Amazon Is Lobbying the US Government to Make Pot Legal | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is Lobbying the US Government to Make Pot Legal

businessinsider.com

80 pointselorant115 comments

Amazon is pushing for more defense contracts: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-industry-seeks-bigger-role...

To do that you need engineers who can hold a security clearance. To hold a security clearance you can't violate federal law despite what your state laws say is legal. I think this is about more than warehouse employees.

Afaict the process has gotten way more lax. Some friends have mine have gotten cleared with heavy mj use up to a few months before applying for clearance. They did have to stop using though

> They did have to stop using though

That is kinda the point. At this point I'm very accustomed to not getting drug tested for jobs, and I'm not willing to give that up. I don't even smoke that much; I'd be willing to give it up for the right reason, but defense contractor clearance wouldn't cut it.

If you get a US security clearance there is a lot you may have to give up. For example, someone who gambles a lot at casinos and lives paycheck to paycheck may get denied for their financial reasons. There's nothing illegal there.

It's not about following the law. They don't want to give clearance to people who could get into situations where they could be bribed or taken advantage of and misuse of a clearance is used to wipe away a debt.

I know a lot of pothead security clearance holders. Hasn't really been a restriction in over a decade.

It's extremely easy to pass a drug test if you have few hours notice. All it requires is some basic googling skills.

It's not about drug tests; most of the time there is no testing. If you admit to actively using drugs, you'll be denied. If you lie and they find out, you'll be denied and barred forever. They're going to talk to your friends and neighbors and there's a good chance they'll find out. And your claims about beating tests on a few hours' notice are nonsense.

They don't talk to anyone, and you can beat any urine test with full bladder of coffee/water.

They definitely talk to absolutely everyone you list on your application form. And superhydration is going to, at the very least, get you a second drug test a week later. THC resides in your body's fat cells, so it takes quite a long time before it fully clears your system to no longer be detectable in a drug test.

Complete BS. I had to do a public trust verification (SF85P) last year and they spoke to 3 friends, a neighbor, 3 old co workers, former and current boss, a coworker in the same office as me, and a former land lord. They even told me of it wasn’t for COVID all would be in person.

> They're going to talk to your friends and neighbors and there's a good chance they'll find out.

They're going to talk to the three friends you listed on your SF-86 and your former landlords at the address listed. Many people seem to think that SSBI investigations consist of, like, the Stasi slapping people around in basements trying to find out what people are hiding. Far from it. If you don't have an arrest record and were discreet about your prior drug use (ie not putting it on social media) and your friends have common sense, you have little to worry about. The process is a lot more about confirming that you lived where you said you did / had no contact with foreign agents than it is about uncovering prior drug use. Anecdotally, it is very common for people to get a waiver for "occasional experimentation with marijuana in high school" when in fact they were enthusiastic recreational drug users for years. As far as drug use goes, SSBIs are essentially a Potemkin process. Given the extent to which selective amnesia is prevalent among SCI applicants, I think it would make sense to reform the process so that applicants can be fully transparent and forgiven for their past transgressions as long as they piss clean.

> They're going to talk to the three friends you listed on your SF-86 and your former landlords at the address listed.

No? They'll branch out and talk to anyone tangentially related to you for only small reasons.

Not in the case of the two SSBIs I've been through. YMMV, I guess.

> YMMV, I guess.

Yeah, quite literally.

Yes, but if you admit honestly to having had used, but promise ever so sincerely to never do it again (this time, for sure), then you don't get denied (on that account). I've even seen the FBI agents in the interviews not-so-subtly guiding people towards the "right answer".

Yeah, I admitted it on my SF-86, and while it prompted them to interview more people, and delayed my clearance by about six weeks, it all worked out fine. They don't really care if you've smoked weed. They don't even care if you're still smoking weed (although you have to play the "it was in the past" game). They don't care about this kind of stuff. What they care about is what you're trying to hide, because if you're hiding something, you can be blackmailed. So just fess up and you'll be fine. Try to lie or cheat, and you're blacklisted for life, and rightfully so.

I actually had the opposite problem when I went for one about 20 years ago. They didn't believe me when I told them I had never smoked weed. At that point in my life, I hadn't. It took interviewing all my friends to finally convince them I wasn't lying.

You can definitely buy some synthetic urine on a few hours notice.

There are plenty of other things you can have done that are illegal and still get a clearance. Without touching if it's a good policy or not, drug use is a black mark during a clearance investigation not because it's illegal, but because you're using drugs.

I wouldn't be surprised if these agencies continue to disallow clearances due to legal drug use. Depending on the level of clearance, alcohol use, poor finances, multiple passports, and having contacts with foreign nationals from certain countries - all legal activities - are reasons for a clearance being denied.

Yeah I asked someone in human reliability about this not too long ago, she said even if it's made legal they are unlikely to change the restrictions any time soon. She said (and I'm not commenting on the validity of this line of reasoning myself, nor was she really) the argument is along the same lines of why you're also not supposed to be routinely getting wasted drinking -- it shows a pattern of unreliable behavior and there is also a risk of disclosing information when intoxicated. She did say that they might slightly relax the restrictions if weed was made fully legal.

Which is still incredibly unscientific. Cannabis doesn't even really lower inhibitions.

Do you have a source for this?

If you admit to using weed in the past year, they will make you wait to get your clearance. As long as you don't have any DUIs or legal trouble from drinking you will not be restricted. Unless you say something like "I have a serious drinking problem and get blackout drunk every night" Drinking is not an issue, even people who do drink too much will consider themselves moderate drinkers, even if they are lying to themselves.

So, admission to responsible weed usage and responsible alcohol usage will get different results.

I have a clearance and almost all of my coworkers talked openly about drinking too much on occasion, but no one would say they touched weed

The one year thing is no longer the case based on my experience. Some friends of mine had extensive marijuana use in a legal state up to 5 months before being successfully cleared

They did for me about 4 years ago, they didn't explicitly state this, so it could have just been a backlog, but a lot of people got their clearance quicker during this period.

That is happening, but it is also both a function of a crumbling system and a bit of desperation of the system to hire people, whether they are necessary or not. The system does not really care about the drug use as much as it cares about whether whatever the factor, you can or cannot be manipulated because of it. The caveat of that being though that the system used to function on that basis, something that I am increasingly witnessing is no longer the case. What we are really living through right now is a kind of civilizational event horizon where, e.g., one society/culture has no remaining knowledge of what something really was for or how it was really used or what systems created it, even as they still use or worship it or perform certain rituals simply out of repetition and custom.

A rather good example of this process is the whole "space race" where the Germans pioneered space travel technology, which ended in a kind of collapse of the whole knowledge base to the point that the USA was hitching a ride on Russian rockets just to get to an aging space station, and where space travel had to essentially be rediscovered by SpaceX, etc. I don't think people quite understand what happened in that 1955-2010 period where the "advanced society" of today stumbled upon the ancient technology of the 1955-1960s when men with straight edges and graphing paper put men on the moon and brought them back home and couldn't figure out how exactly they did it … something that has still not been replicated.

This goes a bit beyond just cultural taboo.

A breathalyzer test can determine if you are under the influence of alcohol _at this moment_. No such test exists for weed. The only way to prove someone is not high is to do the usual urine test, which returns positive if you've smoked at all in the past ~month.

It's a liability thing. If a "weed breathalyzer" is invented and employers can prove that you are sober when reporting to work, I think smoking in the evening will become much less of an issue.

There are devices to detect if someone is currently high from weed, though they are not very common. Source is my SO who works doing DUI rehabilitation therapy for alcohol and weed.

I believe the marijuana "breathalyzer" / swab tests are known to moderately to wildly inaccurate, like you can test positive 2 days after consumption in some cases. Law enforcement desperately wants such a device, so naturally there are plenty of companies willing to fudge their numbers to provide it however.

It goes far beyond just "because you are using drugs" … it is a national security or any security risk for someone to be dependent and pliable, not only on or by drugs. I was going to make this a long explanation, but it can easily be summed up by if you can be manipulated by it, then the system will deem it a threat because you are a weak point. That means the affair you did not confess to your wife or that you fear ostracism for from your community if it were to become publicly known; just as much as the gambling debt or the DUI or any other hidden degenerate proclivities.

But that is all clearly falling by the way side as the US system crumbles and decays from being extremely unhealthy with a kind of civilizational or at least societal and cultural cancer that has clearly metastasized at this point.

Amazon is probably already distributing large quantities of cannabis. I don’t think Amazon is actually concerned with their hired help, but I think they are very concerned with legal risk of shipping drugs which may be disguised as other products.

Amazon can't ship or sell marijuana because even though it's legal on a state level, it's still illegal on a federal level, which means banks won't process payments that are made through federally illegal means. The local dispensaries have issues with having huge amounts of cash on hand because they can't use banks, so far as I know, because of RICO laws.

Sellers aren’t going to list the product as drugs. It may be a suspiciously priced curio or garment that the buyer knows is something else.

There's a difference between holding a clearance and getting a clearance. Most of the responses deal with getting one and how long it has been since using illegal drugs.

>To hold a security clearance you can't violate federal law despite what your state laws say is legal

Exactly. If you are a federal employee, you cannot simply use marijuana because the state made it legal. Earlier this year, the Office of Personnel Management "reiterated that the mandates of Executive Order 12564, Drug-Free Federal Workplace, prohibiting the use of illegal drugs on or off duty remain in effect for all federal employees."

They push so heavily in their press release[0] and their lobbying letter[1] about how this "disproportionately affected communities of color". I'm sure that is true, and it's an important problem.

But I'm almost certain this has nothing to do with Amazon's true reasons for doing this: it's just a great way to frame it as them caring about something that comes as a nice byproduct of increased profits for them. I find that pretentiousness a bit gross!

[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-is... [1]: https://assets.aboutamazon.com/3e/53/014acc0843c3b6d5c12b06d...

When I care about something and I want others to care about it too, I frame it in a way that would help them do that. For example the two main ways I’ve seen newspapers argue in favour of changes are data driven (538) or human interest angle (NYT). Each approach appeals to a different demographic. I’ll use the approach that appeals to my audience, not the one that I personally find most compelling. That doesn’t make me dishonest, just sensitive to the preferences of people listening to me.

Will a change in this law make it easier for Amazon to staff warehouses and teams working on defence contracts? Yes. And are they convincing people with language most likely to work? Also yes. I don’t see the issue.

There's a difference between framing an argument to make it more appealing to people with different values than yourself and lying about what your motives are. For example, if I wanted to pass legislation that would require backdoors in all E2EE communication systems, and I sold my idea by telling everyone that my legislation would prevent terrorism, wouldn't we all agree that's dishonest?

Depends. Will it actually reduce terrorism? And have no other negative side effects on society? Then sure, frame it that way.

No sane person on this thread disputes that what they said is true - marijuana laws have hurt communities of colour disproportionately. Further, framing it in these terms makes it more likely that change will actually happen and those communities will benefit. But some folks have decided that no one working at Amazon cares about that.

Suppose Amazon actually framed it like some people here want them to. “We want to make the lives of our employees and prospective employees easier.” Who would that help exactly? Would it make it more likely that this necessary legislation would pass? No, it wouldn’t. The only thing it would change is that some people here would be less annoyed. But there was no reason to be annoyed in the first place! It’s getting angry by reflex because you don’t like Amazon for other reasons.

Yeah I don't think Amazon cares at all about "communities of color" or anything related to social good. They want more ways to make profit and if they can sell weed on their website, they're going to push for it.

They also want to open their hiring pool up to more low wage workers, and not have to pay for testing and marijuana related overhead. Employers will save lots of money if weed is legalized federally.

This is the company that identified less "diverse" workforces as being at greater risk of unionization.

Everything a corporation like this does is to further its own wealth and power. Anything that may appear to align with your favorite political or social issue, or that is ostensibly said to be for the greater good or to help others is only by coincidence, or because that is estimated to further the primary goal.

That doesn't mean corporatoins are evil, or bad, or good. Corporations are a tool. Amazon cares about communities of color in much the same way as a hammer cares about communities of color.

It's unfortunate but I think "communities of color" are the new "think of the children". It will be used to masquerade motivations under the guise of the social justice flavor of the decade ultimately undermining the true good that could come from these thoughts.

I wish they'd do this in the UK. At the moment we have a real naked emperor situation where more and more anti-drugs legislation gets passed to appease the ridiculous "Vernon Dursley" characters that the focus groups think make up most voters, but in reality pot is common enough to be seen as on par with speeding or pirating MP3s to most well-adjusted people.

It's time the legal reality reflected objective reality here. Legalisation is now consistently out-polling prohibition, it's an open secret that prohibition has been a litany of failure by every objective measure, yet for some reason our politicians are like the Japanese holdouts in the 1950s still hopelessly fighting a war that was lost long ago. It's time we told the remaining hysterical moral puritans to get back in their boxes and finally adopt a sensible policy towards the legalisation of cannabis. If pure polling won't make this happen, maybe corporate lobbyists will do some good for society by accident.

I'm not sure that the majority opinion is that it is on tier with mp3 piracy.

In cooler towns like London, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield maybe. But my parents in the midlands are strictly anti-drugs and see cannabis as as bad as cocaine, and its the case like that for all their friends and the community around.

The culture in the UK is just too different than the culture in the US.

That honestly sounds exactly like the culture in the US.

I think there's a lot of geographical variation, I live in an area that would traditionally be considered very Tory-ish but it seems fairly common judging by the smell in public places. I have to admit my experience is probably biased by my social circle, but polling does suggest that staunch prohibitionists aren't nearly as common as our political climate would suggest.

This YouGov survey in 2019 has twice as many people supporting than opposing legalisation for example:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cannabis-leg...

It's more granular than that. There are localities where the prevalent opinion is anti-cannabis, and localities where the opposite is true. I am in the state of Tennessee, and I have a family member who believes that a person who buys and consumes cannabis is "subsidizing murder".

In the US, most legalization started with ballot initiatives initiated by activists. California's medical marijuana; and Colorado and Massachusetts 100% legalization, were all direct ballot initiatives.

The states control most of the policing anyway, so legalization at the state level basically makes federal drug laws difficult to enforce.

Are there popular ballot initiatives in the UK? (Ok, there was Brexit.) But, can you do something in your town like, "The town police shall treat marijuana laws as their lowest priority." or "The town police shall not enforce marijuana laws or cooperate with county police on marijuana enforcement?"

I really think pot should be legal...but I find the smell of smoked pot so rancid I wish their would be a big push to move away from that form of consumption. Want to get high? Go ahead, just don't light a stink bomb off as you do

If pot were legal I expect most people would consume it via drinks and edibles. The main disadvantage of these products is controlling dose, and those go away with a well regulated market.

This is describing a lot of what happened here in Canada. People still smoke pot, but edibles are widely available. I can order anything I want online and have it shipped in a day or two. I can walk across the street to the nearest store and but what they have.

But some people still smoke pot.

MA res. here. I tried a few different edibles, sublinguals and they didn't do shit for me. They seem to be regulated to 10mg doses. If they aren't popular it's possible it's because they're expensive and don't work. I am road cyclist and would never fuck with my lungs.

Cost. Isn't the process to extract thc content and turn it into an edible rather intensive? Not to mention spoilage issues.

In Seattle, a fully legal 10mg THC edible can be had for $2 dollars. Higher quality ones for $3.

And that will get an average person pretty solidly high for several hours.

Contrasted with the cost of alcohol, this is dirt cheap.

> In Seattle, a fully legal 10mg THC edible

...does not exist, as it is still banned by federal law.

Federal legality will probably drive prices up compared to the current “technically a major crime subject to run, invest in, or play any leadership role in a major business in, though that's not currently actively enforced” [0] condition as the current condition encourages lots of small operators while preventing consolidation, without the high added risk premium of an actively enforced probibition.

[0] because drug kingpin laws apply to marijuana

Laws only count if they are enforced, and the federal government would have to deploy the military on American soil to police states that have legalized marijuana.

Therefore, if you are over 21 years of age and can prove that with official documentation, you can walk into any of hundreds of official retail establishments in several states that are publicly advertised on billboards and purchase marijuana with cash. As long as you do not operate a motor vehicle under the influence or cause a public nuisance, there will be no legal consequences of that action.

Furthermore, you can buy stocks in companies that grow marijuana for sale and distribution in the United States. If it were really illegal, why are companies that do that and pay taxes on the commerce allowed to operate and be publicly traded on the stock exchanges?

> Laws only count if they are enforced

The thing is, the drug kingpin statute has a long statute ot limitations, and there is no federal policy making current violations relating to marijuana not criminal, only a law prohibiting the executive branch from spending money prosecuting marinuana-related offenses related to medical use consistent with state law which the executive branch has also mostly treated as applying to other use permitted by state law. But the boundaries of the legal policy are somewhat fuzzy, and were it to be repealed tomorrow, there would be no bar to the Feds rounding up people who had been openly engaging in the marijuana trade and charging them under drug laws, including the drug kingpin law, subject to the applicable statutes of limitations. And/or filing forfeiture actions (civil and/or criminal; though the latter requires criminal charges against the individual) against property used in or derived from the business.

The risk does affect the who enters the industry, who supplies the industry, and how people in and around the industry conduct business.

> the federal government would have to deploy the military on American soil to police states that have legalized marijuana

AFAIK, the DEA, FBI, and other federal law, and the people who have openly been conducting marijuana business don't take that much effort to identify and round up. The military would not be required to do policing, though DOJ’s Criminal Division might want to get some military JAG lawyers assigned on temporary duty to handle the caseload surge.

What makes an edible higher quality versus lower? Is it taste, consistency of dose, etc? Are some edible form factors more desirable than others?

> The main disadvantage of these products is controlling dose, and those go away with a well regulated market.

Nope. THC intake with smoking is (pretty much) consistent across people and the dosing feedback from intake to effect is much shorter, whereas edibles hit differently depending on a lot of specific factors (body weight, how much one has eaten/drunk) which means that especially in "social get-high situations" edibles don't really work as intended. Not to mention it's easy to overdose on edibles.

That's not what happens.

When I go to the pot stores in Massachusetts and California, most people just buy regular pot. There's plenty of edibles and vaping concentrate available, it's just that most people want to smoke the flower.

Smoking and edibles are different experiences. If you want the effects right away, edibles don't do that. Very different thing feeling the full effects in 10 min. vs 1-2 hrs.

In addition, weed is much more potent than alcohol. With alcohol, most people roughly have the same experience. With weed, give it to 10 different people and they'll have 11 different experiences with it.

It's also much easier to consume a much larger dose by edible than by smoking. Smoking is sort of self-regulating - if you take hits too quickly, you'll cough too much to be able to continue smoking without taking a break.

Unless you can find another way that gives you an instant high, people are still going to smoke.

Just boof it

No different than any other strong smell caused by personal enjoyment (grilling, fires, certain cuisines)

Don't forget perfumes! Some work places have banned strong perfumes on the grounds it affects others. Having a really strong sense of smell, I would rather smell cannabis smoke over strong perfume or really any chemical smell.

I agree. I thought pot wasn't supposed to be so addictive that users had the same withdrawal they get from nicotine. I was at a reunion picnic on Labor Day and people in another group had to take a break to go down to their cars to get high. It was a breezy day so our group was swamped with the skunk smell of today's pot. Additionally, I was at an amusement park last year and they have certain areas set aside for smoking. They are little alcoves off the normal walking paths and behind some bushes and trellis. Every time we went past one, all you could smell was skunk. I think we are starting to get into second hand smoke kind of issues. I could care less if people want to get high, I just don't get the need to be constantly high in public.

"had to take a break"

more like: "wanted to get high on a nice day out"

You don't get the same withdrawal, and your anecdotes do not indicate that it causes any kind of withdrawal, just that some people find nature/amusement parks more enjoyable stoned.

Edibles and other forms of consumption often don't have all the same compounds in them. Marijuana has a lot of stuff in it and many of these compounds aren't fully understood yet.

In college, I liked smoking up from time to time if someone offered. I'd get incredibly high and have a great time. Now that it's legal here in Canada I thought "why not try some THC chocolate?". I ordered it online, had a piece and waited.

It sucked. The bar contained THC and a little bit of CBD and nothing else. I didn't really get the kind of high I remember enjoying in college, just a light buzz and felt sleepy. Honestly the best part was the chocolate, which was super high quality.

I still haven't tried smoking pot again. But I suspect I would have a much better time if I did.

I tried edibles as well and got sleepy, agitated and a slight paranoia from it. Tried it a few more times to make sure it wasn’t just that and it really doesn’t jibe with me, prefering to be sober to that.

Going so far as to actually smoke it is a hair too far.

Get a quality vaporizer and enjoy the full bouquet without the harmful combustion byproducts.

So many people are looking for selfish motives here, or even (because it's Amazon) sinister ones. I doubt they're sitting in a board room twirling their mustaches and cackling about the chaos they'll sew once they control pot distribution. I do believe they're doing this to make more money: my reasoning is that that's what for-profit companies do. But, just because it's Amazon doesn't mean you have to oppose this. Try to imagine a massive corporation lobbying for legalizing marijuana twenty years ago, and take the win!

It's like the time they raised their minimum wage to $15 but it was totally somehow evil, though.

I'd like to live in a society where things are legal for reasons other than because some psychopathic billionaire who would rather literally shoot himself into space than help the poor thinks it will be good for his bottom line.

Well now that cannabis legalization is useful to our corporate masters with their lobbying tentacles deep in the digestive and reproductive tracts of our elected and appointed officials then it's a fait accompli.

Of course, Amazon must develop all expanding consumer markets given the ease with which it can enter them. Amazon will make billions and quickly became the market leader if it becomes federally legal.

Oh, if I could buy my weed from Amazon I would in a heartbeat! The best pot store is about 25 minutes from my house, and my town will only approve medical-only stores.

Yeah that's why they're lobbying, there are millions who would pay them for prime weed lol.

> "We've found that eliminating pre-employment testing for cannabis allows us to expand our applicant pool," Amazon senior VP of human resources Beth Galetti said.

As soon as I read that headline I figured this had at least something to do with it.

I wish people were more suspicious of these mega cult corporations. Amazon is not doing this or anything out of some kind of warm spot in their frozen corporate hearts.

Just like when the internal Amazon emails revealed the cynical reason that Amazon, and likely all other corporations, support "diversity" is that diversity causes disunity, disorganization, and weakness among the workers that then do not unite and form unions or have any demands or unity that can create leverage over the corporate masters.

I don't know why Amazon supports pot legalization, but we know why Amazon supports diversity and it's not for reasons that their Department of Propaganda broadcasts to the masses, so it seems extremely unlikely that Amazon would have somehow had an epiphany to not be a typical psychopathic corporation.

I think it is a good idea. I have often suspected the alcohol and tobacco lobbies have demonised Pot for years and are, in part, responsible for the harsh Pot laws we endure. When I compare the deadly legacy of death sown by alcohol and tobacco to the more or less non existent death rate due to Pot it makes me wonder why we have these laws - if not such a concerted lobbying effort by these lobbies. As for me, I do not drink or smoke Pot(or tobacco), but I do suck nicotine 4Mg tablets from Walmart 2 per day - keeps me thin, no other apparent effect. These nicotine inhalers (Juul, etc) that ended up doing lung damage and killing people would have been OK if they went with care and evaluated before release, so it was only nicotine you breathed. The added chemicals did the killing, just like it is the tar and chemicals in combustion smoking that kills you. Then the millions of people harmed by the police and prison systems for alcohol and Pot offences - remove the Pot offences, wipe that slate clean, empty the prisons of Pot offenders, clean their records, fully expunge that past..

I hope the government acts on this imitative. The states that have approved Pot have shown already that Pot is not a problem at all.

> The states that have approved Pot have shown already that Pot is not a problem at all.

I don't agree. I live in a legal state and there a plethora of issues caused by it being legal. A lot of these are due to the fact that people flock here because not everywhere has legalized yet. The problems are probably less of an issue than things caused by tobacco and alcohol. However, they are certainly present.

That sounds like an intoxicant tourism problem rather than a specifically cannabis problem.

Yeah and that's part of legalizing it just like allowing anything. Allowing alcohol means you will deal with drunk drivers killing people.

There are downsides to having legalized cannabis. Sorry that upsets you. I'm not advocating for it to be illegal.

It doesn't upset me - you're thinking of the other commenter, I think.

I was just clarifying a little.

What are the issues? Increased tax revenue for towns from outside buyers? Are these new issues that didn't exist in the black market?

I can see issues with security/robbing facilities that are cash rich due to issues depositing the cash due to federal regulations... but that's not the dispensaries fault.

> Increased tax revenue for towns from outside buyers? Are these new issues that didn't exist in the black market?

For what it's worth, the Netherlands allow communities to ban foreigners from coffee shops - Maastricht already has such a ban, and proposals to do the same in Amsterdam crop up regularly (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/11/foreigners-fac...). The issue is that especially in border-adjacent cities coffee shops attract a lot of "weed tourism": people coming only for the weed but not spending much outside of the coffee shops, causing traffic issues and the likes, that are nowhere near appropriately covered by the pot taxes.

We Germans have a similar issue with prostitution - Germany is widely seen as the "biggest brothel of Europe", so especially French clients (where "thanks" to the "nordic model" prostitution is criminalized) overrun the brothels close to the border. In Czechia, prostitution is legal as well - but vastly cheaper than in Germany, which means a lot of Germans living near the border go there.

The main issue is abuse which is not limited to pot of course and seems to cause fewer issues than alcohol, but it’s nonetheless something not to be proud of.

I don't have actual data because it's not available. Anecdotally, I have friends/family who teach and there seems to be a definite increase in the amount of kids smoking. It's much easier for them to get their hands on it now. Just like having legal alcohol, they send in their older friends to buy cannabis.

Additionally, you have a lot of families moving in just to grow pot and they'll come in buy up some sort of low end desert property shack thinking they can grow a bunch of plants all over their property legally. They don't take care of their kids at all so there's a large influx of kids just wandering around without parents, missing school etc. because their parents are high all the time. I see people smoking and jumping in vehicles regularly, they also appear to think it's just fine to drive intoxicated since it's not alcohol.

Then you have the whole cannabis oil vape pen issue which is sort of a downstream effect.

I'm not advocating for keeping it illegal. I'm just pointing out it's not all rainbows and unicorns when you legalize it. Supposedly the tax money goes to schools but I've yet to witness any actual improvements from it. Like most things, they'll say they're going to put taxes in one place and then pull other money away from them.

There's also this strange pervasive idea that no harm can come from cannabis. There are multiple studies showing it isn't good for adolescents.

What exactly are these issues and the supporting evidence?

The issues are downstream, people in jails or unable to get jobs because they were caught with Pot in 1964. Some statistics show up tp 50% of jailed people are due to Pot - true, most get out and most carry on OK, but the record blights their lives - it should not. There are millions of these blighted people - disproportionally Black because the system favored whites at all levels - better defence via $$, as well as pure naked racism. Be done with it, free these millions of all races from this persistent stigma.

That shouldn’t be the test though. I’m not surprised that legalising pot caused issues, of course it would.

The question should be are those issues worse than the well-documented problems caused by it being illegal.

Strawman. Nowhere am I advocating for it to stay illegal.

Well, when prohibition came in they flocked for a last drink - then the big league bootleggers came - bigger problem. Then it was legalised again - big problem again. Then it abated to the steady state drunks and road deaths. When it is legal these local clusters at borders will go away - then it will be the abuser problem, I prefer the Pot abuser problem to the alcohol abuser problem. Pot causes almost none of the tobacco cancer problems as most smoke less and the smoke has been verified as less cancerous(low, but not zero) Vaping will be non cancerous and non dangerous for nicotine or pot - it was the added crap that caused the deaths. So I thinka safer steady state will emerge, Pot and 'tobacco essence' = nicotine via vape or lozenge will emerge as a safer high than smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol. Look at Russia, to some degree brought down by alcohol - they had and still have a HUGE booze problem at all levels of their society.

No nicotine inhalers killed people. Those were bootleg THC carts that killed people. If the federal gov would have regulated THC carts, those people wouldn't have died.

But instead of blaming the gov't for inaction leading to death on an issue that the majority of Americans have supported for decades, most remember the Juul is bad for you.

If you want an idea for corporations are going to act politically, check out libertarianism.

Basically: Anything that can be commercialized should be legal. Social things: Meh, whatever, really.

I wish corporations acted like libertarians politically lmao

Brave New World gets one more step closer. We can soon rename pot to soma.

A lot of people would need to work less if not paying for addictions. Encouraging more pot use is good for those who depend on labor.

To be honest most of the fascination with pot is the fact that it's illegal and you are not supposed to smoke it.

Governments around the world should think long and hard before legalizing it because as soon as they do, people will move to the next thing. Maybe something that it's both illegal and won't cause much harm such as cocaine and party drugs. Still more harmful than pot though.

For sure there would be a sudden spike if you could buy pot at Whole Foods, but I'd be surprised if 1 year after legalization there are huge differences vis-a-vis the current regime

The way I see it , alcohol is the layer0 . People use it to lower their own inhibitions and also groups as a whole to lower the group's inhibitions.

Once a substance that can perform the aforementioned function is provided and legal, everything else becomes a contest for people trying to one-up each other.

And I think pot is included in it, but also cigarettes and all the other drugs.

I think it’d help if you cited some data to back up what you’re saying. Without it your claims are pure conjecture. There’s plenty of opportunity for such data to be collected because there’s data before and after legalisation in many states and countries. You could compare US states where it’s legal and where it isn’t.

I'm sure that's true for some small percentage of the population to try and one-up each other with dangerous acts. But the fact that they do it because it is illegal is very dubious. Where is the world of underground illegal cycling on freeways? Right, there is no culture of that because no one from the general populace is doing that for fun. The one-upping can only exist in a culture that is well established via some other means. For instance, search for "gravity biking" which is an incredibly dangerous sport that only exists in places with a big cycling culture. The legality of pot has nothing to do with daredevil behavior.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g-NsgOa42VE

Here is your world of underground freeway biking btw

That road has a sidewalk, that isn't a freeway.

> Where is the world of underground illegal cycling on freeways?

The underground culture of illegal street racing is alive and well though.

Cycling is not a social activity in the sense that has constraints to socialization both during the activity as well as before/after.

Street racing isn't that social of an activity either but it exists and thriving. The Fast saga made 15B from it. Drug consumption on a night out is the social activity by definition, it trumps street racing.

You essentially prove my point. That an illicit form of a dangerous activity exists because many other people are doing it as part of their daily life not because the activity is in itself illegal.

No , it's because of the thrill.

Street racing has an element of thrill and danger in the race itself, whereas pot only trill would be breaking the law given that it is impossible to OD and there is little to no harm.

The low toxicity and low harm are positives but only as long as there is some form of thrill to keep the population hooked on pot. That is: breaking the law.

I believe we are saying the same thing. I called these people daredevils in my original post to capture exactly that they are pursuing thrills. I'm sure doing pot is thrilling for puritans because it is illegal but that is so laughable because of the state of reality. My point remains that these daredevils aren't going to upgrade to harsher substances if pot is legalized because that has long since past on the thrills scale.

I don't think you've ever smoked pot...

People are not smoking pot as a trill of breaking the law. Just as drinking alcohol before the age of 21 is not for the trill of breaking the law, but for the feeling it gives.

Alcohol is in every way worse for you as a person and for society, yet it is fully legal.

I don't smoke simply because my Job requires a pot free lifestyle. But I spent the first half of my 20s doing it, and the last thing on my mind or anyone else was "Take that LawMan".

Plus you can be a daily smoker for 6+ years and quit cold turkey. Sure you might crave it, but that is more mental. Your body doesn't break down from not having it. Unless you have poor mental control to keep yourself from breaking. Its the same weak control that fools people into dumping money into mobile games.

It's not because of the thill. It's because people like to relax or focus. There are two different main strains and both do different things, one is more relaxing the other is more energizing.

I don't know a single pothead who does it because of the thrill of breaking the law. They do it because they enjoy being high.

Which is anecdotal, but still more grounded in reality than wild conjecture based on nothing.

> To be honest most of the fascination with pot is the fact that it's illegal and you are not supposed to smoke it.

This is easily disproven by looking at domestic marijuana usage in states where it is legal -- reported past marijuana use has increased year after year in every such state.

> Governments around the world should think long and hard before legalizing it because as soon as they do, people will move to the next thing.

This view is myopic. What about societal benefits? Shouldn't governments also think about: tax revenue increases, fewer people in jail, more people employed, lower use of opiates, etc? (Not to mention personal liberty and giving citizens the right to grow a plant whose effects are clearly less harmful than alcohol in the aggregate.)

> The way I see it , alcohol is the layer0 . People use it to lower their own inhibitions and also groups as a whole to lower the group's inhibitions.

People also use alcohol and then commit domestic abuse or kill people with automobiles or kill themselves, while their "inhibitions are lowered". Sounds great for society.

(On re-reading, I see you are not necessarily arguing for alcohol to be legal -- you seem to be saying that there will be a slow ramp-up of legalizing all drugs because people want to "one-up each other". I find this claim strange and it doesn't resonate with me -- I know plenty of people that like alcohol and not weed, and vice versa. There's no hierarchy of drugs.)

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