Drug Traffickers Seek Safe Haven Amid Legal Marijuana | Hacker News Reader

Drug Traffickers Seek Safe Haven Amid Legal Marijuana

abcnews.go.com

44 pointsevo_950 comments

I see a bit or irony here.

FTA: The Obama administration last month urged the Supreme Court to reject the suit, saying that the leakage was not Colorado's fault.

But just a few weeks ago, the same President argued that gun crime in Illinois is Indiana's fault for having less restrictive gun laws.

No one's vape ever ricocheted off a wall into a child's chest cavity...

Prosecutors have full discretion on the most important cases they choose pursue. This would be an exercise of that discretion.

IDK... that could have happened at some point.

Besides, that's like saying "no one ever got all baked and left their child in a hot car because they were carrying a gun.." In other words, it's kind of a pointless point.

The argument isn't one of severity, but of responsibility so your comment doesn't really address the argument being made.

I don't know why as society we are so adamant on censoring things or distorting reality to avoid hurting children the way we think is going to hurt them by exposure to marijuana etc but has somebody done the research that shows marijuana smoke hurts kids?

Nothing pisses me more off than seeing a parent light up a fucking cigarette in front of their kids. But marijuana? God forbid any kid with epilepsy or depression smoke the devil's drug and end up like reefer madness...

No irony; get rid of drug laws and you rid yourselves of drug crime; restrict gun sales and you reduce gun crime.

By definition more gun law (restricted sales) results in more gun crime if those laws are enforced.

"Get rid of gun laws and you rid yourselves of gun crime" would seem to be more equivalent.

Crime is more often in the intent/implementation, not the tools.

You can relax all the laws around gun sales, ownership, brandishing, etc. but shooting somebody will still be a crime.

The moral equivalent with drug laws would be drunk driving. (And I think that kills more people than guns.)

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, "gun crimes" refers to crimes committed with guns (murder, assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, etc.), not to violations of gun prohibition. There is no analogy to that with drugs. The only crime you can commit with a drug is a violation of prohibition. (Well, OK, maybe you can try to poison someone, but that's not exactly a rampant problem.)

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, "gun crimes" refers to crimes committed with guns (murder, assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, etc.), not to violations of gun prohibition.

In that case, one could argue that "drug crime" isn't really violation of prohibition laws but the crimes committed to feed the habits of addicts or crimes committed while under the influence of drugs.

In reality it's both. Gun crimes are shootings and non-violent violations of firearms regulations. Possession of an unlicensed machinegun is a gun crime.

Sure, but the vast majority of "crimes committed to feed the habits of addicts" would simply evaporate if there weren't prohibition because the price of drugs wouldn't be so high, so addicts wouldn't need to commit crimes to support their habit.

I don't know how much crime is actually committed under the influence. I'm pretty sure that smoking marijuana actually reduces one's tendency to commit crimes.

From what I remember, nothing more serious than mischief takes place when people are under the influence of marijuana and there is still a great deal of debate about whether or not marijuana is even addictive.

"drug crime" also includes the crimes committed by people who are addicted to heroin or cocaine.

>he only crime you can commit with a drug is a violation of prohibition.

Also DUI, Minor in possession, providing controlled substance to minor.

Those last two are definitely prohibition violations. DUI is arguable. DUI used to be called DWI - Driving While Impaired. But there are all kinds of ways you can be impaired. The fact that driving drunk is a crime but driving-while-sleepy isn't is evidence that anti-drunk-driving laws are really prohibition in disguise.

Using a mobile device whilst driving is probably a bigger overall threat to public safety than stoned drivers (not that people should drive while high).

You're making a meme-worthy argument.

You can get rid of any crime by making it legal. I'm not sure I see the point.

This is one of the least surprising "negative" outcomes of legal marijuana in selective states. I put negative in quotes just as a signal that it's not exactly optimal, but there's an argument that by moving their growth operations somewhere legal, it reduces the likelihood of violence in that particular aspect of the black market marijuana industry.

In CA, making grows legal has just made the illegal grow problem worse, since the legal crop masks the illegal crop in the supply chain. We have huge problems with illegal grows on public lands (or other people's private lands out of easy view) and the concomitant adverse effects (toxins, erosion, dumping, workers imported illegally, violence against neighbors and enforcement agencies, price pressure on legal operations, ...).

Interesting - do you have a reference for this?

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I personally can't stand weed, mostly for the smell and allergic potential of public or shared-wall-dwelling smoking. At some level, it was a joy to move out of Colorado, to an "illegal" place where public and apartment smoking is much more rare.

Even to me, with this admitted bias, this article is another great argument for 50 state legalization. Chasing legal weed across state lines is a huge resource-sink which wins us exactly nothing as a society. Just get it over with and legalize it everywhere, and use the funding you saved to step up enforcement of DUI laws, substance abuse help programs, and hell, fixing bridges and laying fiber.

Is it even technically allowed to smoke inside those apartments?

Yes, it's legal to smoke inside an apartment, so long as your lease doesn't disallow it for example.

Even for complexes where it's disallowed, good luck getting it enforced. I get weed smoke coming in through the ventilation system from who knows where in my completely non-smoking building on a regular basis.

Actually was the same before legalization too, and hasn't really increased, so this is sort of a non sequitur.

If your landlord fails to enforce the lease agreement, you can probably use that to get out of the lease. Our complex recently had people complaining about this very thing and they have started getting much stricter about it thank goodness.

You probably can't, unless your agreement expressly obliges the landlord to enforce the rule against other people rather merely than requiring you to follow the rule as a condition of being permitted to rent the apartment. This would be an unusual lease agreement.

In Colorado, many communities have started to actually enforce this, in the same way that repeated noise violations can lead to eviction or non-renewal. Now that it's no longer a police issue, and just an "inconsiderate prick" issue, property managers can address it in house.

You really think there's less weed smoking where it's illegal? How does that work? Drug laws work so it's next to impossible to obtain them? Fear of getting caught?

On this same thread, you wrote: "restrict gun sales and you reduce gun crime." So, why are the economics of banning guns vs. banning weed such opposites in your view?

So guns are a drug now are they?

I don't see the connection between guns and drugs.

Sure, there is less weed smoking where it's illegal. Aside from the factors you mention, there is an obvious one: people not doing something simply because it is against the law. People do make decisions on that basis.

> people not doing something simply because it is against the law. People do make decisions on that basis.

Conversely, people also make decisions on the opposite basis -- doing things because they are prohibited.

Not nearly the same amount do that, I assume.

Really? I can't imagine a single person ever saying "I've heard about people having profound, life altering experiences on drugs, but because they are illegal I won't take them". Such a person must have literally no respect for themselves at all.

Hi @dave2000, I am that man. Sure, I've done illegal things, and I still do, but generally I avoid breaking the law.

I note that my respect for the law has increased with age. Probably due to encountering more accomplished lawbreakers and not wanting to be the guy who says, "Yes, but it's OK if I break that law because it's a stupid law." Also knowing people who, perhaps, had a problem at an airport or with the state police. I find the law to be a useful reality check.

I note your argument above has made this into a 0/1 proposition ("because they are illegal I won't take them").

But I believe it is more true to reality to look at it probabilistically, i.e., on a given Friday night, is it more or less likely that I'd be offered MMJ by a friend if it's legal in CA versus not legal in CA.

I think this thought experiment clarifies the argument that consumption increases when MJ is legalized. Indeed, for medical MJ specifically, I think that is the point.

It's less public. There's actual fear of smoking in parks, pools, concerts, because it's still nominally illegal. After legalization in CO, public smoking went way up.

I suspect it'll drop down again after the novelty wears off and the public tires of it and wants smoking laws enforced.

But one nice perk of legalization is that it could be written into leases explicitly that smoking in the apartment is in violation of the lease and is grounds for eviction after repeated complaints. It's not a police matter or a "narcotics" issue, it's just somebody being an inconsiderate neighbor.

That's not a perk of legalization, since you can do that when the drug is illegal, as well. In fact, many leases do do that for all illegal drugs (which marijuana remains, due to federal prohibition, no matter what happens under state law.)

Yes, but there's a huge subjective difference between saying "You're an asshole, stop smoking up in a shared-wall-dwelling" and "You're a criminal, go to jail". Most managers are happy to address nuisance issues, but would rather reduce the number of police calls to the property.

Same thing with public smoking laws. People smoking up in a park upwind of people deserve a small ticket, an age check, and a harshed mellow. They do not deserve arrest and prosecution on drug laws.

Enforcement of disproportionate punishment is less attractive to sane humans.

The fact that something is a criminal offense does not mean that landlords cannot also handle it as a contract issue when it is addressed in a lease.

Again, legalization doesn't enable anything here.

I'd rather CO/WA/CA solve the public nuisance problem of smoking (we juuuust finished clearing most public airspace of cigarette smoke, and now MJ is bringing it back) before rolling out legalization nationwide. MJ smokers aren't advocating themselves persuasively.

This is a big issue, I think. Concerts are really, really bad in Colorado these days.

My hope is that widespread legality and availability of tinctures and edibiles and non-plant-containing vaporizing juice, there will be an increased number of ways for people to get high without being inconsiderate to the people around them.

Colorado to other states: sounds like a you problem.

It seems there's a very simple solution to this problem....

> That "is really hard to curb," he said. "We can't essentially babysit adults and their behavior."

We need more people like this in government.

I would think that all of the ins and outs of these different-legality-by-state issues were mostly sorted during Prohibition. So, it's fun to speculate about who won the 'exporting devil alcohol' legal debates of the 1920s. We definitely would not benefit as a Union from having export controls implemented by states, which of course just shows up some of the weirdness of having a federated legal system.

Url changed from http://www.latinpost.com/articles/112868/20160202/marijuana-..., which points to this.

thanks for this. wondering what was the motivation for the change!

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