perpetrator and a victim. That's two parties in conflict. Drug possession only has 1 party, the person possessing or doing the drugs, and drug sales have two parties who aren't in conflict.
clearly you havent thought of the children /s
DMT is a drug I’d highly recommend everyone take once but only once.
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. :-)
That Salvia divinorum is somehow legal (varies by jurisdiction) always blows my mind...
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"].
Yeah, no. We're already in a drug crisis as it is. We need to teach people that doing drugs (of any kind) isn't the answer to problems. Soft times seems to have created this problem where people would rather escape their lives than live them out.
I completely agree. People in the US need to learn that happiness cannot come from a purchase, whether it's chemicals to ingest or whatever else is being marketed to them. It's amazing what americans will do to their bodies and minds except get exercise and eat fresh healthy foods.
"we need to teach people" "people in the US need to learn"
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.
I don't think people do psilocybin and LSD to escape from reality. I'm not even sure how that would work, given how I understand tolerance works for those drugs?
Of course not, the drugs to escape reality are available for free (or nearly free) and en masse, because they are useful as a means of control.
You just reflexively replied with what you have been programmed to believe about mind-altering substances (aside from those exempted by the authorities). The use of "drug crisis" in reply to the substances mentioned is a clear indication of your prejudice and ignorance, given that MDMA has already been given breakthrough status by the FDA as a treatment for PTSD, psilocybin for major depression, and being studied for it's powerful anti-addictive effects, same as LSD (which had great results with curing alcoholism *in one session* when it was initially being studied in the 50s and 60s).
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.
Please. It's insane that people are dying from fentanyl overdoses taking molly, absolutely not the right societal trade off to be making any more.
Also GHB. Sodium oxybate is currently schedule III, but it's basically just a bit of chemical sleight of hand to allow GHB to be prescribed.
The greatest thing about tight, upcoming elections is that governments actually start to do a tiny bit of what people want. Great result.
Unfortunately different people often want different things.
Doesn't everyone want freedom, justice, fairness, etc.
(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?")
Romans have enslaved our children, raped our wives, desecrated our holy places and burned our priests. They razed our villages, slaughtered our herds, and forced our young men into their military service.
So glad that they brought us civilisation!
Yes they do, for example lobbyists and donors and buddies want to get rich at the expense of the country and its people, and the common plebs don't want that.
Common plebs also include different people.
It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, doesn't it? Why haven't they taken action until now? People aren't children to be appeased by such gestures.
You have to keep some things in the bank to use in certain circumstances.
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.
We all prioritize things differently and I believe this process was started on October 6th, 2022 [1]. This is just one of many things the current administration has done over the last 3 years, though.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/07/biden-weed-executiv...
You just described whole maga movement and some others. It works en masse, thats why trump won first time without investing heavily into marketing, telling folks what they wanted to hear
“People aren't children to be appeased by such gestures.”
Good one.
You are underestimating the time it takes to get stuff done in a big bureaucracy AND the fear of the Congressional Review Act. It's the nuclear option where Congress not only reverses an agency decision but also ban the agency from ever doing that thing again in the future.
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.
I'm not underestimating that, I think the timing of this approval was probably politically motivated.
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.
Or shorter, given that this regulation is aimed at stoners who are notorious for having memory issues, you'd release this 6 days before an election, not six months before.
Do you think that’s driving this decision?
From what I gathered the DEA was looking at this over the past few years.
It wasn’t a Presidential decision.
I think it is driving the decision yes, and I think bureaucracies are hopelessly politicized and corrupted.
Governments actually do a lot of what people want, alas.
See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...
LOL, the wisdom of the market mechanism to the rescue of the irrational voters.
While it being moved to Schedule ~II~ (Correction: III) rather than removed altogether is a bit disappointing, I'm not gonna miss the forest for the trees on this one: this is a big deal after all this time.
It's moving to schedule III, though the new company it's in really highlights how it should be descheduled instead:
It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids
Hopefully the first step but not the last.
sure, marijuana shouldn't be considered 100% harmless, but it's ludicrous to argue it does the same amount of damage to people's bodies as ketamine (abuse can lead to kidney failure, bladder cystectomy) or even some sched. IV substances such as alprazolam (seizures from withdrawal can be fatal).
As someone who has taken ketamine for medical purposes and marijuana for not, it is utterly off-the-charts bonkers that they are classified identically.
A large dose of ketamine literally disconnects yourself from reality. Weed makes you tired.
Why should subjective effects direct the scheduling of these drugs?
What should they be based on?
Actual harm, I think. I know that Ketamine has harm potential, but it's my impression that the physical harm only occurs with long term binge use, and that immediate physical harm due to overdose is unlikely. That the subjective effects during use are very powerful and overwhelming is not and should not be relevant, I think.
You think a large dose of weed to someone who's not used to it just makes them tired?
It might make you high, but it won't kill you. It won't even harm you.
Benzo addiction is very dangerous. Withdrawal can lead to life threatening or altering outcomes. I have a hard time understanding what property the scheduling is based on
So now it is de-jure easier to get than ADHD meds instead of just de-facto easier.
Seems reasonable, considering the abuse potential is worse with things like Adderall than cannabis.
At least according to one study, cannabis does slightly more harm than both of those, although that harm is still tiny compared to that done by alcohol. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285843262_Drug_harm...
They do score ketamine higher than cannabis in "harm to user", but cannabis has a much higher "harm to others" score.
Ah, good catch. Yeah, I'll take the progress even if it's not exactly where I'd like policy to be ultimately.
Naturally occurring human hormones should not be scheduled at all, they should be available over the counter to anyone over 18.
I agree. To me this feels like Biden, who loathes cannabis and has opposed its legalization at every turn, found a good way to still sontewall legalization and move the goalposts to distract everyone enough that they think he's done them a huge favor.
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!
At the very least researchers won't have to jump through as many hoops to study it.
Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use. There are more cannabis shops then mcdonalds. You can grow your own and most people do. There's online options.
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.
But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.
Same thing happened with cupcake shops and craft breweries.
Except cupcake shops and craft breweries are allowed to differentiate (gluten free, superhero themed, we only sell wild fermented German beers...) while the legal cannabis retailers in Canada are more akin to owning a Subway franchise.
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.
I'm referring more to the "several times as many as the market can sustain get opened" phenomenon. Around here, every just-out-of-college set of buddies decided they'd get into brewing a few years ago. Probably 75% of them were gone in a year or two.
But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.
That's fair as well. Being invested in cannabis is a whole other beast.
It’s not a particularly easy industry to value add. Growing pretty good weed is probably less work than a brewery - and I have a very hard time telling the difference between the hundreds of different strains.
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
While this is true, the remaining stores are continuing to capture more business. Users who only make legal source purchases are over 70% of the market now https://globalnews.ca/news/10367758/legal-cannabis-sales-pro...
There's a common notion that I've noticed, which is that if you just open up a "pot shop" that you'll make money hand over fist, meanwhile, they're fairly complex retail operations to run and you can loose your hat just as quickly as with any other business.
You can grow your own and most people do
pffft... source? I know about 1 person who grows their own for every 100 who smoke.
I grew weed durring covid, it's like taking care of a baby for weed that's mostly OK. I sold everything after two attempts. I learned alot about gardening though lol
I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong) which means there were private shops in existence but then shut down further polluting online listings. I eventually figured this out (after visiting what I thought was a cannabis shop that was actually a deli) but as luck would have it, they were all closed when I was downtown.
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...
I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong)
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.
You think most people in Canada grow weed?
I read that as "most people [who smoke weed] grow their own". Also a bold statement but way less absurd than "most Canadians grow weed".
"A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition."
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?
Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use.
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.
There you have it, the administrator themselves saying they believe in myths about cannabis: It’s a gateway drug; while simultaneously ignoring that the drug killing people, fent has a perfectly causal gateway drug in vicodin/percs
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.
It is a gateway drug. When marijuana is illegal you have to get it from drug dealers, who have an incentive to upsell you to harder stuff. Make it legal and that gateway goes away.
Anecdote: I've had countless dealers over 20 years in many countries and continents, not once has someone tried to sell me anything else (besides hash). It's always been some cheery barefoot guy with dreads growing it in his closet.
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 ;)
However, if you wanted something other than weed, you would have someone who may be able to help you out
Let it go.
Sounds like you're the one who needs help. See a professional.
Same has been true for me in the US over 35+ years. This has always been a stupid and false boogeyman narrative.
In that case it ceases to become a gateway drug once legal.
In my experience, the weed dealers aren't the same dealers as the guys moving the harder stuff. If you can get meth from a guy, he can probably get you coke too. But your weed guy probably can't get you either. At least, IME with NYC dealers.
I think these 'gateway drug' believers will be pleasantly surprised. One reason it's a gateway drug is because of a line of thought like this:
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.
This is precisely how my thought process went back when I used to use drugs heavily.
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.
Not to go all Godwin but a lot of people have the same reaction to news about Trump -- for some reason, people see the need to lie about and misrepresent Trump. "If he's so bad, surely people could just list off his crimes without having to try to trick me right? Must not be so bad, it couldn't hurt to give him a turn as president."
That or the other 'gateway' pathway:
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.
the difference between fentanyl and marijuana is like a nuclear bomb versus a slingshot.
Vicodin/percs also require prescriptions tho.
Not so much of a gotcha.
Or, he's a savvy guy talking to the people who do still believe it's a gateway drug, and deftly explaining to them why this is good without trying to tell them they are wrong.
It’s a gateway drug; while simultaneously ignoring that the drug killing people, fent has a perfectly causal gateway drug in vicodin/percs
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
Feels like they were keeping this card in their sleeves for when they needed a popularity boost.
It is a good thing for democratically accountable governments to do good things that the people want!
Yes, it's good for the government to not be tyrannical, but I'd argue that when the majority of people increasingly and collectively want things that are net negatives for society like recreational drug use, it's a red flag that society is in decline.
I think recreational drug use is demonstrably good for society and part of all succesful civilizations. Take caffeine, sugar, alcohol and tobacco as the primary examples. All potent drugs and all taken habitually and en masse by all the most successful societies in the world.
All the most successful societies have tobacco users, therefore tobacco is good for society. Logic checks out.
More like all the most successful societies value personal freedoms. Personal freedoms are clearly good for society and a big one of those is recreational drug use of which tobacco use is quite 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.
You seem to be conflating a distaste for demonstratively failed policy, like as prohibition, with an appetite for what you are calling "recreational drug use".
Do you acknowledge the failure of prohibition?
Tell that to all the people pissed off at Roe v Wade
The political group largely responsible for this has been consistently underperforming in nearly every election since it happened, so I’m not sure what point you’re driving at.
Which party is part of which decision again?
This is a directional error. Roe protected liberty. Federal criminalization of weed impedes liberty. While ending both of these things returns policy to the states, one necessarily reduces liberty while one necessarily increases liberty.
The people want to be undisturbed and untaxed by rampant mental illness too, but the average person won't acknowledge that recreational marijuana use (with today's potency levels) contributes to declining mental health.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/
https://treatmentmagazine.com/cannabis-2020-this-isnt-your-d...
That logic doesn't really hold. I'll speak generally and not about this specific administration:
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.
They absolutely were. Between 25% inflation, the student loan relief failure, two proxy wars and the current beating of college students across the country, the current administration would have been facing record low turnout in November.
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.
Nobody cares about college protestors, even other young people. It's the second to least important issue in recent polls.
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.)
Utter bullshit. Reclassifying schedule 1 Drugs requires the approval of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the UN. Otherwise, they are just reclassifying it under an already reclassified treaty structure as a red herring.
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.
I'm quite ignorant about how international law and treaties interact with domestic policy. Could you educate me? What is the mechanism within US law by which this reclassification requires approval by that UN commission?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotropic_Substances_Act_(U... The above link is the Act that governs the USA's international obligations based on our treaty with the UN to schedule specific drugs and under those terms only allowed to reschedule Schedule 1 drugs with the approval of the UN; often after a review of the drugs medicinal purposes by the WHO.
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.
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.
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"?
"may have an affect on legal charges" - for which there are many levied that don't directly correlate to a drug offense; such as the Texas cannabis tax stamp requirement. If you don't pay taxes on your illegal cannabis in Texas they can charge you with tax evasion. Making it federally "legal" in a certain context, may have an affect on states ability to make jackass laws like the Texas cannabis tax stamp law.
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.
Thank you for the links!
I'm hoping other knowledgeable people will also weigh in on this topic.
The 1961 convention, which as far as I know has not been contravened (w.r.t. cannabis) by the subsequent acts only bans non-medical (and non-scientific) uses of cannabis. Schedule IV would probably be sufficient to comply with the US's obligations there, and Schedule III certainly is.
Well the UN has already done that, moving it from Schedule IV to Schedule I. Note that the schedules are reversed in the UN's system.
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.
That's under a different treaty. You're falling for the bamboozle.
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.
Help me out here, because I'm genuinely trying to grok your point but, for whatever reason, it's not clicking for me. You originally stated:
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.
That's because you're intentionally missing the first point where I said that's under a different treaty. Probably because you aren't actually interested in learning the complexity of international drug laws, but simply buying into political nonsense.
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.
The only thing I am intentionally trying to do is to understand what you're saying. What's up with the hostility here?
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.
Legitimate question: How is it nonsense if it is still treated, currently, as a S1? If this changes anything it's not nonsense.
I answered your question in the other comment.
I’d rather the regime let Assange go, and pardoned Snowden. Allowing something most states already allow is weak sauce as far as populism is concerned.
do you know how many poor people get caught up on mj charges every year in this country? not to mention this will lead to prior charges being expunged from people's records. but sure let's prioritize those two guys.
Very short sighted thinking. If they beheaded Sam bankman fried there will be a clear message to not commit financial crime, and the aspiration and motivation would almost zero.
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.
SBF was willing to repeatedly take double-or-nothing bets at 50/50 odds even though the expected utility of each bet is the same as not betting at all and the combined odds of bankruptcy very quickly asymptotes to 100% with increasing rounds.
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.
No he was not. You think he'd repeatedly do Russian roulette with half the bullets? He had the odds with him with his legal advisors.
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.
""""The whole time that we were dating, he was also my boss at work, which created some awkward situations," she testified, according to The Wall Street Journal. Describing Bankman-Fried's attitude toward risk-taking, "Ellison recalled on the witness stand how Bankman-Fried once spoke of a coin-flip scenario where if the coin landed on tails, the world would end. But if the coin landed on heads, 'the world would be twice as good.' Bankman-Fried [said] he would take the bet if there were a chance of making the world better, Ellison said."""" - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sbfs-ex-girlfrie...
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.
I can only remain bemused at how some people weigh things; 300,000 people were arrested in 2020 for possession of marijuana [1]. There is nothing short-sighted about wishing the free so many people of the misery of being under the same thumb (the penal system) that you bemoan for Assange and Snowden.
1. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/317793-people-were-a...
Where is the stats for 2023?
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
But why not both?
You haven’t even read the first paragraph of the article. It still remains controlled substance, lol
This is a truly unhinged comment and I can’t work out if it’s an art project or not. Love it.
I really don't think this is a positive in any way, unless you oppose recreational marijuana usage.
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.
You seem to believe that a move from Schedule I (totally illegal to sell) to Schedule III (legal to sell under some circumstances) is going to hit the reset button on state laws around cannabis. That seems unlikely, the states are already ignoring the feds on this, this is just a step the feds are taking to bring the federal legal landscape closer to the state landscape. The major changes will simply be, as others have stated, to make it possible to travel with cannabis (with an Rx) and for dispensaries and others to use FDIC insured banking and transfer mechanisms.
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.
Once there is a framework for legal sale, and regulations around it, you think all these states will continue to just not comply?
They've been thumbing their nose at more more serious laws until now, why would a downgrade in consequences suddenly make them burn down industries that bring in billions?
Imo the states get far too much revenue from recreational taxes and I imagine the Fed doesn't want that to change either.
It's really just a few dinosaur pearl clutchers that are preventing it from being descheduled entirely
Know that the reason why it's illegal in so many places to begin with is because of the US. Weed wasn't really an "issue" anywhere. Until the US drug war began and spread to other countries thru international narcotic treaties.
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.
Supposed evidence of the harmfulness of cannabis compared to alcohol shows that cannabis absolutely deserves to be OTC and available for recreational use. Popular sentiment is popular precisely because the supposed harm has never materialized to the point of justifying the paternalistic and authoritarian control of social groups who tend to use cannabis.
You'll be able to get a doctor rx super easily, think like all these viagra and adderall rx mills.
I'm not sure it belongs in schedule I, but it certainly doesn't belong OTC.
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.
America should have a long hard look at why it takes so long to do something that would have been considered "reasonable" by most of the country 15 years ago.
But that's factually untrue.
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...
Since when is majority support the same thing as reasonable??
something that would have been considered "reasonable" by most of the country 15 years ago
What strategy is more reasonable?
I think it's the same with a lot of things that the American government grapples with, they only do it when there is a politically expedient reason to do it. Whether it's reducing student loans, outlawing noncompete clause, or marijuana, elected officials don't really seem to do anything helpful unless there's a clear advantage for themselves or their party.
Our government moves slowly, by design.
Trust me, you don't want to see a fast-moving American government.
Honestly, we should look to fix the issues that lead to people depending on weed, alcohol, and other drugs instead.
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.
It could just be as simple as it’s a lot of fun. I smoked pot for a lot of years, not because I had a hole in me or anything, it was just a very fun way to go about the day. I haven’t smoked in a decade because long term usage led to mild agoraphobia for me but went away a couple of months after I stopped.
Yeah. I mean, it's a great accompaniment to some fresh fruit and cheese on a sunny day, a good album, maybe the company of a loved one. It never made me feel like a different person or like I was on a vacation from reality like alcohol could. I've known lots of people who smoke a little, or used to smoke a little and then stopped (I haven't for a long time), and also people who smoke a lot and seem to be doing fine, and also people who clearly smoke in excess, to their detriment. But I have to say that the worst potheads I've ever met seemed happy, healthy, and well-adjusted compared to the alcoholics.
Yeah that paints a pretty picture but it’s also really fun to do less picturesque things like just smoke and play your favorite video game all day.
Honestly, we should look to fix the issues that lead to people depending on weed, alcohol, and other drugs instead.
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.
I think the long term effect depends on how your life is going.
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.
I know/knew a lot of people who smoke daily. It's honestly close to 50/50 where daily smokers excel and experience more than they would have without, and daily smokers who stagnate.
A lot of them naturally moved away from smoking when its purpose was served too.
For federal workers in legalized states, will they be able to use?
Unlikely in the near term. As I understand it, rescheduling to Schedule III would mean that marijuana (and marijuana-based products) can be sold with a prescription. But, for a doctor to prescribe something, it needs FDA approval. I don't know when/if FDA will approve any marijuana-based treatments. And even if they did, this would not authorize recreational use.
you can get a prescription for marijuana within 15 mins of walking into a doctors office. we are past the peak of this, but 10 years ago you used to be able to go to a doctor that did nothing but marijuana prescriptions. and the line was out the door to the office. you walk in, pay $100-$150, and walk out with a prescription for 1 year
you can get a prescription for marijuana within 15 mins of walking into a doctors office.
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.
not for at least like 20 years probably
it's possible that there might be a move to cheek swaps instead of urine tests for routine testing, making it possible to enjoy some recreational pot during off times.
Democrats will dangle the possibility of marijuana legalization to entice voters to turn out for the election. But I doubt legalization will actually happen; I'd be delighted to be proven wrong. I'm just too jaded, I guess.
Why wouldn't it, though? It's a massive new market that big corps are itching to get into if only they could do so legally. And the fact that some top politicians on both sides of the aisle are already investing in weed (on state level, where it's legal) has already made some news.
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.
Experience here in Canada has shown it's not nearly the massive market that people thought it was. Tons of stores with excess stock and people losing their shirts, production curtailed. Big speculative wave when legalization was announced, and then it collapsed. Take a look at e.g. Canopy Growth's stock price over 5 years and you can see how the hype wave went.
Yes, I think you are too jaded. It's fine to be wary, but wrong to think these two groups are the same. Don't forget that our Senate is broken, so no legislation passes without an inordinate amount of rural, conservatives states backing it.
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.
It's already been legalized at the state level in 24 states, most of those states governed by Democrats. There's clearly a lot of support for actual action on this issue, including among elected officials.
From the article: "Then there’s the United States’ international treaty obligations, chief among them the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which requires the criminalization of cannabis."
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.
Canada got told "shame on you" when they legalized. That seems to be about the extent of the ramifications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Narcotics_Contro...
I was curious if us Canadians were on that treaty, haha.
Yeah the irony here is that it's been the US making the most trouble on this topic. Border agents were pretty difficult for a while, and in theory they can still ban you for life for admitting you have consumed it here, even though it's legal.
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.
This is not good enough, in my opinion. It's hard to treat the justice system seriously because of bullshit restrictions on victimless "crimes" like this. I'll only be okay with this if alcohol gets reclassified as Schedule III.
It's not really victimless when you have cases of psychosis and other health issues that negatively affect people around them, and put strain on taxpayers and the health system. This is Should be strictly prescription-only, and not with the rubber stamp model that "medical" marijuana clinics use. But that isn't politically correct so it's better to ignore the science and just drug the masses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/ https://treatmentmagazine.com/cannabis-2020-this-isnt-your-d...
The evidence that exists suggests that heavy cannabis usage _at an early age_ is associated with the development of psychotic disorders. No state that has legalized cannabis has permitted minors to purchase it. No evidence exists that cannabis usage later in life causes psychosis. There is also a lack of population evidence that increased cannabis usage among the public results in increased rates of diagnosis of psychotic disorders. And nobody is "drugging the masses" here. The government authorizing a product for sale doesn't force you to consume it.
To be fair, if it is legalized, that makes it easier to get for minors. Look at how many high schoolers smoke/vape even though you're supposed to be 18. I still don't think it's worth keeping it as a schedule I drug, but this is a possible externality that we need to account for as a society.
It's a trap, you will be drug addict.
Nicotine and alcohol are more addictive than weed. Why aren't those illegal?
Honest question, are you a bot?
I can already walk down the block and legally buy weed in the US so, in many places this is not really a change.
Great, let psychedelics be reclassified next
What we need is less drugs, and more fixing the issues on what causes people to turn to drugs.
Affordable healthcare being chief among these. If people could go to the doctor without fear of bankruptcy, they might stop trying to self medicate with potentially addictive substances.
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.
Humans have been using drugs as long as we've been human. From caffeine to advanced hallucinogens.
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.
Is the weed strength so strong these days that actually it should at this class
Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
Is it so strong it precludes medical usage?
Should alcohol or energy drinks be re-classified because of distilled spirits and unhealthy amounts of caffeine?
Are most users smoking the plant directly, or using vapes or edibles (which typically have a known dose)?
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.
The AP article has one critical thing wrong:
"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.
I read all of that gigantic word salad and it's still not clear to me what it is that you think the AP article got wrong.
I am still waiting for the war on tylenol, which has killed over 100k in US a year for decades.
That is completely false:
"an estimated 458 deaths due to acute liver failure each year"
I think most people agree that weed shouldn't be a schedule 1 drug, but I believe that the movement to decriminalize will have unforeseen consequences on our society. Marijuana use leads to cognitive decline and exacerbates psychiatric conditions even in healthy individuals, full stop. The literature on this is clear. Whether the tradeoff is worth it or not (the increased pleasure, for the decrease in cognitive ability), should be up to the individual to decide.
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.
Can you provide some of your top resources for this argument? I feel like if this were true it would be much more well-known. Maybe you're misreading a paper?
You don't have to look very far.
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...
Will this open hiring options for government agencies?
Will nonviolent drug dealers be released from prison?
Most people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes are in state prisons and cannot be freed by the federal government, but the administration has been issuing pardons and commutations over the past several years for the small number of people that have federal cannabis convictions.
Ah interesting. So does that mean nonviolent prisoners may have already been released in the states with “legal” weed?
Why is it that in Amsterdam you have coffee-shops where you can sit relax and smoke cannabis but nothing like that seems to exist in New York City? Or elsewhere in America, is there?
Honestly, it's probably mostly just a tourism thing at this point. Most of the Dutch people I know tend to not care about weed but they see coffee-shops as a thing for tourists or international students. If you're a regular user in NL, then you have a hookup or grow your own plants.
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)!
There are a couple of dispensaries with on site consumption lounges in San Francisco.
I did some AI-assisted research on this, and have come to the following tentative conclusions:
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).
And what did the AI cite as sources for these conclusions?
These conclusions are mine, based on research the AI did. None of these probabilities were directly output, it simply found lots of news articles, made simple models, researched what people have said & done historically.
There’s been no strong studies on the harmful effects of weed due to its illegal status. Now that is legal in many places, in 30 years we will know a lot more as this natural experiment unfolds. I would not be surprised if we see different but equally harmful effects.
Let the experiment begin.
The issue is the prolonged constant daily use of it. Unlike alcohol, it's much easier to get by in the day with weed, and a lot of people do use it as that. It offers them an escape from reality without the full social repercussion of something like alcohol.
That’s a good point. I’ve known people who smoke a joint every couple of hours and outwardly seem more functional than someone who has had three or four drinks.
The long term effects remain to be determined.
however, the weed these days is much stronger, and not the one our grandfathers smoked.
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.
One advantage to legalization (as implemented in Canada at least) is that THC content needs to be measured and labeled, so if you want to smoke something closer to your grandfather’s level you have the choice and aren’t at the mercy of whatever your dealer happens to have.
What an embarrassment to anyone in the DEA or public policy in general that this is still a thing.
Not sure how the DEA can consider itself a serious organization.
Hard to judge the DEAs effectiveness off something like this. You have very little insight on their actual effectiveness and workings on everything, yet your comment seems to summarize the entire organization off a completely biased political comment.
This change is not gonna legalize it, but will just make it “less illegal” acknowledging its medical use. While logically it make sense to move in this direction, I am afraid that ultimate consequences might be few large companies dominating the market completely and probably growing stuff offshore. If it gets a pass for recreational use then we will see weed induced soda in vending machines at school in couple of generations.
Weed induced soda in vending machines sounds like a win to me.
… and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs.
No, really, they're prepared to concede that water is wet? Shocker!
it’ll remain controlled substance
Got to make sure the doctors get a cut by requiring prescriptions.
Reminder that Marijuana was made illegal 90 years ago due to pressure by a cartel of other drug peddlers (including opium and cocaine), and also a culture of pervasive racism that painted Marijuana as a trap that brown/black races had fallen into and must be outlawed for white people.
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)
the U.S.'s international treaty obligations to criminalize cannabis
Is that a thing?
ironic use of the word "marijuana" in the title
We should legalize some of the less harmful mild uppers like khat while we're legalizing depressants.
Major impact will also be felt at cannabis research at land grant universities. Aka all the experiments to prove obvious stuff like different cultivars affect different people differently can finally happen at scale.
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.
Did nobody else notice that this is a story based on sources "Familiar with the matter"?
Have we learned nothing from the Mueller Investigation? How are we all still falling for unsourced stories 5 years later?
Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related/cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.
Elections have consequences!!
Just in time for the election. It baffles me why this took so long given the number of states legalizing it.
Looks like Biden is really worried about re-election.
What the heck is going on? This is literally top post on HN and the comments look like a wasteland of nonsense and bots.
I'm not sure how this will affect the current "mom and pop" weed stores. I know that The Big Dogs are just raring to get in on the action, and I'll lay odds they have done things like preemptively register weed brands.
FWIW I asked ChatGPT how long the process would take from DEA putting the rule out for public comment until it becomes an active rule:
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.
A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store
there is still a lot of cash on site due to the presence of an ATM though, and in the cash registers. the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
My brother supervises at a dispensary. They are not attractive robbery targets at all. They have a lot of security. Like a bank, they expect the amount of cash would bring trouble if they were not prepared. Unlike a bank, they don't dispense much cash (just petty change) so they don't even have to leave much in the drawers, which are emptied frequently and dropped into a safe nobody there can access.
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 disgracefully elitist. White collar crime hurts more people.
I see why you would say that, but you probably have not met very many people who work at a dispensary, I have. My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.
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 as a customer an hour ago had a long conversation with a friend I made behind the counter.
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
I didn’t say it was. I just said employee theft is a bigger problem than robbery.
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.
What it meant was, if you work at a place with all the cash controls of a casino, you have to be stoned to steal petty cash from them. You’re going to get caught, and you’re going to get a felony over a small amount of money. Nobody sober does that.
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.
This is like a tour of logical fallacies. How about some data?
I don’t think there is much data to be had, at least public. But I can tell you in the 5 years my brother has been there, they have had zero armed robbery attempts, and several employee theft attempts. And a quick Google about whether dispensaries get robbed frequently will show you people from the industry saying the same thing.
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.
If you smoke weed, why do you care if people judge you negatively? Aren’t you making the deliberate choice to free yourself from society’s expectations? Judgment is society’s very weak tool for getting narcissistic individuals to behave in a civilized manner. If you don’t want negative judgment, maybe try conforming to what society views as positive? Or don’t conform and just deal with what people think of you.
Don’t bully people for smoking a plant. Easy.
Which is why if you want to steal from dispensaries, just work in security, like your brother. Who's to say he's not stealing, and simply not bragging to you about it?
I said he’s a supervisor, not in security. He’s not an idiot. He’d be caught very quickly. Cash controls are such that everyone is.
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.
Thank god he was smart enough to avoid becoming a security guard, the natural path to thievery.
But he is high every single moment at work by your reasoning, yes?
I’m not sure you even read the comment you were replying to. Click “parent” a few times and you’ll see “My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.”
The federal illegality of the weed business (and downstream effects of that illegality on working/business conditions) affects who works there, and that includes white collar employees (also investors, etc.)
Definitely. There are a lot of strange quirks to working at one.
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.
Golden rule of customer service is you can not demand service while simultaneously degrading the people who provide it to you.
That dig at employees of dispensaries is really low
I've known directors to steal from companies so the stereotype doesn't really jive.
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.
Often enough, it isn’t an actual ATM. You pay at the counter like you usually would using a card or an NFC payment method (e.g., Apple Pay), but the payment reader processes it as an ATM withdrawal transaction (hence an extra transaction fee of a few dollars). There is no physical cash involved at any point in this (at least not on the dispensary premises).
Sure, for people that want to pay 5$ more for every transaction.
Probably a good number of people don't.
Where I’ve been, they round up to the nearest multiple of 5, and the extra you pay is kept as credit on your account towards future purchases.
That's kinda shitty. They just give us the 5 back cash.
Maybe this is a state by state thing? I have never observed this in WA.
I've heard Origins in Redmond does this, IIRC. But I believe that to be the exception, not the rule.
Is the payment service operating in a regulatory gray area or loophole?
I think the ATM isn't actually dispensing cash. You're doing an ATM transaction for a certain amount of money, but what you're actually getting is weed.
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."
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.
Out of the 15+ SWIM has been to in WA state, SWIM has never seen a dispensary take anything but physical cash (bills and coins).
Nope, it's just a regular ATM operated by a 3rd party company. You get cash from it then give them the cash. The store will also often reimburse for the ATM fee.
Nope, see other comments. My interpretation is correct.
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.
Signs that times are a' changing -- you can buy illegal drugs with a card now.
(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...)
Do they have jurisdiction to go and do that?
sure they do. for example it's illegal to be in possession of marijuana and a firearm. the purchase of said MJ would be pretty good evidence that could lead to other warrants. That's the Hunter Biden gun charge.
It's oddly not. Only to be a user or addict with a firearm. IIRC if you just like the way weed looks in your hand that doesn't make you a user, and there's plenty of reasonable doubt you're guarding it for grandma or whoever.
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.
oh fair enough about the "user" vs possession. but my point was they could possible use this info to get a warrant to surveil you to catch you using it.
They don't need that. I was served a federal search warrant after a detective wrote an anonymous officer claimed an anonymous DOG accused me of wrongdoing.
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Even a rubber-stamp warrant process serves a point, by making the police identify who they are targeting, as opposed to targeting everyone, and deciding who to charge after the fact.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
fair. its not hard to get a warrant. but your info in the database could still make you a target
What you're saying is how people generally think the law works, but it's not how it works in practice. This is easily illustrated with possession of drug paraphernalia charges. There's two types of possession, actual and constructive - but both face the exact same charge. Constructive just means something like 'could be reasonably accessed.'
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.
What you're saying is how people generally think the prohibited possessor law works, but it's not how it works in practice. It says nothing of drug possession, only gun/ammo possession by someone who uses or addicted to illegal drugs. There is plenty of reasonable doubt that constructive or actual possession of drugs is not accompanied by use, in fact this is the case for many dispensary workers.
The worst part is that the states are quite happy to help the feds enforce this. E.g. Hawaii has both mandatory gun registration and requires a state-issued license for medical marijuana. And if you happen to have both, well:
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.
It would be great if the DEA and ATF were a bit more consistent in their enforcement. Joe Rogan smokes pot and has guns, federal agents busting down his studio door and dragging him away in handcuffs (while state ones look on and clap) would do more to move the needle on drug legalization than most anything else.
This is why I'm going to buy a gun to celebrate marijuana moving to schedule 3
The Silver Platter doctrine prevents your financial institutions from handing over that data unbidden, but they can do so by request from law enforcement.
which law enforcement can get, trivially, if they're prosecuting a felony.
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...
If you get hit with a federal charge and they care enough, federal prosecutors can absolutely dig into your financial records.
That said, I imagine it would only get done if they really wanted to throw the book at you...
"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
Except they’re legal drugs
Reclassified, not legalized. As per the article it will now be classified along anabolic steroids, ketamine, and other such things.
which is to say, still illegal, just that you won't get 25 to life for a few plants.
DEA isn't kicking down doors to bust dudes doin 'roids, mostly nailing low-hanging fruit like doctors who blatantly spam fake steroid prescriptions
Yes this seems to be increasingly common, at least on the west coast. The suboptimal part is that the buyer typically gets hit with an out-of-network ATM fee for doing this, so the consumer is paying $2-5 for processing per transaction.
That’s pretty small potatoes though compared to going to a bank yourself and making a transaction for cash you don’t normally have around. Maybe there’s an ATM down the block but that’s not the case for many people.
Use a credit union or bank that doesn’t charge ATM fees; that’s what I do. Any CU-related ATM withdrawal is always free and I get 10 ATM withdrawals a month with fees reversed.
Unlimited fees reversed with Schwab checking. No monthly fee to figure out how to avoid, either.
So they just eat the fees?
Yes, even exorbitant ones like on a cruise ship or casino. Free checks, too. And mutual funds with lower fees than Vanguard. But virtually no physical branches (most locations are brokerage offices only) so not ideal for depositing cash or getting a cashier's check... use something else for that.
The Neo-Bank I use in Germany (N26) works similarly. 3 or 5 fee-eaten withdrawals per month, but the always free option is supermarket registers. There’s a large network of supermarkets that are connected to the network, and I can generate a code on my phone, scan it, and it registers the negative value (e.g. -50 €), which I then get handed. Deposits work the same way (scan code, generate positive amount that you then pay), but at least for free accounts deposits incur a fee.
They eat the fees because operating physical branches is much more costly still.
And if you're truly abusing it and costing them massively with fees, they can always close your account.
Almost all CUs use the same company to provide the ATM network. The fees between them get zeroed out in part because the transaction stays in house.
It’s probably better to say “nearly all CU withdrawals” because they don’t have a perfect monopoly.
And those ATMs around the block from a dispensary (or even in the same buildimg) would still charge a fee for withdrawal anyway (as they are always a third-party ATM and not a bank one, so you get that big message on the screen about an extra fee for withdrawal).
You can use a brokerage account that reimburses atm fees.
Or a credit union.
Or some banks
That's a fairly a common practice for cash only businesses, normally a different company is supplying the ATM and its cash. For example I've seen cash only ice cream shops with the same setup.
That's not what he's describing. In this case there actually is no cash or traditional ATM involved on-site. It's connected to the dispensary POS, not a physical ATM. (They often have a regular ATM like you describe also, though.)
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.
Oh interesting. Does it appear on your end as a cash advance when using a credit card?
Nope. ATM withdrawal. My bank even reimburses the ATM fee associated with it
An ATM withdrawal with a credit card is a cash advance.
Oh my bad, read the question wrong. They just don’t support CCs. Debit only
Isn't that how a traditional ATM transaction works? You use the ATM and the money goes to the ATM owner (plus a fee). The only difference here is you get weed instead of cash.
Does it actually keep cash out of the store? They might just have to keep track of it at the back of house still.
you answered it yourself
Which most take off the couple of bills for processing fee's.
The ATM is usually registered to a different business around the corner or something like that.
Business 2 owns the building and the atm, renting it to business 1, the dispensary. B1 pays the cash as rent to b2 who puts it into the ATM again. A SWAG but it's common enough in other business setups to alter costs as I understand it.
THEREFORE they will be able to move CASH money out of their stores TO BANKS, resulting in fewer "smash and grab" incidents ... aka, "Hyundai meet storefront of weed shop."
Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it.
Every dispo in my area (Metro Detroit) has concrete pillars surrounding the building, usually every two feet or so.
One of the first to open a few years back got hit early and everyone seems to have learned the lesson.
Those short pillars are called bollards.
Every fan of physics is recommended to look up bollard test videos.
And one of the best Twitter accounts: https://twitter.com/WorldBollard
I just browsed this far longer than I'd care to admit.
same :)
‘I don’t even think it was my fault!’
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.
Oh my god. As someone who can't see well enough to get a license, but somehow can see bollards just fine as a passenger: If you can't see them, you shouldn't be fucking driving.
This is amazing, made me laugh out loud, have to be careful though, as I'm currently in the office. :D
Just did! =)
The gravity of physics always brings me down.
(sorry!)
Well-known to expert GeoGuessr players as a convenient way to quickly tell what country you're in on a random rural road, as different countries use mysteriously consistent different bollard styles even when their road surfaces are otherwise almost identical.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bollard+meta
The ones in DC typically seem to be either on 2nd floors or in basements. Security outside at the entrance to the steps.
The ones I've seen in the Detroit area seem to mostly be in areas zoned industrial, which typically means single story, stand alone buildings with few "eyes on the street". Going to guess Michigan has restrictive zoning requirements for marijuana businesses that keep it out of the public eye.
First line in your link:
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.
Cash has to leave the building at some point.
There's typically far more monetary value in product in any weed shop than there is cash, likely by an order of magnitude. Many of the purchases are done electronically, so there's not as much cash as you might think in most dispensaries.
How are these purchases done electronically if the stores cannot process credit cards? After there dispensaries more commonly using crypto that I don't know about?
they charge debit, so it's basically an atm withdrawal at point of sale.
Up to the 1990s (and probably still to this day, IDK how electronic payments have impacted this) there was a whole industry dedicated to getting cash off business premises and into banks.
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...
I guess the weed can still be stolen
then again, you can just grow it yourself w/o risk of being shot
Can't buy shit with weed. Gotta sell it. And that has time requirements and risks to you (including getting robbed yourself).
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.
The poverty and gangster culture is going to stay the same so this seems like a weird kind of social take, I mean wont grifters just find another way to hurt common folk?
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.
Which Starbucks?
The poor San Bernardino Sheriff's department is going to need a new funding source, too.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-28/marijuan...
I don’t get why they don’t just use Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Mainly because your employees, suppliers, and landlord have no desire to be paid in Bitcoin.
What does that matter? You can convert Bitcoin into cash. But then you can do that in an undisclosed location at your leisure instead of keeping a mountain of cash in your publicly advertised storefront location and becoming a huge robbery target.
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.
And for all that convenience, each BTC transaction costs only $7 !
So use Bitcoin Cash or any of the other alternatives with lower transaction fees.
The transaction fee for a cash transaction is $0 and no time for the consumer.
That is the benchmark you are competing against.
Cash transactions require you to make change and are a target for theft. This is neither free nor zero time.
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.
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.
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.
No sane person uses Bitcoin as a currency because it is a fundamentally unsound ponzi scheme for suckers. I don't want my salary to be subject to the vagaries and manipulations of the Bitcoin exchange rate.
If you don't want to hold Bitcoin or be exposed to price changes, you can set your hourly rate in dollars, be paid at the current exchange rate and immediately convert it back into dollars. The advantage of this over being paid in physical cash is that it's electronic and then you're not carrying two weeks salary in physical cash on your person for somebody to mug you.
two weeks salary in physical cash
How expensive do you think weed is? You can get baked every day for two weeks for $50, probably less
We're talking about their employees, not their customers. If you can't get a bank account, you can't pay employees with direct deposit.
There are plenty of sane people who use Bitcoin as a currency. Making blithe moral declarations like this doesn't spark curiosity and is incredibly tired after so many years (you're not the first).
"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?
So if I as a consumer want to buy weed:
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?
Because you don't have cash to begin with, you have money in a bank account, which you have to convert to something else to pay the dispensary. Converting it via cash instead of Bitcoin just makes it easier for you to be mugged.
To be honest, I’m far more concerned about crypto scams, wallet hacks, etc, than I am worried about getting mugged for ~$100 at the dispensary parking lot.
That seems like a weird set of priorities? If someone hacks your crypto wallet with $100 in it, you could lose $100. If someone mugs you when you have $100 in your wallet, you could lose $100 and get shot.
Crypto scams are... completely unrelated? It's like being worried about using a bank account because there are ponzi schemes that use bank transfers.
All of the legit Bitcoin-to-cash orgs will report that to the IRS, and then you're back to square one: what do you do with that wad of cash? Orgs that don't report to the IRS probably aren't giving you a good exchange rate, and you're still left holding the bag afterward.
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.
Nobody wants to stand around for several minutes waiting for transactions to clear.
Ethereum average block time is 12s (with low variance) and high chance of getting tx included in the next block. Still too long for a point-of-sale payment, but its feasible. Then there's fees that are too high on L1 (several dollars minimum).
L2s fix this (~immediate settlement, cents in fees), but it's another layer and another account for users to manage (which is annoying).
Because you can't yet purchase electricity/internet with bitcoin (directly).
That's just because crypto shills just don't get obvious facts about reality, not because obvious facts about reality aren't objectively and provably true. That's just the way cults and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and fraud work, so stop being a shill and wondering why nobody believes or respects you, because there's a lot you don't get.
Those two specifically have super high transaction fees which basically kills their use as normal currencies.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
That's so sad.
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.
You can in the U.S. too. For instance, in Portland we have a neighborhood shop and you can use a debit card there because each transaction is classified as an ATM transaction. All the ban ever did was making accounting and reporting more complicated, it didn't stop state legal sales or transactions.
The difference is in Canada it's actually fully legal at all levels of government, so the transaction is a normal point of sale transaction, it can also go through a credit card as a normal purchase without being subjected to the expensive cash advance interest rates, and so on. It can even be a tax-deductible and reimbursable business entertainment expense under similar conditions to alcohol.
Its super weird how america can make things half legal. In canada the responsibilities are divided up between different levels of government. None of this legal at one level but not another level bullshit.
The same is true in Canada. There are things that are federally illegal that are not illegal at the provincial level. There are also local laws that supersede federal law. E.g. There is no federal law against woodburning for home heat, but many local jurisdictions have banned it for air quality reasons, and provinces also have pollution laws. You can have something be illegal in one town, and legal outside of it, or illegal province wide but legal in another province.
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.
That's not what supersede means.
There is no federal law about wood burning stoves because the constitution assigns environment to the provinces.
If environment is assigned to the provinces then what is the Canadian Environment Protection Act https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services....
AFAICT it’s the federal laws about pollution.
It’s easier to pull this off when the number of states fits on one hand.
If you mean provinces in Canada's context, then no, the number of provinces does not fit on one hand. In fact it barely fits on two, and that's only if you don't count the territories as well.
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.
It was supposed to be that way in the US but then populists decided they wanted the federal government to do all the things the constitution said it couldn't.
Extended banking services are difficult. Finding a fdic insured bank that will do business with a dispensary is hard. The business, esp those that aren't already multinational or national conglomerates with enormous amounts of cash
This is really exciting to see.
Will US Bankruptcy Court deal with a debtor that sells weed?
I’ve done it in New York City, in a really clean and hipstery shop in park slope, Brooklyn. Paid with a debit card, the whole process felt legit and professional, that was a great experience. They also offered really fancy teas and coffees.
How? It's still federally illegal to sell schedule 3 to consumers without a DEA licensed rx and dea licensing. The banks would still be knowingly in conspiracy to transmit illegal drug money and a litany of felonies for recreational or purely state-licensed 'medical'.
You can sell schedule 3 drugs to consumers. Pharmacies do this all the time.
'without a DEA licensed rx and dea licensing'
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.
But it does mean that it will actually, for the first time ever in living memory, be possible for someone to fully federally legally possess a THC-active form of cannabis without further Congressional action. I'm not sure if a state-legal cannabis supply chain could be fully federally legal in this context, but imagine if a pharma company goes through the FDA approval process for a THC pill and then doctors prescribe it for patients based on their medical judgment that it will help alleviate pain for some chronic condition like Crohn's disease. (I expect both of those steps to happen in practice, over time of course due to how many prerequisites exist for FDA approval, to the extent they haven't already been begun.)
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.
Very briefly. Until recent history the 10th amendment was understood to constrain the government from going outside enumerated powers, like intrastate commerce. This is why they needed an amendment instead of law to federally outright ban alcohol. Thus weed had an essentially unpayable 'tax' that got overturned by Timothy Leary
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.
Agree with the sentiment but isn't legal marinol roughly fulfilling that niche of THC pill?
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.
Fair point, yes. I was unaware of marinol when I typed that. I assume something more than just synthetic THC is being rescheduled, then. Maybe it will actually become possible to be prescribed a joint and to receive it at DEA-licensed pharmacies? Will the FDA be approving joints as drugs after clinical trials?
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...
"'without a DEA licensed rx and dea licensing'"
I know of several grocery stores without pharmacies or a local Rx license selling 1% hydrocortisone/hydrocortisone acetate - Schedule 4, 3, AND 2, simultaneously.
1% hydrocortisone, at least in the US, is not a controlled drug not do you need a pharmacy license to sell it.
No different than buying Tylenol at a gas station.
I think the point is that banks are no longer automatically required to reject any customer that deals with weed, because some of those transactions are going to be legal under the federal law. Which basically allows them to look the other way for all such transactions.
"One major effect of this is that weed stores will be able to use banks and payment processors legally once the regulators catch up."
Assuming banks/processors don't decide to restrict them for other reasons.
Wouldn't that be leaving money on the table? The bank that accepts business with marijuana vendors is at a competitive advantage to one that doesn't, no?
Not necessarily. It depends on the risks, morals, and stuff like ESG. We've seen this with stuff like alcohol, tobacco, and guns.
But you can buy alcohol, tobacco and guns with just about any payment method?
Porn and gambling are probably better examples. They're kryptonite to payment processors due to the chargeback risk.
Gambling is actually illegal trough, no? AFAIK porn is the only proper example
Gambling varies by type and jursidiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
There is no liquor store in the country where you can't pay with a card. Well, maybe not Uncle Ted's Moonshine Shack, but realistically it's not something anyone has to worry about. Different funds may not invest invest in those thing, payment processors might charge some businesses a slightly higher premium, but Visa/MC are not gonna police your legal consumer purchases.
People are talking about schedule 3 needing a prescription, etc. From the financial point of view that's irrelevant; the point is that you CANNOT legally sell schedule 1 drugs commercially (with some exceptions that I can't remember).
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.
Right. At the end of the day we need to just de-list it and strike all federal laws on it. The ship has sailed and the states won, let’s just do the inevitable thing and get on with it.
If it has been illegal to sell cannabis commercially, how have cannabis companies been allowed to form and be publicly traded? I would think that federal regulation to be publicly traded would cause issues.
Which US based weed companies are publicly traded?
You already answered this already :)
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.
Will they? Since it will be Schedule III, “weed stores” that aren't pharmacies distributing properly labelled drugs to people with prescriptions will still be violating the Controlled Substances Act and will probably have the same banking problems.
I don't see how this anything but a mandate for the DEA to crack down on recreational.
I don't see how rescheduling to a less-restrictive category is a mandate to change the existing enforcement policy to a more restrictive one.
Obviously, weed has made OP paranoid
I wonder if this means more tracking of drug purchases.
Does alcohol consumption show up on credit card bills and filter back to insurance companies?
they might not be able to see the purchases if you're in a state where you can buy booze in a 7/11 or grocery store; in that case it's just a grocery purchase. but they sure as hell can see that you have a charge from "CORNER LIQUOR STORE - $47.61 - 12 APRIL 2024" and can make guesses.
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.
Don't be so sure. Kava is regulated by the FDA as a food, but many banks and payment processors refuse to work with businesses that sell it.
But will they be able to write off business expenses? Section 280E of the US Tax Code is, as I understand it, is the major killer for the whole industry right now.
Edit: yes
https://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/tax_implications_reclassi...
Hopefully this will also help internationally. Many countries are just copying what the US is doing since they run a large part of world commerce and finance
I guess, but have you tried to gamble online using a CapitalOne mastercard? It's impossible. Your only recourse is an ACH transfer.