Germany unveils bill to legalize cannabis | Hacker News Reader

Germany unveils bill to legalize cannabis

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55 points2-718-281-82867 comments

The much more surprising move is that they've just passed legislation to reduce bureaucracy for setting up photovoltaic installations.

Reducing bureaucracy!

I live in The Netherlands. Two months ago, I received a fine notice because I drove a bit too fast and had a €80 fine to pay. I paid the fine the same day or week I received it. Today I received a registered mail from somewhere in Germany.

Because I had just been back from Germany again, I was worried I sped up by accident again, even though I don't remember this happening!

Guess what? They actually sent me a registered letter informing me I paid the fine I had received previously. Which I paid for on-line. On their website. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's actually kind of nice. In case their computer system gets borked, you have positive affirmation/defense.

But what if it’s the computer system that sends the post? Is it actually more reliable?

Well, it's not broken yet. It might break later and claim you never paid it later.

I think both are related ;)

We have an law that prohibits conplicated laws and one that limits the maximum amount of traffic signs in an area.

Congrats! I'm from Washington. It's been legal here for a while, and society has not collapsed yet, so I have every hope Germany will also survive this cataclysm.

They won't.

Birth rate in Germany is ~1.5-ish.

The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

Question: Where do educated people frequently move to?

> The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

Which system in your opinion is superior and will replace it?

> Which system in your opinion is superior and will replace it?

Presumably the West as it used to be at some point in the past.

Your ideas would get further if you had any substance to your implied argument, or if you came off a bit less trollish.

I don't know that criminalizing marijuana has much to do with western civilization, which I understand to be normally defined by a set of liberal cultural values, a renaissance humanism, and the intellectual approaches of the enlightenment. Incarcerating people for possessing or ingesting a substance less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol isn't, by my estimation, something that was ever in keeping with the best aspects of that tradition.

Since cannabis only became illegal in Germany in 1929, during what brief period of time would you describe "The West" as "alive?"

Well, a society that makes deleterious substances illegal is more alive than one that embraces them with open arms. Don't you think?

No.

I have no idea what birth rates have to do with milking ducks, and especially why it matters in the context of allowing folks to use a drug less harmful than alcohol if they so desire, but shout off, dude, you do you.

The world population continues to barrel upwards at a likely-unsustainable rate, don't worry, we'll find plenty of people to live in "the west" even if people are opting out of raising screaming, expensive children themselves (or maybe being opted out of it - many folks I know want children for various reasons, but can't afford to even birth them, let alone raise them).

Why is the argument always "It's less harmful than alcohol..."?

Alcohol is definitely bad. What does marijuana have to do with alcohol?

Probably because we set the baseline at alcohol—if alcohol is legal, then society is willing to tolerate the harms that come from it (along with the inertia of it being such a widely-consumed drug for thousands of years). If we can tolerate the harms from alcohol, why can't we tolerate the (much lower) harms from cannabis?

This isn't really a good answer.

"Society" isn't really a unit. The decision to "tolerate" alcohol isn't unanimous, I mean.

> If we can tolerate the harms from alcohol, why can't we tolerate the (much lower) harms from cannabis?

Because you're just adding more harm. Those who don't drink but smoke weed are now harmed. Those who drink and add weed are now even worse off.

There is no way to make the logic work.

If someone steals $100, it doesn't make it better for them to say "Yeah, well, that guy stole $1,000". It doesn't make their actions okay.

I don’t think the birth rate (which I agree is a problem) has any relation to legalization. What connection are you seeing? Just that you view marijuana as immoral, and a variety of immoral aspects in general have been accumulating in the west?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#...

Immoral? Yes.

However, that's not the only factor. It's actually bad for reproduction.

That just means that smoking while pregnant is immoral? Which I think most would agree with.

Conventional wisdom is that declining birth rates are correlated with industrialization, urbanization and contraception. This has been a pattern for a while, across many populations [0].

Children in a rural agricultural society are free labor, and a retirement plan. Children in a urban industrialized economy are a costly burden, particularly when it is illegal to put them to work.

I'm not sure that your comment about cannabis and a thousand cuts is significant compared to this other data. Germany's birth rate went from 5.4 in 1875 to 1.3 in 1995 [1], as they industrialized and urbanized. It went up a little bit to the 1.5 you mentioned after the end of the cold wa, and reunification. Economic boom. Nothing to do with drug laws.

> The West seems to be dying by a thousand cuts. This is yet another cut.

I don't understand. Is this some kind of moral judgement? Do you think cannabis laws somehow affect people's decision to have children more than economic issues?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition#Summary

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033102/fertility-rate-g...

If you care about your population surviving, you know that a birth rate below 2 is a serious problem that must be solved.

Allowing your populace to sedate itself with weed/booze/porn/etc. is the opposite of solving this problem.

I agree with what you said about the birth rate. That's a legitimate concern. A society that can't sustain itself over time is not a successful society.

But maybe weed/booze/porn/etc are symptoms of a problem, and not root causes. Fighting the symptoms might not help the problem.

For example, compared to several generations ago modern life is alienating in many ways. We have many new conveniences, but also many new things to stress about. The typical adult today, especially those of child bearing age, may have moved for work, doesn't spend much time with their neighbors, is consuming internet and mass media all day, might not have a best friend, lives paycheck to paycheck, might have a lot of student loan debt, kids are expensive, houses and cars and food are expensive, divorce is expensive, the American Dream ain't what it used to be, etc.

Drugs are an escape for many people, something to ease their suffering, boredom, or stress. Not the cause.

If the economic and social milieu that is modern life are the problem no amount of prudence when it comes to marijuana will fix the birth rate.

I forgot dual income families. That's huge. There's a lot of people in that situation. If they have the money for kids, they don't have the time.

The real pushback is that it doesn't produce disturbing hallucinations that shake your soul to its core, leaving you in a state of existential angst.

After legalization here in Canada, I didn't see an increase in crime or substance abuse which the critics said would happen.

You'd probably need to be more specific for this statement to be accurate. After legalization of marijuana, crime related to its use or distribution have not increased, but crime related to substances of other kinds and abuse of those other substances has definitely been a huge problem that's been increasing in the years since legalization, but it's probably unrelated.

So it would be true enough to say legalizing weed was not a bad thing, but not as true to say there hasn't been increases in crime or substance abuse.

This will be a disaster. Not for the usual drugs-are-bad-hmkay reasons but because the bill is completely weird, rife with stupid ideas that just won't work or create new problems.

First, there is no simple way to get cannabis. You cannot just go into any shop, only a select few cities or regions will be allowed to have shops, and that is only for a limited "evaluation period". I predict that after this evaluation period, there just won't be anymore shops. You could participate in a cannabis growing club that is intended as a communal kind of homegrowing, but there are very strange regulations around that such as "at least 200m from any school/kindergarten". Because maybe kids only sneak into greenhouses that are within 200m of their school? Which leaves homegrowing, but the security requirements for the fentanyl in my medicine cabinet are less than for my future potted plants. So they decriminalized cannabis but gave the police reason to snoop around in homes and just fine the same people for different "crimes", such as insufficiently armored windows in front of their indoor garden.

Then, the law will conflict with EU laws. But the government didn't even try to change EU laws, they are just waiting to maybe be sued by the commission. Which will then end in the law being invalidated by the EU courts.

They also added taxation, with the argument that this will generate income to offset the supposed health problems that legalization would create. However, since the only viable thing is to homegrow, which isn't taxed (yet), tax income will be minimal and just add to the overall tax bureaucracy, maybe even resulting in a net negative income for the state.

There were ideas of creating a cannabis industry, similar to what California did. However, since there won't be many shops, requirements around security are extreme and customers are driven to homegrow, there won't be any industry to speak of. Maybe just a little to illegally (because trade is forbidden there, as is exporting from Germany) supply the Netherlands and other neighboring countries. Since there won't be any scale and costs will be high, illegal cannabis will still be cheaper overall.

I personally suspect that this law is set up to fail by the people writing it. E.g. the minister of health, Lauterbach, was never a fan of the idea (to say it mildly), yet was forced to write this law since it fell into the realm of his ministry. Others in the coalition, especially in the SPD, are of a similar opinion and only go along because their other partners, FDP and greens, demanded legalization. When the next government in 2 years is a SPD/CDU coalition (current polls look that way, would be a repeat of most of the Merkel governments), this law will, after "thorough evaluation of the results", be abolished again.

As I'm neither European nor a smoker, can you explain how this is in conflict with the EU?

I know Holland has "coffee shops" and Portugal has decriminalized all drugs, so I'm guessing the problem is in the German implementation details.

Portugal and Holland have decriminalized consumption and associated posession, but nothing else. Sales there are already in a legal gray area, e.g. because the Netherlands do not allow production or trade, so all the places selling cannabis there have to get their product illegally. Sales in coffeeshops are actually illegal, but not punishable, if done following certain rules. I don't know the details about Portugal, but in the Netherlands, Cannabis is still an illegal drug overall, just with the aforementioned plus medical exceptions. But even that is against EU laws, there just hasn't been any action from the EU comission to enforce that yet. So the hope for Germany is that maybe the comission will continue to look away even for a wider decriminalization.

You forgot the part that even if you homegrow, you're only allowed to own 25 grams of Cannabis, while being allowed to grow three plants. Someone told me anyone can grow more than 25 grams out of a single plant.

You are allowed to own 25g in addition to 3 plants. They are very much aware that the ungarnered yield and the plant itself likely puts you over the 25g limit as this is explicitly mentioned in the elaborative part of the draft document. You are supposed to gradually harvest from the plants what you intend to consume, just keep the amount of produce at hand below 25g. (I don't know how sensible that is, I have no experience growing cannabis.) My suggestion is if you happen to exceed the 25g you can always simply destroy the excess.

Half of your points are not part of the current draft. The dispensaries from last years key issues paper are not even pursued anymore beyond the evaluation region concept in the "2-column-model" ever since the EU commission gave feedback on it. That also made the question of taxation moot for now. Contrary to popular believe Germany cannot just change EU laws. With only a handful of countries in the EU making efforts to get any decriminalization going in their own countries a change to the EU's drug policy is not gonna happen. The majority of member states are just not interested, there's no wide support for the issue in Brussels.

Is the 200m vicinity rule stupid? Maybe, but it has precedent. Malta has the same rule in their respective law it enacted at the end of 2021, only it's 50m further. Malta is also the only EU-country that even has legislation regarding Cannabis Social / Growing Clubs. The clubs in other EU-countries (Spain and Belgium?) all operate in legal grey areas.

The security requirements for homegrowing are not strict at all. All you need is a lock ('mechanische oder elektronische Verriegelungsvorrichtungen'). If you grow in a greenhouse outside of your living space it needs a lock. If you grow inside you living space I suppose there are locks already present. If there are kids around or other people that should not have access, lock the room, obviously. Keep your produce in a lockable container. That's it. Sensible stuff. Maybe you should actually read the current draft: https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/presse/pressemit... (pdf at bottom of the page; don't skip the 'Besondere Teil').

The idea that Lauterbach was never a fan of the idea is simply wrong. He publicly expressed support for the idea during the coalition negotiations. The suggestion that the SPD (or any of the other Ampel parties, for that matter) in a potential upcoming coalition with the CDU would repeal the very law they just enacted in the former coalition is utter nonsense.

I don't know what you mean about there not being dispensaries, but the article says:

> Decriminalization is the first step. In the next step, specialist shops are able to sell cannabis and products containing THC — but only in selected districts and cities, which are to be named so-called model regions for a period of five years.

So maybe this will be in a followup law.

And about the security requirements, the law says:

> geeignete Maßnahmen und Sicherheitsvorkehrungen (roughly: suitable measures and security measures)

Which is more lenient than I thought. But very vague, such that there will definitely be a period of uncertainty and a few attempts at prosecution until there is sufficient case law to define what that means. Remember that famously the German supreme court decided it to be illegal to criminally prosecute the posession of "small" amounts of cannabis. Which is interpreted in totally different ways in different states, down to the extreme of Bavaria, where "small" means "undetectable or zero". So I fully expect the Bavarian police and state attorneys to try to prosecute everyone and their dog for having "unsuitable" measures, because the wording is too vague.

Lauterbach started supporting legalization during coalition negotiations, at first citing some very strange arguments:

https://www.fr.de/politik/karl-lauterbach-cannabis-drogen-le...

> illegal verkauften Straßencannabis neuartiges Heroin beigemischt, das sich rauchen lässt (roughly: illegally soled street cannabis is mixed with a new kind of heroin that can be smoked)

Reading between the lines I find it clear that his change of heart was for political reasons and he just needed some factual-sounding argument, no matter how weird.

The draft has even more info on the security measures in its rationale section (Begründung / 4. Erfüllungsaufwand)[0] including an estimated cost for the private growing. It's €20. Any padlocked container or closet will do; there's no ambiguity here. Even better, read §36. Violating the required measures is not a criminal offence, it's a misdemeanour (Ordnungswidrigkeit).

[0] which by the way is commonly used be judges when they deliberate the verdict: https://www.verwaltung-innovativ.de/DE/Gesetzgebung/Projekt_...

Germany has also legalized prostitution.

If only the opposition were this concerned about the harmful effects of far more dangerous drugs like alcohol.

Well Germany has to burn whatever it can get its hands on to get energy now...

Anytime a government legalize a drug or even alcohol, you know they are trying to sedate the society from questioning and maybe eventually revolting.

> a drug or even alcohol

Those are not two separate things.

Technically, yes, but socially, not really, a lot will find it ok to drink alcohol on weekly basis but frown upon the fact someone did a drug, soft or hard.

Cannabis is far less harmful than alcohol; it's not close.

It's not a technicality, it's reality. Most of my social circles feel the same way.

I have pity for those who swallowed that propaganda, but they can shove their frowns. That attitude is enabling real harm and needless suffering, like the alcohol they need to function.

In short, I wonder why anyone cares about their opinion. It's not based in reality.

I don't get drunk because someone next to me is drinking.

No one gets high from second hand smoke outside.

That's bs.

That's no way to discuss the issue, especially when the science (and common sense) isn't remotely on your side.

> Secondhand exposure to cannabis smoke under "extreme conditions," such as an unventilated room or enclosed vehicle, can cause nonsmokers to feel the effects of the drug, have minor problems with memory and coordination, and in some cases test positive for the drug in a urinalysis.

- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-extreme-exposure-seco...

That's indoors, unventilated, "can cause" and "in some cases".

I'm curious where you even picked up this bizarre notion.

As many of us learned from DARE, along with what the various names for drugs were and where one might find them.

We aren't revolting because of incredibly effective control of information, controlled opposition, race war instead of class war, and having no guaranteed employment (unions) or healthcare, so people can't protest if they wanted to.

And student loans lock the educated class into work instead of activism or politics because they need a real job for ten years. Go ahead, get acclimated and nihilistic in financial bondage!

Legal weed is simply decent and humane.

Agreed!

This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You want the government to decide what you can and cannot put into your body?

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