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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Marijuana decriminalization amd legalization was billed in part based on the notion that it wasn’t going to change people’s behavior, just decriminalize existing activity. At least in DC, it’s led to a noticeable uptick in marijuana use. You can smell it in the streets in many parts of the city, including in office buildings. It’s sad to see Germany go down the same road.

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Yeah, we should keep locking people up and ruining their lives because you notice a smell sometimes.

That's a US thing, in Germany and most of western Europe you need a lot more than "smelling" like weed to get anything close to jail time

It's already more or less tolerated in Berlin for example

This is interesting. I live in Baltimore where people have been smoking it in the streets illegally for decades. And I have never once smelled it in my house or my office. I smell more piss in DC than marijuana smoke.

I'm pretty glad that Germany has decided to stop locking people in cages for a flower. It's due time we focus on other crimes against humanity.

I'll take MJ smoke smell over piss or car exhaust any time, thank you. By the same logic we'd criminalize pissing in public places or ICE vehicle use. I think such a place already exists. It's called Singapore, though they don't criminalize ICE vehicle use either. They just make it very expensive.

Singapore is great. They still have a civilization building culture, like Americans used to have. If they had acted like modern Americans it would still be a poor country. Though, I agree prison is too much. We should publicly cane people who smoke MJ in public.

I saw an interesting tweet to this effect: https://twitter.com/waspmexicano/status/1633934987664957442

I would be very curious to see if there's data on whether replacing prison with caning (for certain crimes) reduces recidivism.

A colleague from Singapore told me that caning isn’t much of a thing anymore. If you are sentenced to a number of strikes, these will be broken up into a number of „appointments“. Apparently you can easily avoid them with a letter from your doctor.

>By the same logic we'd criminalize pissing in public places

Is public urination not a crime? One that gets you on a sex offender registry?

> it’s led to a noticeable uptick in marijuana use

It'd be interesting to know if that coincided with a reduction in use of other, more destructive drugs such as alcohol.

So far that data is relatively inconclusive, per https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/effect-state-marijuana-...

"These data show no clear relationship between marijuana legalization and alcohol use. Alcohol use increased more than the national trend in Washington (1 percentage point more), Massachusetts (2.3 percentage points), California (1.9 percentage points), and Oregon (1.2 percentage points) but decreased in Colorado (–0.75 percentage points), Maine (–1.4 percentage points), Alaska (–1.1 percentage points), and Nevada (–1.8 percentage points)."

Interesting to see that the data doesn't reflect what I anecdotally have noticed among my friend group: a near-universal pivot from alcohol to cannabis for 50-80% of occasions. Some 100%. That said, my friend group's demographics probably play a part in this.

Sad to see that harder drugs like alcohol are legal even today. Does anyone in your family consume alcohol, rayiner? Pretty sad to see alcohol being sold so openly and consumed, in front of children.

Yes, and my mom is very mad about it because our whole family is Muslim (though I’m not).

Yes, I know. You were Muslim, then atheist, now Christian.

From your reply it seems like alcohol consumption does not create the same kind of sadness in your heart as a milder drug like marijuana does. Why so, rayiner?

More people should try weed who haven't. Melts that stick up the butt, as if were.

But would Germans still be Germans if that happened? That’s my whole problem with this legislation!

You think legal weed is going to make Germans not German anymore? How on earth could you possibly come to that conclusion

Wtf, did I just read?! Alcohol playing with your mind?

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