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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Heh. "Conservative South." I completely understand how arbitrary stances on drugs can be, but for a region with strong ties to alcohol production, someone without cultural context would be pretty confused that alcohol is celebrated[1], while cannabis is stigmatized.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKZqGJONH68

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I don't think alcohol production correlates as much as you're alluding to. I lived in Texas and the state is highly unforgiving around alcohol. A first time drunk driving offense takes the better part of a decade to overcome. Bars and stores are constantly presented with tricks and arbitrary limits that make a job that averages $60k a year a legal minefield. We'd have massive grids around the city setup on holidays that were sobriety checkpoints.

A lot of constituents in the south, from my experience, already use CBD, THC, or both. I'm not sure what actually holds the state back from legalizing it given that so many folks already support it.

Texas is weird. They definitely talk the talk with regard to freedom but when you take a closer look they're highly authoritarian.

Depends on the policy. The way I think about TX and CA is that they divide up the Bill or Rights and divy up the ones which they will actually respect.

To be fair. Texas is Texas; not the south.

At least that’s what my Texas History teacher told me in the state mandated class.

I'd bet he would be screaming mad about which side Texas is of the Mason-Dixen line. By my eye Texas is not part of the north.

It fought for the Confederacy, but in the first couple battles took such catastrophic losses that it was effectively out of the war.

From what I remember, it was different from other Southern states in that a large minority of settlers weren’t southerners and held the relatively new religious Northern idea that slavery was evil. Southern Democrats were still the majority and the Democrats were holding the threat of succession and violence against Republicans to force concessions about slavery (eg, the Missouri Compromise).

Also the state legislature voted overwhelmingly to secede and join the Confederacy citing wanting to keep slavery as one of the primary causes for seceding.

It seems pretty cut and dry to me now, but this man was an intimidating teacher, and I was a quiet kid...

One history book I read spent like an entire chapter on the topic of how to define The South.

Some people include Texas in their definition of The South and some don't. There are multiple states that people have this argument about. Humorously, Florida is another such state.

Yup, it's definitely not an obvious definition. I grew up in GA and the people around me always saw it as appalachia south of the Mason-Dixon line. Texas was kind of a mixture. Same with Louisiana though less so than texas. The joke for Florida was that the further south you went the more north you'd end up.

I've lived in Texas a good while. I think alcohol is completely celebrated here. People consume a lot of alcohol [0]. It's a massive part of every social function and many peoples daily home life. Many have drinking problems.

I remember when it was a big problem in terms of the combination of Texas roads & drunk driving. And people carried shotguns & rifles in their vehicles (on display).

Now, at that time, we also had a bunch of marijuana and "illegals" from South (which were associated, at least in our minds). We also had a national/universal war on drugs and cartels. Reefer madness was in full effect during my teen years, but as teens, we smoked Mexican brick weed mostly. This, this is the mentality that continues to shape our marijuana policies. Also, Fox News.

In good news, Gov. Greg Abbott has recently said he would sign the bill to broaden medical marijuana usage [1]; including for veterans.

[0] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur...

[1] https://twitter.com/gregabbott_tx/status/1403188569817161730...

The word is race. Many drugs in the US are associated with particular races. America used to get much of its weed from South America, hence it is associated with Mexicans and border smugglers. Conversely, in Canada, weed was once controlled by biker gangs. Bikers gangs being predominantly white organizations, weed in Canada is not now associated with minority groups.

Race is intertwined in nearly all American policies but I don’t think it particularly plays a role in why Texas or the South has been slow to legalize/decriminalize marijuana. I think that’s the southern conservative values thing, which does have a racist component. Towing the party line means supporting the war on drugs.

I think we look to places that have legalized. Where it’s basically an extension of the craft beer industry and very white, so I think the same would be true here if/when legalized. I don’t see how racism comes into current policy choices.

My personal opinion, and I feel like I’ve always been pro legalization, but I don’t like how it’s been done in other states I’ve visited. I don’t want to see a weed shop in every strip center or a green cross on ever billboard. I don’t want my kids seeing that. Just because we do alcohol that way, doesn’t make it the best way. I wish it was behind the counter at a pharmacist or mail order only or something similar. Porn shops and strip clubs are highly zoned to keep it out of neighborhoods here, that could work.

What takes a decade to overcome? That seems like a gross exaggeration - from reading the Texas penal code it looks like your first DWI conviction is a class A misdemeanor and the license suspension period is 90 days to a year… that’s rather standard in the USA. Texas also allows you to petition the court for an occupational driver's license that allows you to drive to perform essential functions even while your license is suspended, which is definitely not an option in all states.

Cities are allowed to leverage civil penalties which can also withold your drivers license. You'll get penalties from the city as well as the state.

A huge push for checkpoints means drinking is so common that drinking and driving is a major problem.

Don't forget the intelligence agency off book guns, drugs, money triangle. I've thought for a while as a border state, thats the primary thing exerting influence over the state congress. One of Columbias most famous hitmen said it, if the US legalizes it would change a lot of Mexico for the better, and ironically would be bad for Columbia since they are the upstream supplier. AZ went legal and I can't wait to see how it has impacted the peripherial black markets like human trafficking. If a state on the border like AZ can do it well and reduce over the border criminal activity then I think Texas will start catching up.

My 70 y/o mother-in-law kicked a 9 pill/day habit and drastically reduced her alcohol intake by taking a trip to the dispensary. And she did it by herself! She reminds me of the person I first met years ago. It’s an amazing transformation.

Divest yourself of anything related to the ATF and pay attention to the changes at the DEA.

There are many dry counties in the south. In many places “beer drinker” is used a pejorative. The north and west, generally more urban places, consume most alcohol.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/442848/per-capita-alcoho...

This is an important thing to understand. Pills prescribed by trusted medical professionals in these places were destined to be a kill shot because there were no “cultural antibodies” against them. Weed, alcohol and other potentially damaging habits are kept in check by religion. Opiates and bad diet are the big killers in the south because there are no religious restrictions to moderate. The notion that southerners are drunks is a myth, as are many negative stereotypes of the south.

Bourbon/whiskey tradition or not a lot of the South has this very moralistic relationship with alcohol where because of Baptist and similarly strict religious traditions casual alcohol use was forbidden or looked down on, so even today in a lot of less urban places you wouldn’t see adults having a beer or glass of wine with lunch. They kind of conceptualize drinking as an all or nothing thing where college students or alcoholics binge and respectable adults abstain. Of course its changing quickly but its always weird coming back here and being constantly hassled for id instead of having wine pushed on you by a server as you have in other places.

Dot not underestimate religion in the south. Change comes from the pulpit, not the soapbox. Little can change until the local preachers speak out. And Reagan republicanism, which is basically a civic religion in the south. Its preachers, the talk radio crowd, have to change first too.

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