Mexico's Supreme Court has decriminalised the private use of cannabis by adults | Hacker News Reader

Mexico's Supreme Court has decriminalised the private use of cannabis by adults

bbc.co.uk

392 pointspmoriarty275 comments

It's supersad to me that in 2021 this subject is controversial. I think the "war on drugs" charade has gone long enough and it's time to actually do the right thing. Stop targeting minorities with this stupid war and legalize ALL drugs. Period. Offer rehab programs + make sure that whatever is on the market is safe and the effects are well documented and understood.

> legalize ALL drugs

I'm no expert here, and I hope I'm not misreading your statement, but couldn't this be swinging too far in the other direction? It seems like equating marijuana with, say, heroin and meth -- they're all in the category of 'drugs', and we know pot isn't addictive like opiates. The neural pathways these compounds take are important.

I'd certainly argue legalization of pot is overdue, but does that mean nothing should be illegal?

Not exactly drawing my line in the sand, as I haven't give this much thought. I'm genuinely interested in perspectives on the legalize everything vs some things.

Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

If someone wants to have fun skydiving and risk crashing their head in to the ground, let them. It's their choice. If overindulging in whatever activity interferes with a person's life, that should be a medical issue not a criminal one.

The War on Drugs is an abject failure and hurts much more than it helps. People are going to be doing these drugs anyway, only with the War on Drugs they're going to be doing so in much more damaging ways (from playing Russian Roulette with mystery drugs, and from the harm that arrests by police, imprisonment, and destruction of families and these people's futures cause).

totally agree.

also here's the thing: the war on drugs was never about drugs. It was about controlling the masses and about marginalizing certain categories of people. Rich white people could and can do ANY drug they want with virtually no consequence. Let that sink in for a second.

If you want to be really outraged look at how crack and cocaine are treated as far as law goes and as far as punishment goes. https://drugpolicy.org/drug-facts/cocaine/difference-crack

> Despite the fact that the chemical structure of powder cocaine and crack cocaine is nearly identical, the punishment for crack possession or sales is far greater than that of cocaine. Until 2010, this sentencing disparity was 100 to 1, which means that while just 5 grams of crack would carry a 5-year mandatory minimum, it would take 500 grams of cocaine to trigger the same 5-year sentence. While the law was changed in 2010, there continues to be a disparity of 18 to 1.

This sentencing disparity has had a disproportionate impact on poor people and people of color. Statistics show that Black people are more likely to be convicted of crack cocaine offenses (even though the majority of crack cocaine users are white) and white people are more likely to be convicted of powder cocaine offenses. This means that Black people continue to receive far harsher drug sentences than white people even though powder and crack cocaine are nearly identical substances.

Crack and cocaine were treated differently by the laws because their social effects were seen as different. Crack was seen as destroying inner cities in the 80s and those disproportionate punishments were directed at the dealers in an attempt to protect those communities. The black caucus in congress pushed for those laws.

yeah. the black caucus. are you for real?

Speaking of reality, it's usually more complicated and nuanced than simple narratives about good versus evil.

Here's an interesting profile from the 80s of Charles Rangel, when he was chair of the house narcotics committee and perhaps the strongest proponent of tough sentencing in congress.

https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=3NQDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA128&r...

> Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

You cannot know in advance what mental state a given drug will put a specific adult in (in general, at least), and thus you cannot predict whether there will be harm to others or not.

This is not an argument for prohibition; it is an argument against a "legalize all drugs" position.

you can. it's called research. it can be done (if it hasn't already been done) on virtually any drug.

education + choice are key when it comes to deciding if you want to try drug X. this should be a personal choice not something big brother decides.

You think you can predict someone's response to major hallucinogens? Even with cannabis, among my friends and family who use it, there's a wide variation in response, particularly in levels of reported paranoia.

Research will clarify the statistical level, but isn't necessarily of much help with predicting individual results.

Psychedelics ("hallucinogens" is a pejorative, inaccurate, and outdated term) are some of the most unpredictable of drugs, but there's been a lot of research that has shown the chances of a constructive experience can be maximized with the right dose, set and setting, especially if trained support and integration is available.

Many of the people who suffer from paranoia and other adverse effects from psychedelics probably take them in the wrong setting, with the wrong setting, and in too high a dose for their experience level.. and often unsupervised too.

Education will help here, but ultimately less than ideal use can't be completely eliminated as some people won't care, won't listen, won't believe, etc... But even that kind of use will be way, way, way safer if the substances they take are legal, since they can at least be certain they'll be taking what they thought they bought and they can be sure of the substance's purity and dosage. On the black market it's all a crapshoot, and lots of people have died that way (even if they don't get shot by a cop in a raid or get murdered in jail if they get arrested and imprisoned).

I don't disagree with any of the "ideal scenarios" that you've outlined here.

But you're apparently completely discounting the idea that if all (most?) drugs are legal, more people will try more drugs and that statistically speaking, not all of those new experiences will happen under the ideal scenarios that you've outlined.

Again, this isn't an argument for prohibition. It is an argument against simplistic rationales like "adults should get to do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others".

Whether more drugs will be used by more people depends in large part on how legalization is implemented.

If, say, heroin ads and a wide variety of colorful heroin preparations with outrageous claims are allowed when heroin is legalized, as they are with cannabis then yeah, it's likely that use could rise significantly.

But it's unlikely that the legal heroin market will be allowed to be the kind of free-for-all that cannabis has had. Ads will probably be forbidden, and there'll probably be just one or a handful of heroin preparations in white-labeled containers, as there are for generic prescription drugs... and you'll probably need a prescription to get it too... and you'll probably need to register as a heroin user and maybe even be required to undergo treatment.

So that's a totally different approach to legalization compared to cannabis. Heroin and cocaine, if they're ever legalized will be heavily regulated, and then not nearly as many people will be drawn to using them, compared to cannabis which most people think is harmless and which is advertised heavily wherever it's legal, with a million enticing preparations of all kinds and no prescription needed to get it.

Something else to consider is the example of the Netherlands, where it was shown that Dutch teens were much less likely to use cannabis (despite it being effectively legal in the Netherlands) than their American teen counterparts when cannabis was illegal in the US. The Dutch teens just didn't think cannabis was cool, unlike American kids who were drawn to the forbidden fruit.

So, paradoxically, drugs can be made to be less enticing when legalized than they are when they're illegal.

Yet another thing worth mentioning is that pretty much everyone who actually wants to use a given drug can freely do so now, while it's illegal. It's not unavailability but disinterest or fear of addiction that's keeping most non-users away right now. That won't change with legalization.

Also, according to wikipedia (not definitive, but likely indicative of current thinking), psychedelics are just one subset of the larger family of hallucinogens:

> A hallucinogen is a psychoactive agent that often or ordinarily causes hallucinations, perceptual anomalies, and other substantial subjective changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness that are not typically experienced to such degrees with other drug classifications. The common classifications for hallucinogens are psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants.

If you come to forgive yourself or your parents as a result of taking psilocybin, is that a hallucination? If you overcome your depression or PTSD as a result of taking ketamine (a "dissociative"), is that a hallucination?

Calling these substances hallucinogens is inaccurate, and it's pejorative because it presumes that what's experienced on them is unreal.

Many of the things experienced on them not only seem to be but are to many of their users more real than ordinary waking reality. To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

Perceptual anomalies and changes in thought, emotion, and consciousness all happen on psychedelics, dissociatives, and deleriants. These are not useful distinctions.

It's handy to differentiate between the "resting state" of perception and other states. That doesn't make the "resting state" (i.e. no recent ingestion/injection of any psycho-active compounds) more real, but it does provide a baseline that makes it easier to discuss the differences, similarities and unknowns when in other states.

I'm sorry that you think that the term "hallucinogen" is so loaded with perjorativeness. I don't find it hard to notice how many terms we use in English may have in the past had been used with perjorative intent and have lost that sense. From my perspective, "hallucinogen" (and "hallucinating") is one of them. I don't read "hallucinating" as "having an unreal experience of the world", but rather "having an experience of the world that differs substantively from the resting state".

> To dismiss them as hallucinations is to privilege your own view of reality over theirs.

AFAIK, anyone who has had such an experience has also experienced the world in the "resting state". Because of this, the "priviledging" is not my view of reality versus theirs, but "one of their experiences" versus "another one of their experiences". It doesn't need to be inter-personal comparisons in any way.

Legalization would allow people to try it in a safe controlled environment and find out what something will do to them. And that would also be an ideal time to educate them about the actual risks and experiences they may experience before taking anything.

No question about that.

But that doesn't translate into knowing what the results of a given person taking a given drug will be, in terms of harm to others.

No one can know in advance what mental state alcohol will put a specific person in when they get drunk, and many drunks hurt or kill others all the time.. much more so than the users of any other drug.

Yet we've learned from the Prohibition of the 1920's and no one's seriously suggesting making alcohol illegal again.

>Adults should be allowed to have any mind state they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

I mean, exactly the issue here is that if you allow all adults to take as much meth as they want, they will start hurting someone else indirectly.

ALL drugs. ALL of them. It works. It has been done before and it was wildly successful.

https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...

I work at a shelter, let me give my on-the-ground opinion. People who get hooked on drugs normally do so because their life is awful. Opioids, amphetamines, and barbiturates (not common b/c of cost) are all different ways to escape reality. This checks out if you think of the main demographics of users: the homeless, the unemployed, the lonely elderly, poor rural workers, “problem” students, cooped up housewives. People with things going for them and/or who have a sense of purpose tend not to take these drugs, because the negative side effects are too great, mainly that no one wants to hang out with you if you are strung out.

And the drugs are not in scarce supply. They are not hard to find. What they /are/ though is incredibly dangerous. Most people taking them are very short on cash because they are hooked on drugs, so the drug is getting in the way of paying for food, housing, and family. And drugs are almost always cut with cheaper additives. Opioids are often cut with wildly addictive chemicals that are 100s or 1000s of times stronger than what users are paying for. Needles are expensive and controlled so they get reused. Uppers are cut with many kinds of other amphetamines with awful downsides and agitation that lasts for days on end. Alcohol is so cheap and available we don’t even consider it a dangerous drug, but those dependent on it will die of incredibly painful seizures if they stop taking it.

So put this all together and what we have is a nationwide mental health crisis being compounded by the fact that the easily available medicine people are using to self medicate is illegal, and that makes it dangerous.

Making all drugs legal is only one small part in solving the problem, but if it was legal we wouldn’t be dealing with homemade meth, fentanyl, relapse overdoses, and death by involuntary withdrawal (i.e., running out of money for the drug you are physically dependent on).

Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.

this person get it.

my theory is that poverty and social inequality in general (as a precursor of poverty) are at a root of a lot of things. It's very easy to pay lip service to X, Y and Z and ignore the elephant in the room.

"Making all drugs legal is only the first step to solving the problem, but if it was legal we wouldn't be dealing with homemade meth, fentanyl, overdoses, and death by involuntary withdrawal..."

I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations.

Legalization will make drug use way, way, way safer and lots less people will die and have their lives ruined (both from safer drugs and because they're not getting arrested, separated from their families, imprisoned, or killed by the police, etc..).

But overdoses will still happen because some people will still:

1 - intentionally overdose to kill themselves

2 - mix drugs, which is usually way more dangerous than using a single drug, and (depending on the drugs) how they interact might not even be known, so no safe dosage can be ascertained even if both were perfectly legal.. incidentally, mixing any of a large variety of drugs with alcohol is one of the deadliest combinations

3 - while on drugs people tend not to make the most carefully considered decisions, including whether to take more

Of course, all of this is still possible and still done even when drugs are illegal, and making drugs legal will improve almost all of these outcomes (except intentional suicide), since at least the drugs in question will be of known purity and dosage.. but there will still be overdoses (just a lot less of them).

look, if someone wants to kill themselves they will find a way.

IMHO, education is the key. With great power (access to drugs) comes great responsibility (you need to do the right thing). Nobody will mix things they know will get them killed. Nobody will overdose on purpose. Education and Personal Freedom.

"Nobody will mix things they know will get them killed. Nobody will overdose on purpose."

Well, setting aside intentional suicides, this is true. However, that doesn't mean that they won't mix stuff they don't know will get them killed.

Case in point is alcohol and any of a whole bunch of other drugs, which kills people all the time. Alcohol's already legal, and making other drugs legal won't stop people from mixing their (now pure) drugs with alcohol.

Education will definitely help, and I'm all for it. It's probably the most powerful source of good apart from legalization itself. However, some people just won't care or won't listen or won't believe or will be peer pressured in to doing it by their friends, or will already be too smashed on alcohol or some other drug to make the best decision so will mix in unsafe combinations anyway.

"Education and Personal Freedom."

I'm all for both, but we need to be aware that there will still be both intentional and unintentional overdoses. They happen from both currently legal over-the-counter and prescription medications, after all. Legalized drugs will be no different.

When is the last time you knew of someone becoming blind from a poorly made moonshine? Legalization works for one of our most widely available and life-ruining drugs, why wouldn’t it work for the others?

Alcohol being legal is better than it being illegal, but plenty of people harm or kill themselves and/or others on it all the time... so I hesitate to call this "working"... it's just not as bad as prohibiting it.

A similar state of affairs is likely to occur with legalization of other drugs, though fortunately most of them are much less harmful than alcohol.

> so I hesitate to call this "working"... it's just not as bad as prohibiting it.

I am missing the argument here -- its better to legalize than not legalize, but you are against legalizing? To level set, I don't think many people believe legalizing will make everything rosy. I believe instead they think it will improve the situation, and optimistically free up resources used for criminalization that may be better used for treatment, i.e. instead of training someone to be a cop you can train them to be a nurse.

"I am missing the argument here -- its better to legalize than not legalize, but you are against legalizing?"

No.

Look a couple of posts up in the thread you're responding to and you'll see me say:

"I'm 110% for legalization, but we need to set realistic expectations."

and I was responding to someone who was saying that if we legalize there'd be no overdoses. That's just wishful thinking. We need to legalize but be realistic about our predictions about what legalization is going to look like. No overdoses is not achievable (see my other posts in this thread as to the reasons why). But overdoses will definitely be reduced.

> When is the last time you knew of someone becoming blind from a poorly made moonshine?

This may not be a problem in urban America, but the world is slightly larger than that.

Try living in the Eastern bloc, you will find Russian moonshine is wildly popular and sometimes comes with methanol.

Same goes for China, India and many African countries — the profit motives are stronger where knowledge is more scarce.

Perhaps I'm getting into semantics, but I've heard the distinction made between legalization and decriminalization. Based on my understanding, 'decriminalization' is essentially "don't prosecute someone for using drugs," which can shift funding away from police and toward health care, focusing our societal attention accordingly. Contrast this with 'legalization', which I would phrase as having a sanctioned way to legally sell to the general public.

Am I wrong here? When I see people saying, "Legalize all drugs," I interpret it to mean, "make it so anyone can sell drugs and pay taxes on them" which seems pretty extreme to me. But "decriminalize all drugs" makes a lot more sense in this context. To be clear, it seems logical to me that we stop arresting people for using drugs, but it doesn't seem reasonable to go a step further and allow retail sales of opioids. (Again, it's complicated by the catchall term 'drugs', where retail pot sales are much less problematic than the example of opioids.)

Edit: Recognizing that exceedingly few people are likely to wake up one day and say, "I think I'll try heroin," maybe there's less of a difference between these two terms than I imagine? If legalization means regulations on the quality/purity of the product, for example, then 'sanctioning' retail sales would provide a benefit that 'decriminalization' wouldn't have.

you got it.

decriminalization == it’s still illegal, but you won’t get prosecuted for it (this deincentivizes law enforcement from pursuing it)

legalization == it’s legal and now you can buy it and consume it.

Decriminalization is a back door for criminal enterprises. They would still control supply, which means they would control quality, variety, price and availability.

Do we want to give monopoly on those powers to organized crime? Just look at the Netherlands: on the surface everything looks fine, but then there are murders of politicians…

> People who get hooked on drugs normally do so because their life is awful.

The thing is, we don't know what kind of people would get hooked on drugs if all of them were legal. We don't know if there's correlation between illegality and inaccessibility of the drugs and their abuse by people whose life if awful.

> They are not hard to find.

Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from. Making them legal would make vast majority of them absolutely aware of where to get them from.

> Legalized drugs won’t cause your children or loved ones to start doing drugs, a lack of opportunity will.

Oh yes it will. Not everyone who lacks opportunities in life is willing to resort to illegal drugs right now. But if they were legal, many more would.

I am sorry, but from logical standpoint, your experience is is an observational bias. Looking at a society at large, from statistical perspective, legalizing hard drugs would make many more compelled to try them, purely by enabling them to do so.

Decriminalizing them, however, would surely improve situation, especially if the money spent on enforcement was spent on mental health instead – see Portugal as a great example of such policy.

BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".

It’s baffling how people cherry-pick their opinions on this subject. When someone working the field says the usual ”drugs are bad” mantra, people agree and say: listen to this expert, he knows what actually happens.

But when that field expert says otherwise, she is no longer being listened to. Were we listening, understanding and thinking the first time?

Btw, drugs don’t kill people — people selling fake, cut and laced drugs do. In other words, profit motives kill people.

> BTW: replace "drugs" with "guns" and you sound like "guns don't kill people, people do".

I think this misses the nuances of these arguments. I can speak for my self, where my view points could be summarized to be to increase restrictions on guns and legalize all drugs. You would be right this seems to be inconsistent.

But that's not really my view point at least. Guns are necessary to some degree, but I dont think they need to be given out at as freely as they are. Not everyone needs one, i think we can restrict through something like applications you has one and who doesn't. Also restrict the types of firearms(And im not here to debate gun control, im just explaining there's more then just a one liner to the opinion)

With drugs, I think we can legalize them all. But this also doesn't mean a free for all on availability. We should have limits on marketing, age restrictions, improved education. Like heroine should be available from a store, but maybe only in a plain white box, with a label on it. No one gets to market it as cool.

Not to mention the fact that the very intent of a gun is to inflict harm on others, where a drug is an inward-directed substance, harmful or not.

Very few people choose to get shot. A lot of people choose to take drugs. The person in front of me shooting heroin is unlikely to get me high. The person in front of me shooting guns is more likely to shoot me than themselves.

> Vast majority of people do not know where immediately get hard drugs from.

But they would if they asked. Most hard drugs were readily available where I grew up -- middle class suburb. Being underage, alcohol and ciggarettes were more challenging to obtain, but if you wanted anything illegal you could have it delivered on demand. Despite that other than weed, few were interested. I don't know why that would change. Further you could make those drugs more restrictive, come with strings attached (like briefly meeting with a counselor), etc. The idea is something can still be widely consisdered bad and yet not be illegal, and that by making it more controlled and more visible we may have a better chance at improving people's outcomes. In the least, we could shift funding from a source that clearly doesn't work to one that perhaps does.

Decriminalising the use, even of hard drugs, seems to be a net negative for society (see Portugal's case [0])

They're not going to sell meth at walmart if that's what you're worried about.

People addicted to hard drugs are not going to stop because it's illegal, and people who aren't already addicted won't start shooting heroin all of a sudden because it's decriminalised

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Observ...

What's crazy to me is almost 70% of Americans are in favor[0], with about 50% of Republicans being on board (48% Republicans, 72% Independents, 83% Democrats). It is insane to me that the Democrats are not pushing this forward. It is an easy win. It creates more jobs. It is the only think you can say "we're going to put a 30% tax on the sale of" and people will rejoice. I just don't get it. It's roughly the same as support for gay marriage is _today_[1] (I 'm not trying to use the comparison as a human rights issue but because it is another controversial topic where people can guesstimate how controversial the opinion is)

I can understand how they are more hesitant with other drugs and possession (though I'm with you on full decriminalization like Oregon did), but I at least understand this one. I _do not_ understand how weed isn't legal yet. It's very popular, profitable, and will help reduce issues in South America.

Edit: I think there even is a double win strategy. First you reschedule the drug. Second you legalize it. So even if you want to play political games there's advantage. The numbers above were for full legalization but they just rise when you include medicinal (less people are ready for full legalization but in favor of medical and rescheduling).

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-...

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same...

if the taxes are too high, the market will fail and the majority of people will still use the black market. they'll get a lower tax yield and less safety for users.

yeah but "lower the tax rate" is a lot easier of an incremental policy change than "litigate the tax rate on cannabis before legalization even happens".

I'm just saying, in Washington there's a 37% tax rate... so clearly you can get it pretty high. Probably because weed is cheaper even with the tax than it was on the black market.

Yea this is absolutely not the case at all.

I don't smoke so don't know the specific numbers but pretty much all of the people I know that smoked before it was legal have gone back to their old dealers after their glee from buying from a store wore off.

They usually say that they hate the fact that most of the licenses have gone to rich old dudes who most certainly in the past voted for policies that ruined alot of peoples lives but are happy to make a profit off it now, people like Boehner. They'd much rather support their local dealer who doesn't even have access to a license.

But when you press them on it prices seem to be up to half as much for the same amount and nobody is worried about their weed potentially containing anything dangerous.

That said I assume something similar played out after prohibition. I'm sure there were lots of people who kept making moonshine and lots of people who continued to buy illegally, but over time the number of people doing either basically decreased to zero. I doubt any one looking to smoke the first time is buying illegally. There has been push back on the licensing process to make it more equitable so hopefully the local dealers can get in on it in the future.

What is not the case? 37% tax or weed being cheaper now that it is legalized? Because I can say with extreme confidence that both are true. I can also say that the quality has increased. You can easily fact check the tax rate too.

> They usually say that they hate the fact that most of the licenses have gone to rich old dudes

I'm not sure how this responds to anything I said. This is orthogonal and a completely different conversation. Have you also considered that your friends aren't the norm?

> But when you press them on it prices

So you confirm what I said above. I'll admit now this is a confusing conversation. You open by saying you _absolutely_ disagree with me and then confirm my statement. This has been one wild conversation.

Washington state cannabis has something like 47% tax and it’s very healthy, the black market is not exactly booming. Most of the material on the black market is leaking from licensed grow ops though.

37% for washington, ~17-20% for Oregon

37%excise, plus sales tax. Puts it right about 47 depending on the county and city levied sales taxes.

That hasn't proven to be the case. People who were willing to use the black market before may go back, but in the states that have legalized the bulk of buyers are now people who never used the black market and would not chose to even with very high taxes.

Also lot of the most popular products are stuff the black market never really went into, like gummies, concentrates, etc.

That said, I think OR got it right at about 20% right now, though there's a bill proposed to raise that to ~30%, mostly to raise the local municipalities cut from 3% to 10%.

> That hasn't proven to be the case.

Hasn't? What about the moonshine business? That was all created by the liquor taxes. And all the organized crime around avoiding cigarette taxes.

The moonshine business was pretty darn minor before prohibition?

I'm obviously not talking about moonshine. I'm specifically talking about weed, today.

It is more a question of convenience, quality, variety and availability. Canada had a slow start but more than half of cannabis consumers there are now buying legally, because the legal product has surpassed the illegal one in all these areas.

It is NOT about price.

I think it boils down to a lot of our politicians being old, scared of being perceived as weak on crime, and some pretty heavy lobbying efforts by tobacco and alcohol companies.

I'm sure the DEA is fighting it as hard as they can too. Same with the police union lobby.

I do think it'll happen in the near term, probably faster than people expect just like with gay marriage. Though I also think there will be a few holdout states.

"I think it boils down to a lot of our politicians being old, scared of being perceived as weak on crime, and some pretty heavy lobbying efforts by tobacco and alcohol companies."

It's not just that. A lot of people, including politicians, truly bought in to a lot of the anti-drug propaganda.. and many of them are also in religions which consider drug use sinful. For many of them, their opposition to drugs comes from the same sources as their opposition to gay marriage and abortion: their churches and religious leaders.

What's been incredibly interesting, however, is how their attitudes have been changing once people started to become aware how helpful psychedelics and cannabis can be... to mental and physical health, and to spirituality.

Lots of people are hurting, and the medical and mental health establishments have failed so many people. Even church prohibitions are having a hard time standing up to that, especially if they have a sherd of compassion for those suffering and those than can be helped with these unjustly illegal substances.

I think so too but it also serves as a show of how disconnected politics often is from public opinion. IMO, in a democracy, if public opinion is strongly in favor of something (and there's not clear evidence that that thing is just plane dumb, which we can vet by asking experts), then it is the politicians duty to implement that thing. Yes, they should serve as a safety net (vetting with experts) but they should not impede progress. (In fact, I'll say that they should often ask experts and implement things that are not "widely" popular, but at least mildly popular, if experts think it is a good idea. Which is very clear in the case of drugs. We've got lots of evidence)

Our politicians are very old and seem to have stopped updating their world views long ago (some older people keep learning and changing but it seems most do not). Their views are consistent with public opinion 50 years ago on many issues.

I had assumed big tobacco and alcohol companies were ready to step in and crush all these mom and pop weed ops the second we had federal legalization. Especially tobacco since cigarette usage is on the decline.

I think it's harder than you might assume for big businesses to move into new business areas, especially if it requires cannibalizing their existing revenue streams. That's a story we've seen over and over right?

Big businesses today tend to not innovate themselves and instead expand into new markets via acquisitions, but how many pot business owners do you think are interested in selling to those megacorps vs running their own show and continuing to make bank?

> will help reduce issues in South America

This is not in the interests of your money-owners.

New Zealand had a referendum on leaglisation with a 52/48 opposed result.

Instead of reading this as rightly that people wanted change, Ardern has done nothing.

Not to pull the "think of the children" card, but if it were as easy for kids to obtain heroin as it is for them to obtain alcohol...

it's not easy for kids to obtain alcohol.

Also, if your safety net is that big brother is going to prevent your kid from doing heroin... well... you're gonna have a bad time. Education is key. Having a good and nurturing relationship with your kid is key.

Anecdotally: there are places in the world where kids can have alcohol even as young as 10-12. Not legally, but within the family and it's not taboo for a kid to try it out if they're curios. I'm going to let you guess which places have more trouble with alcohol abuse: places where it's treated like any other thing and kids can try it or places where it's illegal to drink it until you're 18 or 21.

Your anecdote demonstrates how easy it is for kids obtain alcohol.

was talking us vs other places in the world.

Most people aren't going to stick a needle into their arm to get high unless they've tried many other drugs already.

And given alternatives, most people probably wouldn't try it - especially given it's reputation.

Heroin can be smoked, from what I hear.

Where I grew up (middle class suburb) it _was_ easier to obtain drugs than alcohol. This is not an uncommon experience.

I'm going to go off on a limb and say for at least 90% of kids, it is easier to obtain alcohol than heroin or meth. That is not a very controversial assumption.

I would bet more would be able to find a drug dealer than you'd think, which is all you need to access any of the drugs you can think of. The more general point is that its not the legality that is stopping most kids from becoming addicted to heroin. The primary thing is that most kids don't want to do heroin. Making it legal (and highly regulated) isn't going to change that.

You can't stop something as pervasive as drugs no matter how many people you incarcerate or kill attempting to do so. Prohibition has a real cost and it isn't low, time will tell but I am unsure why the current pohibition and its related drug cartels are viewed any differently than Al Capone and alcohol prohibiation. We can legalize it, tax it, regulate it, and further educate people to make good choices. We can eliminate drug cartels and remove funding from vast criminal networks across the US all in one go. We can train people to be nurses and mental health workers instead of cops and DEA agents. And we can probably _save_ money in the process.

> You can't stop something as pervasive as drugs no matter how many people you incarcerate or kill attempting to do so.

Most countries do just this. Of course some will get through the cracks, but they're aiming to lower the number of users, not hit 0 exactly. Also, you don't have the data to say that making heroin and meth as available as alcohol actually works on a large scale.

Legalization of alcohol, marijuana, psylocibin, etc. is not the same as the legalization of opioids and other more destructive drugs.

IMO, dealers should be punished harshly and addicts should be treated as patients rather than criminals.

the point is people 1) should be educated 2) should make up their own damn minds.

> legalize ALL drugs

It's worth mentioning that legalization doesn't mean unregulated availability to everybody.

Ironically, getting even non-narcotic prescription meds often is harder than it is to get illegal substances.

This should be the way everywhere. There is no reason for weed to be illegal when tobacco is legal. I don't smoke either but I support legalisation or at the very least decriminalisation. At least that way the countries can get tax money and also help people who need counselling instead of charging them with unnecessary crimes. They did this in the Australian Capital Territory. Hopefully they'll legalise it in most states.

Because x bad thing is allowed we should also allow y? Ridiculous. I agree it shouldn’t be criminal and having people put into jail over small amounts. But if anything tobacco and alcohol should be restricted too.

Are people really so inept that they need the government up tell them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies?

Study and publicize the risks, the rest should be left to personal decisions.

I agree about the use of cannabis but if you’ve ever lived next to a meth den I don’t think you’d see that and think, “we should legalize this.” Pot heads are one thing, and they don’t usually commit crimes just because they are high, but hard drugs are a completely different ball game that are a lot more nuanced than, “what you do with your body,” meth heads kill people all the time due to the paranoia associated with the drug.

> I agree about the use of cannabis but if you’ve ever lived next to a meth den I don’t think you’d see that and think, “we should legalize this.”

“Meth dens”, like “crack houses”, are a thing which prohibition may punish, but does not prevent, but instead creates.

But how would they punish it if it becomes legal to gather in your front yard and inject methamphetamine?

The same way we already punish people who gather in places they’re not supposed to be in and drink. Legalizing a drug doesn’t mean legalizing all activities relating to it.

How do we punish public drunkenness when alcohol is legal?

We don’t punish people who sit in their house or their yard and get drunk. I’m not talking about public drunkenness I’m talking about meth dens and how they lead to a serious rise in crime in the surrounding neighborhood.

if meth was legal and readily available, would you still have this issue? slap a big warning: causes death. Have programs in place to help people with addiction and let things work themselves out

The thing is that there are programs in place right now for addiction but people who are hooked on meth don’t want that help. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Meth country and saw more than half of my childhood friends end up in prison or in the streets because they’re hooked on the stuff. Maybe it’s too close to home for me to be reasonable about this but I’ll never agree that meth or heroin should be decriminalized.

that's your opinion and it's okay to have that opinion. My opinion is that the government should not tell me what I'm allowed to do with my body (or even worst arrest me for doing stuff to my body). If I literally want to kill myself it should be my choice - How ridiculous would it be if we arrested people that attempted suicide? It's at least as ridiculos trying to end up in prison for an addiction.

Also, completely tangential. But poverty is the thing that really kills people (including driving them to seeking the thrills of hard drugs). I can almost guarantee that there is a correlation between income level/standard of living and meth zones.

That's fine but that's not what the majority of us believe (that hard/extremely addictive and life destroying drugs should be banned) and you will just have to deal with that or find a libertarian paradise in some far off country. Pot isn't one of those drugs though, it's pretty harmless or at least no more destructive than alcohol.

we're getting philosophical here. but I believe that your freedom should be YOUR freedom.

Does that mean you should do stupid things and ruin your life? Probably not. But this is not about doing stupid things. It's about having the option and the option not being constrained by arbitrary things (ie who gets to decide that A is good and B is bad, A is okay, B is life destroying)

also, one thing to consider: It's mostly non-controversial that pot is harmless nowadays. The more you go back in time, the more pot was painted as wrecking your life, a gateway drug, etc. So a lot of what the effect of a drug are can (and is) hearsay + fear-mongering.

How is it not controversial? Most studies seem to suggest the effect is not known.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4337025/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827335/

Definitely seems to suggest there are potentially harmful side effects.

look at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4337025/table/T... those studies are basically jokes.

ever take tylenol? the pain killer that is available OTC virtually everywhere? do you know what happens if you take double the max recommended dosage? liver failure. for something that's OTC.

for all intents and purposes weed is harmless. In WA, most people that I know have tried weed and some of them are actually doing it on a regular basis. I have yet to hear of any [mental] health issues.

If you do something all day everyday you are dealing with something else and the drug is a way of escapism.

Again, the argument that because bad x exists and is allowed freely does not mean y should be allowed. You can not use transitive arguments for this. I would think that pain killer should also be restricted. Anecdotal small sample sizes are also not convincing either way, I do not think we should be so cavalier with allowing or disallowing.

my point is that everything should be allowed and the decision should be at a personal level. that’s freedom! literally the definition of freedom. you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t restrict others freedom

I respectfully disagree, society does not function like that. We need constraints. It might not restrict others freedoms entirely, but there are still consequences for actions, things do not happen in a vacuum.

Things indeed do not happen in a vacuum. Each situation is heavily influenced by the complicated and nuanced circumstances surrounding it.

Do you think a few hundred people in the central government should decide how to handle those situations, or the people most intimately familiar with the details?

I believe alcohol is already pretty destructive. It’s been shown no level is really safe, it causes brain damage, although as to how much it’s not clear. I think weed is fairly similar. Tobacco gives you lung cancer. I don’t think we should just let people destroy themselves. We want a caring society.

we should educate/inform people and let them make their own choices.

we want a caring society but not at the cost of restricting personal freedoms

> Tobacco gives you lung cancer.

And smoking weed doesnt? They are both plants.

Unclear actually.

The content of cannabis smoke is quite different from tobacco smoke, and in particular it contains a lot of terpenes, and the cannabinoids themselves, which are potent antioxidants.

Last I checked, cannabis smoke was implicated in COPD, but doesn't appear to contribute to lung cancer. That was at least a decade ago, however.

"I don't think we should just let people destroy themselves. We want a caring society."

The problem is that, like the old "we had to destroy the village to save it" cliche from Vietnam, the War on Drugs destroys the very lives it purports to protect.

The illegality of drugs means that the drugs people buy are either not what they're sold as or are of an unknown purity, which leads to overdoses. Such unintentional overdoses from mistakes in gauging substance or purity would virtually disappear if drugs were legal.

The organized crime that runs the drug trade kills many people and has a corrosive effect on our justice system and government and that of many other nations. That too will be greatly reduced with legalization.

Arrests of users, killing of them and their families by police during raids, imprisonment, separating families and ruining lives by all of the above and on top of that criminal records for possession are yet another horrific consequence of the War on Drugs.

Rights are thrown away, police power and surveillance of the population is ratcheted up to ever greater levels in the name of fighting the WOD. Billions of dollars are wasted and billions more given to organized crime instead of paid as taxes to governments.

And on top of it all the WOD is not even effective. People continue to use drugs anyway, if they want to.

So what is the point?

What you do with yourself does not always happen in a vacuum. Maybe if you are in the cabin in the wild growing your own pot who cares, but for the rest of society I think we should consider second order effects. Society does already dictate what you can do with your body. You can’t drink and drive. I don’t think we want a society that encourages or turns a blind eye to people to harming themselves.

Well in many jurisdictions in the US it is only illegal to drink and drive on property the public has ready access to. If someone is driving drink on sufficiently private property, then that's a risk the people who are choosing to be there are willing to take on. Would I personally want to be involved? Definitely not, but it's not up to me to decide for others.

And quite literally everything is harmful in one way or another, it's just a matter of degrees, and people should be allowed to make their own decisions.

Yes they are. There is a reason we have a law saying people can't be in a car without seatbelts and so on, it is because people are dumbasses who will hurt themselves. So it being legal for you and everyone else means a ton of people will get hurt just by using it themselves. Are you really fine sacrificing others just to get your fix?

I wear a seatbelt because I understand what will happen if I don't, not because of a law.

That's a strawman, but I'll roll with it. Yep, totally fine with it (although I have not used any illegal drugs). Mostly because there are massive amounts of people currently using prohibited drugs. Why not study and make known the risks instead of hopelessly trying to directly control everyone's actions?

At a higher level, I do not believe in any authority's ability to consistently produce a net benefit over long periods of time by deciding what substances are legal. I do however think that the markets will figure it out pretty quickly.

While I agree with you partially, this is a slippery slope. Sugar and processed food are really bad for you too. Should we start banning or restricting access to those too?

FWIW Mexico does attempt to label sugary snacks with warning labels, more than in the US at least

Compared to meth, crack, oxy, etc they are relatively safe so no we don't need to ban them.

That's the problem. Compared to weed these are highly addictive and cause a lot of harm to the users. Oxy is easily prescribed by doctors whereas there is a taboo against cannabis. It should be the opposite.

Marijuana certainly shouldn't be legalized because tobacco is legalized. Marijuana should be legalized because it is relatively benign, easily cultivated, useful, interesting and dare I say pretty good.

No, it should be legal because it's no one else's business but the adult who's changing their consciousness as to what they put in to their body, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

Just like if an adult wants to go skydiving, which is a risky activity, it should be their choice.

You're getting buried because of your political opinion, but I agree that "there is no reason for weed to be illegal when tobacco is legal" makes no sense whatsoever... I thought we were supposed to be nerds that overvalued logical thought here ;)

Yeah, you're probably correct. I think a lot of people are very liberal about their downvoting privilege! I'm happy for someone to not agree with me but I don't like being flagged or downvoted just because someone doesn't like my opinion. I think downvotes should be for comments that are racist or abusive in nature. A little bit of sarcasm should be okay!

Tobacco and alcohol are restricted. Almost every country has rules around how old you must be to purchase or consume them, where you can purchase them, where you can consume them, how much you can consume before driving (in the case of alcohol), etc.

There's no reason we can't apply the same reasonable controls to cannabis.

The same control ARE applied to cannabis. You cannot drive high and claim you're not drunk. The punishment (at least in my neck of the woods) is basically the same.

This is interesting. How would they even know you're high on cannabis while you're driving?

As far as I know there's no way to tell. Last I checked the available drug tests could only tell if you've used cannabis in the last 30 days, not if you used it on the day you were driving.. and even if you had that doesn't mean you were high at the time you drove.

Drug tests should really be replaced with performance tests.

It's none of their business if you're high. What matters is if you can drive safely.

huh. so at least in WA the law says >5 nano-grams if THC per milliliter in blood can get you a DUI.

Seems that you are right that there is no reliable way of testing for this (and the 5 nanograms might have been pulled out of someone’s a…ttic when the law was written).

https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=46.61.502

You missed my point.

Cannabis is way more restricted and controlled than tobacco or alcohol in most places. If you buy cigarettes or alcohol, cops won’t bother you. If you’re caught with cannabis, you are potentially facing criminal charges.

No, it should be fully legalized, not just decriminalized.

Decriminalization is this weird grey area where it's legal(ish) to possess small quantities, but generally not to produce, sell, or distribute.

It’s weird as fuck to me that decriminalisation is even considered because one of the (or just the?) largest negative effects of people doing illegal drugs is the large crime organisations built to provide them. As well as the then poor quality control resulting in people overdosing because they didn’t know what they were using, although not really a problem with weed specifically.

Decriminalisation keeps the organised crime and dodgy product while removing any sort of demand reducing effect keeping it illegal had.

At least it decreases the number of people sent to prisons for possession and consumption.

This is not a sufficient step, but a likely first step in normalizing the use of weed in the eyes of the public. Abrupt changes scare people (and for a good reason).

when this is selectively enforced and only people of a certain color or ethnic group have to pay the heavy price of possession I call bullshit on the "war on drugs". this is not and has not been about drugs from day one.

It was an anti-Left and anti-Black plot from the beginning, according to some. Unfortunately, hard proofs of that are absent.

In any case, were it about health and well-being, it likely won't look like a war.

The idea of decriminalisation is the cops don't focus on end users (and the negative effect of this to them) and the resource goes toward organised crime.

I think makes sense for drugs govt won't legalise like Heroin, while they should legalise lower end drugs like pot.

The problem with decrim is that it forces users to interact with criminals to get their fix.

And the interaction can't be monitored - the user has no guide through dosages besides the person directly benefiting from the sale.

Who where they interacting before decriminalization to get their fix?

I don’t get the point of this question. Obviously criminals? The expectation is that regulated avenues will serve to divert.

Parent (now GP) said:

> The problem with decrim is that it forces users to interact with criminals to get their fix.

They just left out that context, i.e. decrim doesn't change the fact that you are forced to go through a criminal to obtain them.

Sure, but they were doing it already and now they have removed the criminal element of it so the situation has improved. While legalising reduces the criminal element, however potentially adds wider social issues. Illegal/decriminalised/legal all have pros/cons.

lol. here is a crazy idea: make them legal.

also, decriminalization is usually a step towards legalization. because it's too much to straigh-up legalize them.

also, it's beyond me how some people can get on their high horses about what drugs are okay (alcohol? coffee?) and what drugs are not okay. we should have figured this out by now - but seems that we're going to need more time /s

Actually not that crazy an idea and the aspect that decriminalization makes interaction with criminals necessary, should be enough to skip this idea.

So legalization seems to be the way forward, i do wonder what organized crime will do in response.

The most lucrative crimes are Counterfeit goods, drug trafficking and human trafficking according to this source.

https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/6240-ngo-transnational-organi...

anecdotal evidence: in WA state where weed is legal, I have not heard of anyone buying weed on the street. Why would you risk it when you have good quality stuff that you can buy in a safe location?

so you decriminalize it first and after that you make it straight up legal.

Organized crime is going to move to other things in response. There is a risk/reward curve.

Absolutely, and here the reward for legalizing some drugs seems greater than the risk.

I suppose Meth and Crack are not on the list of legalized drugs, which means that half of all drug offenses will not be affected.

Still, halving drug offenses is not a bad result.

Source:

https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

Why lol?

It's weird as fuck to me that legalization is even considered because one of the (or just the?) largest negative effects of people doing illegal drugs is the added legal consequences on them and our inability to help them because they are considered criminals.

Allowing businesses to legally sell, develop, and advertise addictive psychoactive substances seems dangerous to me. History has shown that if they come up with a new compound that is 20% more addictive but 15% more dangereous, you can bet that this will be their next best seller. On top of that, we should welcome their "innovation" for tax dollars and give them a legal shelter ?

We already have seen what it leads to with opioids, even when we gate it behind doctors prescriptions: a usage crisis. We need more control, not less.

And we need a legal framework that does allow us to help users instead of putting them to prison, that does not pack the courts with addicts, and that allows the police to focus on more pressing issues. That is what decriminalization is about.

Extreme repression is as bad as extreme indulgence, there is a middle ground.

That depends on the implementation, though, doesn’t it? After all, in the Netherlands, it’s only decriminalized, yet there are stores selling it all over the country.

It is also deeply tied with criminals organizations providing them a healthy revenue stream.

Look to the commercialization in US states like Colorado as a better (but not perfect) model.

Is there somewhere I can read more the criminal organizations being apart of the legal cannabis scene in Holland?

I don't have a source, but as a Dutch person: there is no legal way to actually grow cannabis in this country, nor to sell it to stores ("coffeeshops") that sell it to consumers. Thus all cannabis sold necessarily[0] comes from illegal growth operations, which is the kind of thing that's very lucrative for organized crime.

[0] if you want to be pedantic about it, owning up to 5 cannabis plants is decriminalized, but nobody is under the illusion that such personal use scale agriculture is fueling the commercial trade

> Look to the commercialization in US states like Colorado as a better (but not perfect) model. reply

Sounds crazy, but one of the best models in the United States right now is actually the state of Oklahoma's.

It's fairly straight forward, easy to apply, and barrier to entry is low. Fees are low. Not a lot of red tape. It's working well.

The coffeeshops are allowed to sell small quantities for personal use. But growing marijuana in large quantities and supplying those stores is still considered illegal and punishable with fines / jail time.

As someone who used to be against drug (including weed) legalization, I had my opinion changed completely by this article few years ago. I shared it with a few of my right leaning friends and several of them also had their opinions changed:

Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

It's an excellent read which addresses both sides of the drug legalization debate, side effects of the legalization and how to prevent the bad side effects and presents similar actions in other countries.

A significant majority of my conservative friends are also moving in this direction. Conservative leaning Justice Clarence Thomas today said federal laws against marijuana may no longer be necessary: "The federal government's current approach is a half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana,” the conservative Supreme Court justice wrote.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/clarence-thom...

Now, I am for legalizing and pardoning (non-dealing/manufacturing) weed, cocaine and mushrooms. The only reason I am hesitant for heroine, meth and fentanyl is because if I remember right, heroine and meth get laced with fentanyl which is very easy to overdose on. But I am willing to be corrected if that's not the case.

The last month's ban on menthol cigarettes and flavoured tobacco is a step backwards unfortunately. Considering menthols are preferred by 86% blacks and 46% hispanics, it will just create a new black market and put more of them in prison.

With that said, I don't want everywhere to devolve into San Fransisco either where you see needles everywhere and addicts tweaked out everywhere. Most people who are against legalization aren't going to agree with it if they see things like how San Fran is turning out. So the legalization must be done correctly.

If they are legalized and provided via stores which check ID, that would reduce the black market, reduce cartels across the border, reduce gangs, drug dealing and reduce the prison population which had played a major role in wreaking havoc on many families. It would also reduce policing gone wrong / corruption and have less "rebellious" kids doing it.

>Now, I am for legalizing and pardoning (non-dealing/manufacturing) weed, cocaine and mushrooms. The only reason I am hesitant for heroine, meth and fentanyl is because if I remember right, heroine and meth get laced with fentanyl which is very easy to overdose on. But I am willing to be corrected if that's not the case.

The argument you usually hear back is that if those harder drugs were more regulated, there would be no accidental overdoses where the street drug has been cut or consists of unknown quantities, safer places to consume, no drug deals gone wrong, etc... I am still not sold on the solution there. I know other countries have some sort of program that gets pointed to, but I don't know enough to comment. I do only know that those drugs have absolutely wrecked the lives of people I knew. If they were legal they still seem to be so addictive that the user's life is 100% focused on getting high as often as possible. So maybe some regulation so that certain people can get those drugs but without risk of overdose? But isn't that what methadone is for? I am sort of rambling here as I try to form a better opinion - because if we just outlaw those certain, very-addictive drugs, a black market will always exist. But that is also something I would never want my family members to try on a whim.

I like your train of thought and understand the uncertainty that both avenues present. Personally I believe that healthy adults will mostly choose to avoid getting addicted to hard drugs as long as they’re aware of the consequences. To achieve a reduction in the harm that drugs have in society I feel that we need to do everything possible to reduce the number of new people getting addicted while also making it easy for people to receive treatment and bring them into a system designed to get them back to health. Problem is that doctors need to be educated on this as well. That means stopping doctors from pushing pain pills that get people addicted to pain meds in the first place (because who in their right mind would go straight to using heroine if they hadn’t started on prescription pills) and encouraging open discussion with youths that’s focused on education instead of pushing an agenda (admittedly this doesn’t seems possible) while also legalizing methods for people to access hard drugs in order to bring addicts in out of the cold so to speak and expose them to a medical system that encourages them to get their health back.

If manufacturing is still illegal, you'll have unregulated products. Anything that is more restricted than alcohol to manufacture and sell will have a black market. If you want to get rid of overdoses caused by heroin cut with fentanyl, you have to let Johnson & Johnson make it and sell it at CVS and WalMart.

Legal opiates wouldn't be laced with fentanyl. They'd be tightly regulated. And it would probably be packaged in ways that wouldn't require injection. That sort of packaging would probably be part of the regulations. No one wants needles lying around.

If users know exactly how strong & how much they're taking then it should greatly reduce overdoses. Some will still happen but, as a society, we've decided a certain amount of alcohol overdoses are acceptable. Opiate overdoses would get similar consideration.

Agreed. As long as they strictly go after the black market, I am okay with legalizing all drugs including heroine. For weed, there shouldn't be any more money wasted imo.

Isn't injection the more "quicker" way for heroine though?

It is. But people can adapt. Many people these days grind up their oxy and snort it. Probably not a healthy thing to do in many ways, but still safer than injections. And definitely better than having used needles lying around.

Patches would also be a very viable option. My partner once received a fentanyl patch at the hospital for an injury. She later told me it was an instant trip to a very happy place, and she could understand why some would get addicted to it.

Not sure about the snorting part but for injections, maybe this anecdotal experience might help. I have several friends who use performance enhancing steroids and they say injections are better than the orals because the orals have to go through the liver and kidney etc to get processed which ends up hurting those organs more than injections which directly get in the blood stream. Maybe something similar applies for recreational drugs too?

since you brought up the supreme court I am going to assume you are in the US (correct me if I'm wrong).

We in the US like to plaster freedom everywhere. And it's FREEDOM this, FREEDOM that. But I'm sad to report most people don't understand what freedom means. Freedom means that you can do whatever the f you want, anything, as long as you don't impact other people. If I drink alcohol, smoke weed or do heroin or mushrooms, or like to bang my head against the wall - as long as it does not impact you you should not care about it. Period. That's true freedom.

When it comes to legalizing or forming an opinion about something IMHO the question should be: is this going to impact me? If the answer is not I believe that be default we should not put any gates or laws or rules in place.

I think the govn should step in only to regulate the quality of the product (ie: if you're gonna sell weed it better be weed, if you're gonna sell alcohol it better be alcohol etc) not to dictate what is okay to sell and what is not okay to sell.

It sure as hell impacts me when I am paying for the 10th dose of naloxone to be slammed into you in a row if you are a repeat ODer.

Does it really impact you though?

Is our medical system so well tuned that people receiving a procedure that literally saves their lives is inconvenient for you?

I come from Ohio, so it impacts me that my friends and their friends have lost loved ones to this epidemic (who had been administered naloxone more than once, no doubt). And I've donated to harm reduction programs in New Orleans that provide community administered naloxone and safe needle sites so don't get me twisted. That is not the same as a unionized state apparatus and the overhead involved.

Do you believe that is someone whats to kill themselves is their right to do it?

Do you agree that people that need and want help should receive it?

Where does your personal freedom and where does my personal freedom begin?

When someone does the same thing 10 times like that they owe an explanation to the community whose resources are keeping them alive, even if in principle. I think it's hilarious that you're lecturing me about the value of human life above and totally miss what I said about community administered treatment.

I'm not going to debate. I'm for decriminalization.

That said, nalozone should be stocked in every pharmacy across America.

Just like needles. Needles can be bought in CA.

Hell--I would put it in emergency glass boxes all around SF, and most cities.

(To anyone addicted, bupernorpine works pretty well. Most of you could get down to a very low dose of bupenorpine pretty quick. It really helped me. I was never a bad addict. I just started taking pain pill from a nurse friend. Well, kind of a friend. She meant well. I could have just told her no, but didn't.)

In the nineties, a friend of mine called me up, and asked me what do you do with someone who is overdosed.

I told him there was naxolone, but it's only available at the hospital.

He called back while in transit. She died at the hospital.

He was living next to CVS pharmacy. If it was available, she would still be here. She wasen't even a long term addict. It was her second time using.

IMHO you should debate people that cannot see part their own stupid short-sighted self-interest and tell them about the value of human life compared to their "inconveniences". just like you did here. You should totally debate an push hard on their BS

You clearly didn't read my other comment.

Unfortunately the hypocrisy you describe regarding "freedom" is not limited to the US. It's more of a "flawed human nature" thing. Most humans try to exert power and control over everything they don't like.

I immigrated from India to Canada and plan on immigrating to US in the future. So I have experienced the ongoing failed "war on drugs" in India which has created a major overdose problem along with worsened the police/government corruption and thrown many people in prison. I have also seen the legalization of weed couple years ago in Canada.

I agree with you about the "Freedom means that you can do whatever the f you want, anything, as long as you don't impact other people." and share the exact same opinion. That's the same standard I apply to everything else too - from gay marriage to freedom of speech. I don't care about what's happening in someone's bedroom or whom they are having sex with as long as it's consensual adults. That's also why I am free speech absolutist. I absolutely hate the smell of weed and have never touched any drugs. But I want it to be legal because I believe the federal government/police needs to stop wasting tax payer resources on shutting down fundamental liberties. Similarly I believe we need to learn to develop a thicker skin and ignore things if they offend us instead of censoring/banning them using governmental or trillion dollar corporations. Just like sunlight is the best disinfectant for free speech, same approach with drugs. Same approach to allowing euthanasia (and even suicide but that can get messy and impacts too many other people so maybe not).

Let drugs be legal and prevent black markets and ensure "proper advertising" like we do in every other industry. Make sure regulations aren't getting in the way of the industry to the point where the government has to step in to subsidize them (Canada and California are having this problem).

i'm very hesitant about legalization of heroin. i think there could be a time in my life, if i'm low or anxious, where i would go buy some. and then it'd be likely i'd get hooked for life. there would be many people like that. i think it should be prescription based if anything.

Yeah there’s no way hard drugs should ever be easy to access. Putting them behind a prescription that’s required to be administered in a controlled environment seems the obvious choice. Honestly it should be safe, legal, and rare

There's still going to be a black market for prescription hard drugs then just like there is for prescription pills now.

This argument seems moot. I am not under the impression that it's difficult to go buy heroin or meth if you want some. Users seem to have no problem getting it.

Legalization doesn't have to mean you can buy packets of heroin at a gas station.

It can mean you have to go to a government-run outlet, and if it's your first time, someone is going to ask you some pointed questions about why you want to buy it, make it very clear to you that heroin addiction is a real risk and no fun, maybe offer some counseling services on the spot as an alternative, and if you're still determined to get some, you can fill out a form and get a card with your face on it to present next time.

Note that this isn't the same thing as a prescription, where a doctor is gatekeeping access to the medicine / drug in question. It's an approach which acknowledges legal drugs as less harmful to users and society than the alternatives, and stresses harm reduction for everyone and ending addictive patterns for users who are able and willing.

I really like your post and only have this small point to add to it.

> The only reason I am hesitant for heroine, meth and fentanyl is because if I remember right, heroine and meth get laced with fentanyl which is very easy to overdose on. But I am willing to be corrected if that's not the case.

When you look at this through the lens of business it doesn’t really make sense. Drug dealing is a financially driven business and there’s not an incentive to cut drugs like heroin and meth with fentanyl. Both are HIGHLY addictive in their own and in the case of meth it’s actually really counterproductive. Neither drug needs assistance from fentanyl to become more addicting. But beyond this, fentanyl is pretty dang valuable by itself on the streets and hard to come by. Why cut heroine with something valuable when you can use baking soda or sugar?

Honestly the whole “laced drugs” thing is a scare tactic that doesn’t pass the smell test in my eyes. I’m willing to change my opinion but it really doesn’t make sense to me.

What? Fentanyl is so so so much cheaper and 100% does get added to heroin all the time. It also gets added, to a lesser extent, to meth, coke, fake xanax pills, ketamine, etc. Especially in many places in the US, it's actually hard to find heroin without at least a trace of fentanyl.

Fentanyl is synthesized in China or Mexico (with precursors from China) extremely cheaply and without the need to maintain large plantations. It can then be imported to the US much more easily than heroin (extremely potent by weight and doesn't smell as much) where it's then diluted/mixed with other drugs. This is easily provable, there's tons and tons and tons of evidence/documentation of all of this.

I don't understand the original posters point either though, because providing addicts with clean drugs and access to treatment is the only real way to curb the current fentanyl epidemic.

> I don't understand the original posters point either though, because providing addicts with clean drugs and access to treatment is the only real way to curb the current fentanyl epidemic.

You are right about that. When I was referring to fentanyl laced heroine, I was talking about black markets. If it's legalized and the production is regulated, then that problem won't occur.

> With that said, I don't want everywhere to devolve into San Fransisco either where you see needles everywhere and addicts tweaked out everywhere. Most people who are against legalization aren't going to agree with it if they see things like how San Fran is turning out. So the legalization must be done correctly.

Stop watching fox news. Only the small areas where homeless people congregate have those homeless problems. The rest of the city is normal. Every major city has sketchy areas filled with all sorts of problems.

I don't watch Fox News nor does this have anything to do with objective facts. I have left leaning friends there who run businesses and it's very well reported even by them.

its not an objective fact to say sf is full of needles. and its not an objective fact to say homeless people are there because of heroine or drugs. your repeating right wing nonsense by saying things like that

> your repeating right wing nonsense by saying things like that

Please refrain from dismissing view points with ad hominem attacks "right wing nonsense". That doesn't further the discussion to anywhere productive and is equivalent to "she's a witch" from 1600s. You are not talking in objective facts. Ignoring the problem by yelling "La la la, I can't hear you!" and gaslighting people by claiming what they are seeing is not real and is some Fox talking point is not going to encourage those who are reluctant to make drugs legal to change their mind. There is a very serious problem with homelessness and needles/feces to the point where they literally have an app to report poop on the streets.

Here's all left leaning sources:

> 2018: Survey of Downtown San Francisco Reveals Trash on Every Block, 303 Piles of Feces and 100 Drug Needles

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/diseased-streets/16660...

> NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit reported a 20m² 153-block downtown area it surveyed was littered with refuse. The team found discarded needles on 41 blocks and piles of feces on 96. In July, a major medical association canceled future events in the Golden Gate City because of its filthy streets.

https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-needles-human-feces-1...

> 'It's raining needles': Drug crisis creates pollution threat in San Francisco, across US

https://abc7news.com/needles-found-in-sf-left-on-streets-rep...

> EPA Issues Violation Notice To San Francisco Over Needles, Human Waste

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/10/02/epa-issues-viol...

> Business Insider: San Francisco's dirtiest street has an outdoor drug market, discarded heroin needles, and piles of poop on the sidewalk. The block's homeless residents — including drug dealers, addicts, and the mentally ill — leave behind piles of feces and discarded needles.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.businessinsider.co...

> 'SnapCrap' app invites San Francisco residents to report poop on city streets

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Fran...

Even this year's Academy Awards events had to clean up the homeless people before holding the event:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/homeless-ordered-out-of-la...

I don't think you actually live in San Francisco so I don't think you really know what's going on. Homeless people congregate on one area where all these services are and then spill over to the tourist area. so it seems like it's crazy all the time.

No one is going to write an article saying "normal day in Glen Park" witriing articles about needles gets clicks. So I think your confidently uninformed. Maybe listen to people who live there instead on forming opinions based off stuff you don't have experience with. You don't know about drugs and you don't know about sfs homeless situation and you don't know about the city.

Your first article just focuses on the tenderloin. Homeless doesn't equal drug problems. There's way to much to unpack and set straight here.

You clearly didn't read or intentionally ignored all my previous comments. I stated:

> I have left leaning friends there who run businesses and it's very well reported even by them.

CA has been the state which has lost population because people are fleeing the state and one of the reasons is "Filth":

https://travelmedium.com/usa/california/why-are-people-leavi...

I also stated I am very pro legalizing all drugs. I think you are being insincere on purpose because despite me presenting multiple left leaning articles which go against your narrative, you prefer to have blinders on. This discussion isn't worth going forward.

Your muddying up the points, none of those issues are related to drug use. California has a lot of homeless people, a lot of those use drugs. Californias homeless problem is complicated and completely separate from drug use. Now your quoting articles about california as a whole.

What your saying and the conclusions your drawing make no sense. Your also showing a misunderstanding of the nuances of san fransisco. Your own articles show that these problems are concentrated in historically problematic neighborhoods. Go back to the original quote i picked from you, it shows a complete lack of understanding of what is going on, and you cant form a coherent argument.

Show me one article that says, sunset, richmond, bernal heights, glen park, excelsior, pacific heights, presidio, noe valley, balboa park are full of needles.

> and you cant form a coherent argument

Your inability to make ad hominem attacks prevents me from replying further. Have a good day.

It has been decriminalized then re-criminalized [1] before. To end this loop, lets just legalize anything that doesn't hurt others and let people decide what is good or bad for themselves, given we follow this logic on substances and habits such as alcohol, sugar, sun bathing, throwing darts, parachuting, hang-gliding, replying to emails whilst drunk. I would wager that driving a car is a higher risk to others than inhaling or ingesting a drug though I don't have statistics to back that up.

[1] - https://theconversation.com/re-criminalizing-cannabis-is-wor...

Addiction hurts others though. You can’t get physically addicted to most of the things you listed.

True, mostly. People do get addicted to sugar and alcohol. Though it appears about 30% of people get addicted to MJ use [1] which makes them moody or restless. Does that really hurt others, more so than someone not getting their coffee in the morning? I get moody without my coffee. The other issues they list appear to only affect the person with the dependency.

I suppose if we go down the rabbit hole, if a person is so moody they lose their job and they have children dependent on them, that's a problem. I would put that in the same category as drinking on the job though.

[1] - https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...

Except some people would go home from the job and do it in front of their kids.

> To end this loop, lets just legalize anything that doesn't hurt others

Everything hurts others. People and their actions don't exist in a vacuum - we are all players on a team called "society"; the actions of people, even if done privately, can end up affecting the performance of the team. Cars, alcohol, and tobacco are all legal, and all of those things end up harming others directly or through second/third order effects.

I'm not necessarily against decriminalizing or even legalizing marijuana, but I don't think the reason for doing so should be because it "doesn't hurt others", but rather because governments should infringe on liberties as little as possible even if it means bad consequences could emerge from abuse of said liberties.

I also agree that governments should not infringe on liberties.

> People and their actions don't exist in a vacuum - we are all players on a team called "society"

If you really want to think of it as a system, then the proper way to think of drug usage is as an escape valve for societal issues like loneliness, hopelessness, etc. If so, then it's important to legalize it so that it can be monitored and measured; if it's measured, then society's government can focus on reducing that measurement as low as possible by treating the systemic issues and not the symptom.

You do realize that lots of people will hurt themselves with drugs making them unhappy? It being legal for them is bad. You are sacrificing those people just so you can get high.

Look around yourself, how many people are fat? That is how well people will responsibly use drugs. A large majority lacks the self control to properly use these substances and the law helps them do it.

I think you're subtly making my point. If criminalizing drugs doesn't prevent drug abuse, and legalizing sugar etc. doesn't prevent abuse, then what effect, really, does legalization or prohibition have on abuse?

Your comparison to the obesity epidemic is a non-sequitur. People abuse drugs to fill an emotional hole in their lives. While that does sometimes happen with food, most overweight people in the US are generally happy. The obesity epidemic isn't caused by people abusing sugar to escape unfulfilling lives; it's caused by callous government policy that makes healthy food expensive and junk food cheap. Too many Americans genuinely lack access to healthy options, let alone ones that are economical.

The sooner we can accept that most people don't have the skills or the desire to work in the knowledge economy, the better off we'll be. We are, today, perfectly equipped to handle that reality.

It's true people need purpose in life. They can find purpose in art, in travel, in maintaining a personal garden, in maintaining connection to their community. Not through bullshit jobs. What's the point of humanity if we can't truly automate the toils of physical and knowledge labor to somewhere south of 10 hours per week? What's all of this for, anyway?

Let people have their legal weed and live a little. We don't need to work so hard. We've achieved so much innovation in the past few thousand years, we ought to enjoy it before perishing, or continuing focusing our lives wholly on work.

And when bad consequences emerge, we will just fire bad government and then ban marijuana again. Marijuana was banned first in 13th century.

> To end this loop, lets just legalize anything that doesn't hurt others and let people decide what is good or bad for themselves

I used to think that but I don’t anymore. Not having your shut together and not being a contributing member of society hurts others, so drugs aren’t harmless. Drug users are people’s kids, parents, etc., who have responsibilities and often can’t meet them because of their drug use and that hurts people. And the ship has probably sailed on letting drug users die in the street if they need help so the cost of welfare and services are also a burden.

The real question to me is whether making drugs illegal actually creates more burdens than it avoids. I suspect the answer is that if the culture condones drug use, you’ve already lost that battle and making it illegal is pointless. Laws should help reinforce norms. If the norms have broken down, enforcement of the law needs to be too coercive to be feasible. For example divorce also imposes tremendous social costs, but we probably can’t fix that by repealing no-fault divorce laws.

I think anyone who cares about others and has seen what truly addictive substances like oxy and heroin do to people thinks the same. They literally lose their mind. There's no "bootstrappin'" when it comes to that, it becomes an intervention or nothing. Sure a few folks come back from that abyss, but not many without the help of others. Those type of substances clearly need to be only allowed when nothing else is a solution and heavily controlled by the government.

>Those type of substances clearly need to be only allowed when nothing else is a solution and heavily controlled by the government.

That policy hasn't historically worked well.

Getting thrown in jail or prison isn't exactly harmless to the families of the imprisoned either.

I encourage you to read the current research on the medicinal uses of psychedelics and cannabis to see how these substances can actually help people.

People can actually overcome all sorts of mental and physical problems using these substances, and if that's not a net win for society, I don't know what is... especially considering the abominably ineffective mental health system and insanely expensive medical system.

Religious, sacred, and sacramental use of these substances is something many people also value, as is just having fun or connecting to others in loving ways (as with MDMA).

Not everything's about being a worker drone in the system and valuing your life and everything you do by how much you can contribute vs how much you cost.

I’m not super up to date on medical literature, but are the mental effects of cannabis the same as tobacco? Nicotine is a stimulant. I know a few potheads that whittled their lives away high, but tobacco doesn’t seem to have that effect.

Tobacco is a sacred plant in some contexts, like in Native American ceremonies, where it's not used for its stimulant effects.

Cannabis too can be used sacramentally, spiritually, recreationally, or medicinally. It can be an appetite stimulant or a sex enhancer. Some can get insight through it, while others prefer to get so stoned they can't think.

It's helped me to reconnect with my feelings and motivated me to seek therapy. It can be a wise teacher if you listen.

Or you can watch cartoons on it and eat snacks..

The many uses of it are not mutually exclusive, but how you use it and what you get out of it is your choice.

What’s the effect in the aggregate on the average person? It seems to me that many (most?) don’t have the willpower to really make smart choices with it, and default to watching cartoons and eating snacks.

We’re watching this happen to a friend of my BIL now and it’s hard to watch. To be fair the kid’s problems started with his parents exercising “choice” to pursue serial marriages instead of raising their kid, but smoking pot (with a blow torch apparently?) isn’t helping.

is this causation or correlation? do you know potheads that are wildly successful? because I do. And it does not seem to be linked to weed

I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.

i live in WA. here weed has been legal for quite a while. It's not a big deal and people consume basically sort of like alcohol. As far as I know there is no causation effect between smoking/eating weed and how well you do in life.

The story about potheads that mess up their lives are usually stereotypes of people in rough situations that are f'ed with or without weed. It's usually poverty and lack of opportunity that messes you up, not smoking a joint

It's unbelievable that in 2021 Cannabis is still a Schedule 1 Drug but Alcohol and Tobacco are responsible for more death and have killed more people in America than all the Wars.

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

>Excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the United States each year, or 261 deaths per day.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/index.htm

>Each year, nearly half a million Americans die prematurely of smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke. Another 16 million live with a serious illness caused by smoking. Each year, the United States spends more than $225 billion on medical care to treat smoking-related disease in adults.

Our Government is a Kakistocracy. I really don't believe the current administration will legalize it and any election promises were lies.

you should see what sugar does. I think sugar is even worse than alcohol. We put that shit in everything and our kids are addicted to it by the time they are 5. it's ridiculous. but... weed! think about the children!

I'm with you, but I am afraid we are alone out here.

Maybe if we could get people to think of sugar as a drug. At least it is refined in a way that makes it dangerous.

I have a thing I say and for some reason it always shocks people: "Sugar should be a Schedule I drug" It meet all the criteria but it's so normalized in our society that people are shocked when I argue this point.

Now, some some weed? Grab the pitchforks everyone. This pothead is destroying the fabric of our society /s

I'd say society is converging towards outlawing all three. Both smoking and alcohol are vastly more limited and regulated than they used to be. Activist groups like MADD who are blocking decriminalization would certainly be happy to also ban all of the above.

Wasn't its banning in the first place an example of international pressuring bullying a smaller nation to pass laws its people didn't want? Did anyone expect the laws to be effective?

Totally but you can say that for a lot of laws that benefit a few rich companies. Politicians with zero accountability and a 5 years time span serve whoever pays more.

Or laws that primarily benefit a small number of rich countries, which is also a very common tactic. The latest big group move is to attack smaller nations competing with lower corporate income tax rates with an enforced minimum. The rich nations are trying to strangle their competitors through a globally mandated minimum corporate tax rate, wiping out a very lucrative path to rise (attract investment, businesses, jobs) for underdeveloped or otherwise poorer nations. It worked so extraordinarily well for Ireland they can't tolerate any more outcomes like that from smaller, weaker nations. They're not willing or able to go lower (Germany, France, the US, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc), so they're going to try to make sure nobody else can either.

It'd be a tough sale in the US

In Canada it's 15% federally: https://www.taxtips.ca/smallbusiness/corporatetax/corporate-...

The US was 35% for years and is now 21% (+ 30% in California and 29% in NY).

When combined with state/province rates (11-15% in Canada) making it more competitive with Canada:

https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210504142352/25-Percent-Co...

And in the future:

> a 25 percent federal corporate income tax rate would result in a combined average top corporate tax rate of 29.53 percent—higher than the 23.51 average among industrialized countries in the OECD.

https://taxfoundation.org/25-percent-corporate-income-tax-ra...

The US should probably focus more on the endless loopholes, tax reductions, and corporate welfare.

Does anyone understand the ruling and judicial process there, I'm assuming its in Spanish and I also don't know what the case was about. Was this appellate or original jurisdiction, if so how and if not, is that a factor in the Mexican Supreme Court?

I'm still piecing it together, but what I've found so far:

In 2018 the Supreme Court declared the prohibition unconstitutional, and gave the legislature a deadline to pass a legalization bill - all the rules necessary for dispensing, growing, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Mexico#2018_Suprem...

The deadline came and went several times, with a few extensions, and the ruling today was the court decriminalizing it on their own because the legislature couldn't get it done after 3 years and were asking for another extension (see below; they originally had 90 days to do it and were granted over 30 months worth of extensions).

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/mexicos-supreme-court-strike...

I haven't tracked down what prompted the 2018 ruling.

Edit: What I've found:

Mexico seems to have a system where 5 similar rulings on the same matter by the Supreme Court set binding judicial precedent for all other judges, and starts a timer whereby the legislature must resolve contradictions. 2 seemingly minor cases in 2018 gave them the 5 needed and started the process:

https://www.marijuanamoment.net/mexican-supreme-court-strike...

Seems like this is about as far as I'm going to get without learning Spanish.

Edit2: Probably the last update, but I found a bit about the "5 Ruling" thing:

> Later, if the Chambers or the Full Court set case law by five consecutive and uninterrupted decisions, the Supreme Court, once again, will inform the issuing authority of the norm in order to amend the un-constitutional part of the norm within ninety days.

> If the unconstitutionality problem persists and it is not solved, the Full Court, with the vote of eight of its members, will expel the norm from the Mexican legal system. If it is a criminal norm, it may have re-troactive effects. It must be noted that this procedu-re is not applicable to norms involving tax matters.

https://www.scjn.gob.mx/sites/default/files/pagina/documento...

interesting, strange! thanks for finding that source outside of the marijuana activist sites

That 2018 ruling from the SCJN (Mexico's Supreme Court) was about individual cases. It looks like the day counter for Congreso de la Union (Mexico's Congress) to legislate on the issue started on February 2019 [0].

[0]: https://www.eleconomista.com.mx/politica/Reformas-para-uso-l...

Individuals took the case to the supreme court and won . 5 times as someone else said. The supreme court gave Congress enough time to create sensible laws for legal consumption. Congress didn't do its job (all the government systems in mexico are a huge joke. Congress is one of them). After giving them 2 or 3 extensions. The deadline arrived and the Supreme court made it into law.

Congress is VERY political, while Supreme Court is not. I feel that Congress let it's time expire so that the "blame" on making it legal falls in the SC.

Source: Mexican living in Mexico.

Let’s keep this train movin’ baby!

If you saw Clarence Thomas's comments today, it seems a lot more likely:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/clarence-thom...

Not as if it matters as long as the GOP holds out on passing anything related to legalization. What a joke of a party.

> Not as if it matters as long as the GOP holds out on passing anything related to legalization. What a joke of a party.

Please do not get tribal flame wars started especially if you are objectively wrong based on direction of politics.

Biden admin is the one which last month banned menthol cigarettes and flavoured tobacco - 86% of blacks and 46% of hispanics prefer menthol cigarettes. Opposite of which, several of the pardons issued by the previous admin were for non-violent drug related crimes thrown in prison for life thanks to the 90s crime bill written by Biden.

It seems disingenuous to me to ignore the absolute harm that menthol cigarettes have done to communities over the past several decades, lump that in with marijuana, and act like they should be treated similarly. This change will likely save hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States[1].

Yes, small freedoms are being taken away. This violates the libertarian ideal. The 90's crime bill you cite is absolutely an issue, and the pardons were good. But sometimes objective freedom and making America better go in different directions, and not always on political lines.

[1]: https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2021/03/31/toba...

> But sometimes objective freedom and making America better go in different directions

I don't see how thousands of people locked up for exercising their basic liberties is somehow "making America better".

> It seems disingenuous to me to ignore the absolute harm that menthol cigarettes have done to communities over the past several decades

Nobody is ignoring the harm. It's obvious. But that can be said about all the drugs, pharmaceuticals too. And alcohol, sugars and junk food has done a lot more damage than what some cigarettes or drugs could ever do. Even flavoured cigars are being banned. Why???

I don't want the government to play nanny state. That's why I want all drugs legalized, not just weed.

More black families and several white families have been destroyed because of the failed war on drugs which has led to kids growing without fathers who are locked up in prison.

"On average, African Americans initiate smoking at a later age compared to Whites." and "African Americans smoke fewer cigarettes per day":

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/african-americans/in...

So most adult blacks are making conscious decisions themselves to start smoking when they are adults and not kids. And since 86% of blacks and 46% of hispanics prefer menthol cigarettes over regular ones, the adults enjoy that flavour. But this ban is patronizing them as if the adult blacks are too stupid to think for themselves, so the politicians must treat them as they treat kids and make the decisions to take away bad things from them.

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...

Instead of making changes so that youth can't get a hand on it, they are banning it because according to their own set standards, somehow adults of these communities are unable to think for themselves. This will end up locking more people of these communities in prison.

You're making some good points, but I think addiction, as a whole, subverts the ideal of 'think for themselves'. Your own CDC link states that 72.8% of African Americans want to quit. Addiction cessation programs might seem patronizing, but the vast majority of people can't do it alone. Even adults don't have access to all the information when they make a choice, especially those in lower income communities. If we had better publicly available addiction treatments, or improved the conditions that lead people to start smoking, then sure, legalize them. The current market doesn't reflect honest and fully informed consumer choice, and that's where I believe the state should come in.

It's likely that we won't find a middle ground here.

All of that can be applied to every single decision we make in life. Pretty much every human "want to quit" sugars, junk food, exercise more, eat healthy etc. It's definitely more than the % which wants to quit smoking. That doesn't mean we should government come in and ban sugars, junk food, force exercise and force people to eat salads. That's straight out of a Black Mirror episode where people are forced to do these things.

> The current market doesn't reflect honest and fully informed consumer choice

I don't think you are correct here at all. The tobacco industry and sales is very heavily regulated. They can't even have ads broadcast plus are hidden behind counter at stores. And as I presented in the CDC stats, vast majority of the blacks pick up smoking when they become adults and not kids. So they are already making "fully informed consumer choice". And a significantly small population actually smokes anyway. Junk food on the other hand which takes more lives, has more addiction and is consumed by kids doesn't have much regulation.

There can be better steps which can be taken such as "those who don't smoke" get a tax rebate for example.

the GOP does not have the House, Senate, or White House right now. Several of the states recently legalizing it have been GOP controlled states.

The Dems have passed absolutely nothing to move legalization forward.

Sorry, but this is squarely in Biden's hands now, and we have all seen how his track record on drug policy has been - a disappointment.

It doesn’t matter if the GOP doesn’t control the House, Senate, or White House - if the reason legalization isn’t moving forward is because 50 GOP Senators vote no, and 1 Dem Senator votes no, it’s still squarely the GOP’s fault. If a legalization bill isn’t even ever going to move past the senate, it really doesn’t matter if the House/WH are Dem controlled.

I fail to see how it’s squarely in Biden’s hands at this point, unless I’m sorely misunderstanding the US legislative process.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress-schumer-mar...

> 50 GOP Senators vote no, and 1 Dem Senator votes no, it’s still squarely the GOP’s fault

Even worse, you can have 59 Dem & GOP Senators, but if a single GOP Senator objects, the bill is dead.

I'm all for it, but is very annoying having kids and.going to the park and some pot head is smoking because he is free to do so

A lot of parks in my city are no smoking and no drinking. There's always one or two people who ignore the rules, but compared to how many there would be otherwise it's good. If someone is doing it near the kids playground I kindly remind them and ask them to go elsewhere while my kids play.

I'm in favor of people smoking pot anywhere you can smoke cigs. most parks have no-smoking laws.

Maybe ban smoking in parks and beaches and other places where people usually take their kids?

letting people grow their own is a great step that might take some profit away from the cartels. But part of the game should really be to make the production and large scale sale legal and controlled, and a non-cartel business. Leaving this massive business to organized crime is a huge problem.

High school, ~2005. A classmate's dad was a fairly high up DEA agent and he came to class to talk about his drug warrioring. Despite all his warrioring, he sadly stated that the DEA probably seized less than 1% of all drugs entering America.

So I raised my hand and asked if all the billions we spent on the drug war were wasted considering it seems like a total failure. He about had an aneurysm! Looked like his brain was going to explode that someone would ask this. I wonder how many people devoted their entire lives to this stupid, useless war. Probably one of the most destructive, idiotic things you could spend your life doing.

Its true, people will grasp at the most emotionally satisfying course of action with only a measured minority stopping to consider the vision, the math, the costs (societal and otherwise) and the sense.

I suspect when those same enraged majority hear "stupid, useless war." (I totally agree by the way) They register it in the same way again: "What?! You want your kids to become drug addicts?"

Congratulation to sense, and congratulations to Mexico.

Late reply, I just listened to Michael Garfield's Future Fossils podcast with guest Leidy Klotz[0] last night.

The subject was subtractive design. Very interesting, part of the discussion regards an 'additive bias' in our thinking. Klotz recounts an academic study he undertook to measure the bias of adding VS subtracting to solve a given problem.

I mention this because I think this bias could be useful while analyzing these sort of errors.

[0] - https://futurefossils.net/

This is cool, but clearly laws never really disincentivized bad actors in Mexico. Now I'm just wondering if I can have Fentanyl with my legal Mexican weed?

Why would they spike it with fentanyl when people will pay more for the real deal?

fentanyl provides a "better high" in very small dosages as compared to other heroine or others. Hence dealers trying to make a bigger profit lace their heroine with fentanyl. This is also why users often accidently overdose on heroine because they inject it using the heroine measurements but since it's got fentanyl, it's a lot more potent and thus easily overdosed on.

But marijuana isn't heroin, wouldn't the heroin user prefer heroin over marijuana for their heroin habit?

Marijuana users prefer marijuana.

I am sorry, I thought your reply was to my another comment which was talking about heroine and other hard drugs, not weed. My bad.

There are large swathes of Mexico that are under cartel control, thousands of square miles, so I don't think we can really don't think this case makes much difference.

"By adults" means teens will still go to jail?

Great. Everyone should be free to put into their body whatever they please. And nature cannot be made 'illegal'.

The question is what the implications are for a Mexican society where drug gangs are more than a menace. As opposed to legalization, mere decriminalization will increase demand without providing new, legal means to get the marijuana.

Then again the gangs get a very small portion of their income from domestic weed sales, so maybe this won't make the situation worse.

agree but weed is not really natural any more as we've bred it to be far more potent (thc%) than wild varieties

Here's my problem with legalising weed: Smoking it has external problems that are difficult to ever resolve. If you have ever lived beside someone who smokes weed the smell is all permeating, lingers and is absolutely vile. With more people living in apartment buildings it is an increasing problem I have observed.

Could be said with anyone that has a drug or alcohol abuse...

No. It couldn't. How?

Since legalized weed in MA most consumers in my circle have switched to edibles and vaping, as they are now available and provably* safe. Previously both were something of a crapshoot.

I like the smell of most strains of cannabis, but sometimes it is gross (I suspect because it's been mixed with tobacco).

If it bothers you, you could take it up with your neighbors just as you would if they were blasting loud music late at night.

Criminalizing it just leads to absolutely ruined lives and misery on a much worse scale than just an unpleasant smell.

Taking it up with the neighbors will work zero times out of zero. If you're lucky you'll get a brief reprieve, which will then slip back. This goes for most any annoying, persistent externality when living amongst piles of other people. Their habits and behaviors are not going to change voluntarily to please strangers, even if they initially make a small token gesture to be polite.

For anyone dealing with that situation, the only truly effective solution is to make sure the next time that you choose an apartment complex where the landlord does not allow smoking on the premises (whether tobacco or marijuana).

Most apartments have a no-smoking clause in their lease -it’s grounds for eviction. The problem though is it’s also usually illegal to smoke it in public.

While I am not going to disagree with you - I do want to share something that took a long time for me to learn about apartment living (going from a middle class upbringing in a small town and being somewhat of an introvert). Make a conscious effort to get to know your apartment neighbors. Help carrying some bags to their door, share some food or drinks, talk about friends/family/local events, send them a new years card...

If your only interactions are asking to turn the volume down or don't do the $annoying_thing, yes you'll get that response. And yeah some times you'll have neighbors that simply won't engage in community building but once I figured this out I realized those people are the exception not the rule. I also ended up getting some relationships that I would have never been exposed to in my professional or personal life.

That doesn't work. In particular in modern buildings there might be 600+ residents with very few apartments per floor.

The vectors for spreading of air between apartments can be varied. Internal, external, air intakes, communal infrastructure etc.

How this relates to the unavoidable and highly pungent smell of weed I do not know

> zero times out of zero

Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ZeroDivisionError: division by zero

> Criminalizing it just leads to absolutely ruined lives and misery on a much worse scale than just an unpleasant smell.

Not really. If you can't sleep in your own bed because a pungent smell of shit permeates your home that's not acceptable.

You might be happy to live like that but civilised people are not

i've heard the same complaints about people who cook with curry.

That’s ridiculous curry smells amazing

Cigarettes are legal and cause exactly the same kinds of problems. Every apartment complex I’ve lived in has had some smoke-free policy. If yours doesn’t, consider bringing it up with the landlord. I can’t imagine they like having their units ruined by smokers any more than you do.

The smell of my neighbor's cooking is also all permeating, lingering and absolutely vile.

True, if you smoke it can be as bad as cigarettes.

Similarly to cigarettes, if you vape cannabis the smell is much much much more tolerable, it doesn't linger and it's much reduced.

I have people vaping nicotine in my building and, sure, I'm not a fan of smelling vanilla or whatever flavour they're vaping today, but it doesn't last long and it doesn't linger.

You could make a similar argument about playing loud music.

Apartments, HOAs and similar communities are free to specify community rules, expectations and consequences in a contract/lease. When a party breaks those conditions then allow the community to enforce the contractual remedies.

There is no reason to involve the state here to take away a person's life and liberty. Just allow people to interact (or not interact) voluntarily.

Most places have sound restrictions though, not the building or community but as a city ordinance.

I've had the opportunity to live in 5 major metropolitan areas in 3 different regions of the US. Every apartment I've live in has had multiple pages of community rules. Sound/noise always had building specific guidelines.

Further calling police to handle a noise disturbance is a nuclear option. I'd hope people would have exhausted every other avenue before wasting the police's time on a noise problem.

Nope. Different countries have different rules. Invoking lease breach contracts in my country requires a high court judgement. That would take potentially years to achieve and a lot of money and multiple stakeholders involvement.

Unfortunately keeping weed a criminal substance is the best option as police enforcement can be sought to counter anti social behaviour.

Furthermore, noise is regulated by local authorities in my jurisdiction

I think we have to agree to disagree here. Taking away a person's property, freedom, or life for what they choose to ingest and preventing people from voluntarily entering into and being bound by contracts is antisocial by my personal values.

If the person's actions cause lasting detriment to another person's peaceable enjoyment of their property then they are in breach of the basic fundamentals of private property ownership. So too bad

so you just aren't aware of those who use edibles, got it

So that represents 100% of THC users does it?

Federal regulation that puts people in prison vs. the need for minimal community organization.

Tough choice.

I could say the same about bacon

Smokers need to be encouraged to switch to vaping.

guess we should criminalize bowel movements

It's a sad state of affairs when the judicial system of a country feel empowered to pass laws by themselves.

  -"Today is a historic day for liberties," Supreme Court president Arturo Zaldívar said.

Sounds political to me.

The court reiterated constitutional rights of the citizens legislators infringed on with legislation. Checks and balances.

You got that wrong. The legislation prohibiting cannabis was unconstitutional.

You are ignorant of how the Mexican legal system works.

educate me. please.

So, I'm no lawyer down there, but this is how it was explained to me by a friend down there.

What they're doing is within their constitutional mandate. It takes 5 cases to set a precedent, at which point the legislature is on a timer to take action and codify it into law. The 5 cases on this topic happened. The prohibition was found unconstitutional. The legislature has been dragging their feet for 3 years now, repeatedly asking for extensions. As the legislature has failed to act within their given deadline, the court has the right to refuse a further extension, and to take action themselves.

This is not the court abusing it's power, this is the court protecting the constitutional rights of Mexican citizens, as they're exactly supposed to.

You're projecting your own politics, I assume US based, on a totally different system. Don't do that.

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