Why is this? Why this derangement on the subject of cannabis? I've read a fair amount, and every time I've brought it up, I get downvoted to hell. So, I'll ask:
Anyone have a hypothesis on why a large number of our leaders, who happen to be older white men, are insanely against this plant?
"We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief)
In the interim, it became a wedge issue and via "tough on crime", an extension of certain party platforms, (also in that it has effectively become the status quo for some population segments) and I think persists largely as some combination of the above.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
Cocaine is a schedule 3 stuff. Cannabis and crack cocaine are schedule 1.
The only reason to support the current drug laws is literally because you want more crime and drug use.
You can even evaluate this without malice: Some say MJ is dangerous, and some say it's great. The status quo is that it is banned. Changing that creates the risk that it is bad and the change will be blamed on you, but legalizing will not bring you much glory, so you support the status quo until you have sufficient incentive (most likely $$$, but a strong push from the public instead of "meh" would also count).
That said, I find a mix of opportunism and greed to be the most likely explanation.
edit: I should clarify that medicinal herbs one can grow oneself scare the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry, and they will (and do) spend money to keep such plants illegal. There is also money from private prison companies who earn profit on the incarceration of citizens who stand to lose money if marijuana is fully decriminalized (I’m not going to pull a number out of thin air, but I believe it is a majority of inmates who are locked up for victimless drug crimes). State and local police departments love to receive federal grants to keep on fighting the war on drugs. There is so much money and effort against the legalization of a f’ing plant, and from so many sides, that even a well-meaning politician can look at the “evidence” and believe the public, as a whole, wants to keep Mother Nature illegal.
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Did I maybe miss a supreme Court case where that bit of it was neutered?
You can't really have it both ways. Forced labour in prison creates a colossal conflict of interest for the state, even in a world where the law is just, and is applied fairly. (We don't really live in that world.)
What I stated was a fact. Too bad, that you don't like facts, or that you try to dismiss the fact that it is slavery by comparing it to chattel slavery.
This isnt some bigoted law in some Southern state legislature. This is enshrined as federal constitutional law, and is also why the USA is not a signatory to numerous anti-slave treaties.
> If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime.
No, "I" didn't call it slavery. The 13th amendment did. Too bad the constitution isnt enough of a authoritative source. And then, you dismiss it with whataboutism. I live in the USA, and am dscussing USA constitutional law; Im not discussing your whataboutism of countries I dont live in.
We can discuss controversial subjects. Happens quite often. But you're wanting me to respect the fact that people are OK with slavery. Put it this way: I have ethics, and this is beyond the pale.
This "argument" is nothing more than a decorum complaint. Slavery, in all its forms, is Wrong. Anybody who supports slavery is Wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts.
And we fought a war over this very issue, and the 'compromise' was that criminals could be enslaved. Who'da thought that the majority of those who were chattel slaves would end up as "criminals", and back where they started? Its high time we excise that criminals part from the 13th.
Combine it with these observations:
1) Trials are increasingly rare, most criminals in prison never had one, they made a plea deal
2) The difference between a maximum sentence and a plea deal can be an order of magnitude (2 years instead of 20)
3) Dark skinned people can rationally expect that they won’t receive a fair trial, given bias in police investigations, DA practices, and juries.
... That adds up to a lot of innocent dark skinned people in prison, who quite rationally traded their civic rights for a smaller variability in their risk profile.
I guess what’s “better” about that than chattel slavery is that person had a possibility of release. So instead of 100% chance of incarceration and loss of civil rights, they had only an 80% chance of incarceration. Is that your position?
Personally, that doesn’t feel like a qualitative difference. Seems like the same situation just moved to a different psychic plane. But, interested in your thoughts.
These systems aren't as bad as chattel slavery because there is a strict legal requirement of when they must end (usually within a year), the citizen remains a citizen (albeit a military one as well) and thus still gets due process (outside of military punishments for, say, defecting or pointing a gun at a superior officer), the citizen can own property while doing their service, they get to do whatever they want with their own money, etc etc etc.
I still think they're wrong, for many reasons, but also because I don't believe there should be militaries designed for human-human conflict.
The Supreme Court does not have the authority to "neuter" parts of the Constitution.
It's not just cannabis though. This whole ideology can be applied to many topics. Where older people grew up being taught to hate it, while younger generations seem to be more rational and open to understanding that these taboo subjects may not be as bad as society wants you think. Some other topics that fall into this category include abortion, female workers/pay, war.
If I were constantly told by a number of authority figures that Argentina was a war-torn shithole with rampant poverty and violence, I'd likely believe it. I've never been there, I don't know anyone from there, and I have no reason to suspect those who I trust are liars.
I'm astounded that psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD are all scheduled so harshly.
Hemp threatened the cotton industry.
Cannabis was more usual among Mexican immigrant workers, which is why they renamed it to something more Mexican sounding.
It was a convenient way of breaking up the hippie movement and avoiding Vietnam war protests.
It has many medicinal uses and less side effects than the artificial crap we call medicine these days.
It scrambles the programming, people start asking themselves the wrong questions when using it.
It allows the government to conduct a war against its own people, and discriminate freely; while claiming to protect.
And on it goes...
States have managed to foment different levels of social stigma.
In Sweden, where I was born; you might as well do crack cocaine in most peoples eyes.
Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition.
Have you ever asked yourself if prohibition was the best way to combat drug problems?
I would suggest reading the book "Rise of the warrior cop" and then ask yourself if you still support prohibition.
However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful.
If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive.
It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect.
I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects.
Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree.
This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.
If I'm totally honest with myself I have to appreciate where they are coming from to a degree. I in no way think that marijuana is bad and I think it's actually extremely beneficial in many ways, but it is, for lack of a better word: strong.
Getting drunk can make you act like an idiot and be life threatening but it doesn't really change how you think, it just sort of shuts down pieces of your brain. Weed in some sense changes who you are. I think this effect is what a lot of people are afraid of.
So in the end I don't think "older white men" are actually being racist (intentionally) but they are just conservatives who are really uncomfortable altering their state of consciousness. I don't agree with it, but I think it's often a good faith argument on their part.
No one should be forced to do drugs of any kind but what is it with this 'baseline hostility' towards altered states?
When the basis of objection is largely emotional facts aren't all that helpful.
That said, the "counter culture" gave us the war on drugs, gun control, probably a couple other curtailments of personal freedom that I'm forgetting, they reduced public support for the civil rights movements of the time and provided an excuse for the three letter agencies to greatly increase their amount of domestic surveillance. In return we got out of 'nam a year, maybe two, earlier. I don't see why people romanticize the culture shifts of the 1960s. Their intentions were good but their methods flawed and their results worse.
As someone who has found some actual relief from previously crippling anxiety using cannabidiol, I'm really hoping to see progress on this front. It's all upwards from here for me.