At least with legalisation it can be regulated and taxed. I would expect any social impact could be mitigated with education. Also legalisation would prevent people from having to interact with illegal dealers who may or may not be selling other more dangerous drugs.
1. Since "hey, it's legal now," lots of people take that to mean they can smoke it wherever and whenever they want. While driving, in parks, near schools, immediately before class, and so on. Along with legalization, there should have been laws enacted, communicated, and enforced which would encourage people to get stoned at home in their own time instead of out in public where they are a danger or at least nuisance to everyone.
2. A good majority of the billboards in my state, in cities and along highways, are now for MJ retailers. I'm worried about the impact this persistent advertising has on normalizing the casual use of psychoactive substances for children who see these ads constantly in their day-to-day lives.
3. The retailers are regulated and taxed, but their prices are quite outside the range of those on a lower to lower-middle class income. As a result, there is still a lot of gray-market dealing going on to provide lower prices for those that accept the risk/inconvenience. And therefore with it, some amount of crime. So legalizing MJ did _not_ suddenly make everything above-board and peachy overnight like all of the legalization supporters had claimed it would.
I don't know that I have a solution for any of this. I only hope that right now we are just seeing some kind of peak the way cigarettes were positively mainstream in the 70's and then gradually faded over the new few decades as society realized what they were doing to us and our children over the long term.
Consequences of excessive taxes are not consequences of legalization.
The primary benefit of legalization is to reduce abuse by police and the judicial system. It is clearly just a tool for authorities to be able to hide behind plausible deniability if and when they want to exercise their power over others.
https://truthinitiative.org/who-we-are/our-history/master-se...
Of course the risk profile of marijuana is arguable closer or more favorable than that of alcohol, so tossing it into the alcohol advertising bin or better makes more sense.
Or the inevitable domestic violence, barfights, DUIs, and deaths. Marijuana, by comparison, kinda smells and makes people eat too many oreos.
A tiny amount in the air will -- enough to smell -- will have a negligible impact on you or other bystanders. If you're worried about brain impacts from having to be around people smoking outside than you should be fuckin terrified about breathing in car fumes, off-gassing plastic items, etc.
This may surprise weed smokers, but non-smokers don't want to breathe that shit in and the smell goes everywhere. Maybe smokers are oblivious to it, but the stench is more far reaching than tobacco for sure.
Car exhaust is far more harmful and I don't like smelling it, let's start ticketing drivers for driving their car too close to my home
It's quite clear that you have no idea how harmful car exhaust is to myself and my children, we need to ban cars and make sure we fine drivers for harming my family
A better analogy would be, imagine your neighbor owned pet skunks and they sprayed a few times a day. Even on their own property, the scent carries and lingers. Keep your pet skunks in the house, that's all.
And no, smoke smell does not linger in open air. Molecules in air diffuse rapidly especially in moderately windy environments, I urge you to read up on basic physical chemistry if you don't believe me
Africa is not a single country, that is a sweeping statement, and based what I saw on the last time that I was in a particular city in a particular country in Africa, that statement is rubbish.
They were also taking many anti-COVID-transmission measures at the time. What I suspect is that African countries were less naïve about COVID - they had no expectations of being exceptional, of escaping unscathed, and had been impacted by other serious disease outbreaks in living memory, so they had more expectation that it was a real problem, but also one that could be mitigated.
> based what I saw on the last time that I was in a particular city in a particular country in Africa, that statement is rubbish.
If it is so easy to acquire, how will legalization result necessarily in regulation and taxation? I am sure some users would go the legal route, but I am aware of people in states that legalized who still grow and sell their own to avoid taxes.
> Recreational cannabis sales in Missouri generated $71.7 million in revenue during its first month of legalization.
> Medical marijuana sales generated an additional $31.2 million, resulting in a combined total of $102.9 million in sales since Feb. 3, according to data from the Department of Health and Senior Services.
https://www.komu.com/news/state/recreational-marijuana-sales...
I don't smoke weed, so my opinion may not be worth much, but if I did, I absolutely would prefer getting in from a somewhat regulated outfit and be sure that it's actually what I expect it to be. I don't know if adulterated weed is a thing, though.
Sure, if between taxes and whatnot you end up with a price 100 times higher than your local dealer's, my point is moot. But I doubt that's the case. So if I could avoid having to deal with sketchy characters, that'd be a plus.
I think growing your own is an entirely different question. My mom grows tomatoes, peppers and other stuff in her garden. I live in an apartment building, so I get mine from the local store. I do enjoy eating her home-grown produce when I visit, though. Maybe there's a market for "non-industrial-grown weed", too, as there is for farmers.
From conversations around purchasing a portable freezer (to store prepreg carbon fiber rolls for my shop), from someone who turned out to be in the legal weed business (processing & drying operations between growers and sales outlets), he told me that in the non-legal supply chain there is an insane amount of adultering weed with some really nasty stuff. Some of it is in the dealer chain to make make crappy weed "better", including adding Fentanyl, and some of it is from counter-drug operations spraying herbicides that are highly toxic but not necessarily 100% effective, so survive into the remaining harvest. Seems that is mostly filtered out for the legal supply chain.
It was enough of a caution that if I were to resume partaking (haven't in decades) I'd definitely want to use a proper store, and really just get some seeds and grow my own - the only true quality control.
Edit: clarity
~30-50% of people have constructive access to a firearm at home, which means you're subject to going to prison for 15 YEARS of federal prison if you have a single joint. State legal weed is a no go for me until I can hunt squirrels without going to jail for 15 years.
Hopefully someday the federal laws will be fixed to allow retail outfits to put money in the bank rather than get robbed by violent organized crime, and to remove pot users from the prohibited person list.
I'm not from the US, so don't know how all this works, but I assume that if weed is "generally legalized", then it should be at the federal level, too.
This was nullified in wickard v filburn, where they decided growing your own plant and consuming it on the spot is interstate commerce. Obviously this is nonsensical, but the courts don't want to shake the house of cards and you'd have people screaming about the "end of the civil rights acts" and various other popular laws that depend on an extremely fudged version of interstate commerce and the 10th.
You don't have to, though. You can just grow your own tomatoes. Easy to do, and can be done with the right setups all year. But you don't. You buy wheat, or tomatoes at the store because it's easier. Sometimes you can get them from your neighbor for free, or from a local farm stand (and lets be real that farmer probably isn't tracking VAT/GST).
The vast, vast majority of buyers are still buying their MJ from retailers, and the incredible tax surpluses the states are seeing reflects that. Most of your weed, like most of your tomatoes, is coming from a store.