Mississippi is 37th state to legalize medical marijuana
npr.org
npr.org
Its government was a staunch defender of slavery, the later Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation, Negro voting disenfranchisement; the last to repeal alcohol prohibition; still frequently challenging abortion rights; among other such.
Mississippi is kind of a belle weather for how Southern conservative governments will lean. That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
I also wanted to honor and acknowledge the non-reactionary political and social forces working and living in Mississippi.
They did not legalize marijuana. At least not in the context of what legalizing marijuana means in 2022, which I think should be that you can walk into a marijuana store and buy marijuana like other states.
The important part being that cops can still bust you for simply having marijuana or buying marijuana, or even suspecting marijuana. Which was the big problem in the first place.
Never mind, I see that it's decriminalized only for 1st offense and under 30 grams, but pretty harsh otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Mississippi
Sure, Mississippi is making progress, but it is 2022, we have the internet, a decade plus of other states actually legalizing it and making it easily accessible to everyone of age, and so my expectations of “legalizing” it are much higher than they were 20 years ago.
A wether is a castrated sheep/goat.
I’m betting $1000 that OP has never stepped foot in Mississippi.
“Negro voting disenfranchisement”?
Voter repression is not just historical.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/01/mississipp...
I mean, you could take the time to refute the "analysis"...?
Paywall. Would love to comment but apparently I’m not allowed.
If you could lay aside your hostility, I am open to your perspective. How is what I wrote incorrect?
I say this having grown up in Alabama and gone to university in Mississippi.
There's a lot of things I love about Alabama. Even the state government occasionally gets things right, like universal pre-K. But they have a long way to go.
National averages are 2.3% and 6.3%.
https://mississippitoday.org/2020/10/19/study-11-of-all-miss...
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While there are both legal and legislative attempts to change it, as of now:
Mississippi currently has no provisions for re-enfranchising those with a past felony conviction, other than by a direct act of the legislature or governor for that specific individual (which is very rare).
Steal $1,001 of stuff when you're 18 and you'll likely never get to vote again in your life even if you never have another encounter with the wrong side of the law.
Isn't a felony, by definition, a federal offense? How can they be different in different states?
In theory it has to do with if the prison sentence can last more than a year.
I highly doubt it. And at a Federal level it will never be legalized. The Biden administration has no plans and the folks involved are just playing games and never had any intention of fulfilling their promises.
Democrats: vote for us for universal healthcare, weed, etc.
Republicans: vote for us for gun rights, freedom, etc.
Neither plans to actually do anything at the national level. They want these carrots kept around to dangle in their constituents' faces.
A bottle of good Spanish wine, claimable somewhere in Central Europe, if you win :)
Context on the state leg last year: https://mississippitoday.org/2021/03/22/medical-marijuana-an...
And the court case: https://mississippitoday.org/2021/04/14/mississippi-supreme-...
That this was a grass-roots initiative makes it more durable. It also means challengers can use it as a wedge issue, at the state level and federally.
And the grassroots efforts will have a hard fight because of how the power dynamics work in Mississippi. I'm very cynical about progressive politics in Mississippi because I've been a part of the grassroots movements and seen what actually happens. 100+ years of white supremacy is very effective at keeping the power structures in tact, because a lot of the voters are disenfranchised, gerrymandered out of having much power, or have moved away.
If cannabis legalisation gets branded as a progressive issue it’s DOA. In Mississippi as well as in most states.
They don't win any votes by supporting legalization (they have all those reluctant votes anyways), and publicly supporting legalization gives their far-right opposing party free ammunition (the DNC wants your kids to be stoned, urban crime, &c.). So it's all downside, with no upside.
In today's polarized climate, you can say that about almost any issue whatsoever.
Compare the Democrats' reluctance to take on and lead on issues to the modus operandi of the Republicans, who have not hesitated to innovate and lead in the political sphere even when the ideas they float are laughed at and villified by their opposition and the mainstream media. Despite that they still manage to fire up their base, change the national conversation, and get their leaders elected.
Democrats don't have to have the equivalent of FOX News or conservative talk radio (they tried that with Air America[1] and failed), but they could show some backbone and actually lead rather than always reacting to Republicans framing the issues.
The nation has clearly moved on past believing in Reefer Madness style anti-cannabis propaganda, and even the risk-averse Democratic leadership should recognize that cannabis legalization is an issue with broad national support and that this is a leadership opportunity.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(radio_network)
Doubtful! The state legislatures in these states are generally more conservative than the population and are generally against these measures. In Wisconsin for example there is currently no chance of legalization because the state legislature is gerrymandered within an inch of its life for some of the most radical republicans in the country, despite the fact that generally the state votes for democratic representatives at the federal and state level.
No one cares if you've had a drink over the weekend, on your own time, as long as it's not affecting your on-the-job performance. Some companies have parties where alcohol is served, and going for drinks after work is quite common.
Yet so many companies require you to take drug tests before you get hired (and some have regular on-the-job drug tests), to prove you haven't used cannabis in the last 30 days -- even in states where it's legal, and even if you have a prescription for it.
This is obvious discrimination, and I hope one day the law recognizes it as such and forbids it.
"On Aug. 5, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held for the first time that Pennsylvania's Medical Marijuana Act (MMA) allows an employee to sue his or her employer for taking an adverse employment action based on the employee's status as a certified user of medical marijuana."[1]
1: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
That makes dealing with MJ impairment a bit of troublesome for companies... I agree that there should be no mandatory drug testing for a lot of employers that currently require one, but everything involving machinery should be allowed to have stricter standards.
> If you can do the job it shouldn't matter (and it's none of their business) if you're using a drug.
The thing is, there is no such thing as "can do the job" for operating machinery. We do have thresholds for allowed impairment from alcohol - e.g. in Germany it's if you cause an accident or show impairments of any kind with > 0.3‰ or get caught even without symptoms (aka random stop-and-blow) with >0.5‰ gets you an infraction ticket under §24a StVG, everything above 0.5‰ gets you a criminal DUI charge under §316 StGB.
These are pretty much generalized thresholds established over decades of research, and even then these lack fairness - as someone used to a liter of vodka a day will be walking straight if he only has 1l of beer, whereas your average random person won't be able to drive safely after the same amount of beer. And someone who has had only six hours of shit sleep, there is no detection at all assuming the data recorder of the truck shows that the driver has not operated it in the last 11 hours. But: it's the best we have.
For weed and other drugs, we don't have any kind of data to base a decision like "can you operate a vehicle/machinery" safely on, there is absolutely no way or standard to test for the physical ability to drive in any way and "self-assessment" of impairment state will always be notoriously unreliable. That is the problem.
https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/marijuana-drug-tests-a...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/26/why-amazo...
https://www.auscannabisclinics.com.au/find-medical-cannabis-...
Only the refillable prescription containers are 2-5 times the price. ;-)
https://news.olemiss.edu/federally-funded-marijuana-turns-50...
Well, it's still Mississippi.
>The devil's lettuce might not be for everyone
It’s not for me. Neither is alcohol. Doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal. I don’t get why other people have this attitude about keeping things illegal simply because they don’t personally get enjoyment out of it.
Sadly.
The context of “pro choice” referring to abortion is not the same context as “pro choice” referring to vaccinations.
Abortions do not affect anyone else, certainly not physically relative to the woman going through the pregnancy. Infectious diseases do affect everyone else. Using the term to equate the validity of the two positions is incorrect and misses the reasoning.
It is utterly absurd there is not more a push to legalize at the Federal level.
And one thing about the way the US has things set up, the States often function as the laboratories for social experiments. That's why you get things like Colorado being the first to legalize weed and Texas attempting to soft-ban abortion.
Many individual states had an interest in keeping slavery and segregation alive, and yet they were made illegal on the federal level.
I cannot think of politically backlash stronger than "and then we went into Civil war about that topic, with the victors of the war settling the matter".
What point are you intending to make? That individual states/industries do not have the political power to influence a discussion at the Federal level?
Why is hemp paper competitively lower priced and cheaper than normal paper? Could that also apply to cardboard?
That is to say, there is no correlation with hemp paper and thc infused paper. They come from different plants and as a consumer you want them to because the different plants can be specialized to their purpose.
Dunno what might kick it off make it viable: new boll weevil, perhaps.
"The flag of Mississippi features a white magnolia blossom surrounded by the words "In God We Trust" and 21 stars, on a red field with a gold-bordered blue pale. It was adopted on January 11, 2021 and replaced the previous flag that displayed the Confederate battle insignia in the upper left hand corner, which had been retired on June 30, 2020."
Yes, people there, generally, are less overtly racist and bigoted, and there is some cool infrastructure, but it trades in rural isolationist prejudice for tech-tainted delusional world building, at the cost of its once beautiful community and culture. Austin is scary, I have never lived in a city that so clearly feels like it has a mind of its own, that changes so much and so explicitly that when you go back to visit your old home, it is literally unrecognizable, everything it once was just poofs away in a year.
After living in a number of cities since, I understand just how weird Austin is, but not in the way it was "weird", wants to be weird. Its now like if a Stepford wife was a city: some totally flawless shell wrapped around a void. Its like if a Tesla car was city, which is perhaps a more apt similie, where it rides off its popular sentiment alone while the internals are shoestring, or at least questionable.
It trades in explicit Texas politics for extreme and swift gentrification, and a, at this point, willful neglect of social services for the communities they've, in part, helped displace. There is little love in Austin now, no matter how many granola eating hippies can still afford the rent. Most of that place is gone, or quickly dissapearing.
Give me Houston, which has comparable politics in the inner city, and the best museums and food in the state. Give me San Antonio, even, which is a more humble, but at least human place, and that does have better breakfast tacos than Austin. But Austin is gone.
I dont think the enthusiasm and attention it gets is going away anytime soon, and people will continue to move in, and it will get "cooler" in the eyes of every google employee that resides there. And property investment will continue to churn, like crude oil in a Kitchenaide. But it has gone crazy, and I see no hope in it going back, its too big to fail, and that is maybe the whole problem.
It was a few years ago, but even the nationally recognized, Beard-award winning bbq darling Franklin BBQ was going to be affected by smoke ordinances, because the new development that cropped up around it, and the existence of lots of bbq smoke. Not sure what came of it, but people were quite vocal.
E: Huh? What could possibly be controversial about this? Obviously an abortion ban affects low income folks far more than rich tech workers.
For rich people this is a vague political issue, not a practical one.
And while I support encouraging people to travel to route around their oppressive backwater hellholes, the ability to do so doesn't mean we should support places regressing towards being oppressive hellholes.
I've heard marijuana is sometimes given to children diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome after their 3rd surgery (Fontan) to encourage them to eat.
I've also heard medical marijuana is sometimes given to children diagnosed with Kabuki syndrome (and other syndromes) to help with seizures.
Would these two cases only be allowed/legal in states that have legalised medical marijuana?
I'm still confused with marijuana being a schedule I substance.
> no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States
but there's a FDA approved medicine, so surely there is accepted medical use, because you've approved one/many?
If you go into it expecting 2020s era prestige production, you will be disappointed, but if you liked the 90's SciFi channel it's fun. That said, not every episode is good, and ymmv.
Support your local caregiver.
"Acute and chronic use of cannabis is associated with different harmful effects on central nervous system and peripheral system including hyperemesis syndrome, impaired coordination and performance, anxiety, suicidal/tendencies, psychotic symptoms and mood disorders, cannabis withdrawal symptoms, exacerbation of psychotic disorders, neurocognitive impairment, cardiovascular, neurological, respiratory, cerebrovascular, peripheral vascular diseases (Thomas et al., 2014; Karila et al., 2014), pneumomediastinum, pneumothorax, pneumopericardium, bullous lung disease, increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, desquamated interstitial disease, and appearance of brown pigmented macrophages (Milroy and Parai, 2011)." source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2019.0148...
> Datura intoxication typically produces delirium, hallucination, hyperthermia, tachycardia, bizarre behavior, urinary retention, and severe mydriasis with resultant painful photophobia that can last several days. Pronounced amnesia is another commonly reported effect.
> The onset of symptoms generally occurs around 30 to 60 minutes after ingesting the herb. These symptoms generally last from 24 to 48 hours, but have been reported in some cases to last as long as 2 weeks.
Alcohol causes some 40k/yr deaths (US) from liver alone, plus some 10-20k road impairment deaths, while lung cancer around 140k/yr.
Yet even states with MMJ treat it as some terrible danger where you need guarded stores, special certification, and mountains of laws, while any schmuck can buy the actual dangerous stuff with only an age check.
The substance is not the threat; the legislatures are.
The difference in safety in favor of cannabis is substantial.
Cognitive freedom is the real issue.
People should be free to do to their own bodies and minds whatever they like, without government interference.
Just to be clear though, this stuff won't get you high like weed. You might feel a little more relaxed because of the CBD but that's about it.
You are absolutely incorrect. From a psychoactive perspective, delta-8 is pretty much indistinguishable from pure THC (a.k.a. delta-9). In my experience the difference is mostly about quantity; it takes about 30% more delta-8.
Its recent use is a sad consequence of the government making a relatively harmless compound illegal and driving users to use novel compounds with unknown (or even averse) safety profiles.
The long-term effects of delta-8 THC use are currently unknown, and you are basically volunteering to be a guinea pig by using it.
Much safer to use cannabis itself (and ideally grow it yourself, so you really know what you're getting).
I was dubious at first too, but I have talked to several people who have used them and they say they are getting a THC high, and the packaging even communicates the THC content.
But I have no reciepts. It could be an entirely illegal Enterprise given the proprietor.
lol
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2015/02/13/how-to-resc...
The only entity that can end prohibition altogether is Congress. When they setup the drug laws, they made them so that there would be a massive chain of signoffs, and so that any single unreasonable person could stop the whole thing.
Biden pretending he can't make this happen is equivalent to Tim Cook pretending he can't get Jeff Williams to do something. Everyone ultimately responsible for changing the schedule ultimately reports to Biden.