German Bundestag Passes Cannabis Legalization
bundestag.de
bundestag.de
There are still random police checks checks between Maastricht and Belgian cities on the other side.
Same with public transportation. Many times, when entering Belgium, cops get on the bus with a dog to see if you have weed on you.
And this is the same country that allows people to drink a beer while driving home from work.
hold up, what?
I knew various European countries had much less draconian liquor laws than the US, but...
while driving?
Drinking a beer in the car is just as legal here as drinking a pepsi. Personally I don't see the problem.
Still, if a police officer exists within 10 miles of you and sees you and pulls you over its going to cause you a massive delay.
I think its a 20 minute minimum wait before breath tests, then blood at a station.
There are a few city-wide regulations in Scotland that prohibit it, possibly in other parts of the UK as well, but there's indeed no such national law.
I really want this to be true for a lot of drugs and even other criminal activities. Not because I necessarily support these things, but because we've seen that when we don't do this, prosecutors put far more of their time and energy into going after the users because they are much easier to go after. But if we do consider these things problems, we need to go after those distributing and manufacturing. It's like trying to put out a fire by removing all things that are flammable. Sure, it can work, but you're going to have a hard time doing this if you're in the woods. Main focus should be on the fire.
saying it should be legal to have it and then go after the manufacturer instead is also treating the symptom, sucking out the smoke without addressing the fire.
With drugs I think this is a bit more apparent because there is addiction. It is well known that a common strategy is getting users hooked. Either by offering some initially for free or at a reduced price, or by increasing the addictive qualities of the product. In fact, we even see similar phenomena in the white market. Starbucks coffee has about twice as much caffeine as a standard cup[0] and this certainly creates a higher demand for their coffee. But I don't think many are aware of this.
Also consider there are different ways of "legal." Some places have "decriminalized" drugs, which would be in line with this idea. For example, the state of Oregon in the US did this. Many people portray this as legality, but it isn't. If you are found with drugs there they will still be confiscated AND you pay a $100 fine and the court will give you information about addiction treatment centers. So not really legal, but not a major criminal offense. That seems like a fair way to put pressure towards manufacturing and distribution if you don't want to just legalize possession (which would always be limited in quantities).
I also just don't buy your analogy in any way. We reduce things that have demand all the time through market regulations. Anything that is illegal to sell or produce is something that there is demand for somewhere. There's a HUGE demand for slave labor, but we've regulated that away (demand is for cheap labor, and slave labor is towards the cheapest one can get if not THE cheapest). The reason to go after manufacturers and distributors is because network effects. When you cut off a dealer you cut off all the people who got their drugs through them. Of course another dealer can take their place, but the effect is still real and far more disruptive than going after tree nodes. You are cutting off branches and the new dealer is like trying to reorganize those orphaned nodes. It's harder. The manufacturers are nodes much closer to the root and so have much greater disruption downstream. You're right that there are orphaned nodes, but it isn't uncommon for people to get off drugs after their supply runs dry. You've essentially forced them.
TLDR: focus on the choke points in a network.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-caf...
I smoke weed frequently (daily user).
I go through 5g in maybe two weeks.
My point is if you are going through 5g in a matter of days, you probably have a problem usage!
I presume it’s an attempt at stopping dealing, maybe to minors? But it feels asinine to have such a limit. Like another poster says, should this extend to a single crate of beer? One bottle of spirits? One pouch of tobacco?
Having a 5g limit just means I’m going to make more frequent trips to the shop to purchase more cannabis, just let me buy a pound and leave me to it.
That and possibly seeking out cannabis with a higher THC concentration.
NL has this same rule of no more than around 5g, I’m not 100% how much the exact limit is but it’s nearby 5g.
Much cannabis culture is not strongly commercial. People grow and share. Maybe there is something in that which software developers could learn from.
The main problem with most SW developers is that they never learn. That's why we have CADT, Windows 10 and 11, Android, Systemd, Wayland, UEFI etc.
Any other commercial crop that we grow at scale is sold in the dollars per ton range. Outside of a few special cultivars there is no practical reason said drug is expensive and easily shareable for nearly free.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-11/the-nethe...
(You obviously still need to manage VAT if your business exceeds 22'000€/50'000€ per year.)
I never want to buy from any black-market dealer ever again, once these cannabis clubs are up and running.
This might help.
Also growing it is super easy. If you can grow tomatoes then you are already overqualified.
That's a little overstated. It's easy to grow very low quality weed. Growing something capable of being on a shelf to be sold is very much a skill that takes time, even for someone with a green thumb; the girls get too stressed very easily, and attract pests like you wouldn't believe.
It's not 1974 anymore.
B) I was a small grower who worked contributed a small bit to the regulatory infrastructure for Colorado's legalization and communicated with many growers of many crop sizes.
It's not extremely easy.
Additionally trimming isn't difficult in that it takes skill, it's difficult in that it's a lot of mind numbing work. Consistently growing is difficult as a skill.
The whole discussion kind of reminds me of the beer brewing industry, where techies think because they had a couple garage brews that went well (and don't consider the ones that didn't), they think they are a replacement for a brewery. And weed is even worse; you're looking at an hour a day for a small batch, and you can't miss a day. And the girls are way worse at telling you what went wrong, whereas you can generally tell exactly what went wrong with beer from the off flavors.
1- During the vegetative phase cut the top of the plant, wait a few weeks and repeat.
2- https://www.royalqueenseeds.com/blog-bigger-cannabis-yields-...
3- https://herbiesheadshop.com/blog/cannabis-stem-splitting-all...
That's why I said "too stressed". It's a fine line you want to straddle.
The trickier stuff is in curing it, but even that is pretty straightforward.
I'm not saying it's not doable; I'm saying it's not "just like tomatoes" or "just grows itself, that's why the call it 'weed'".
Why is that? Just buy a small body, auto flowering seed, some fresh soil and water it every couple days and wait. You won't have a gigantic harvest but that's basically all you have to do and you will have more weed than you know what to do with. When grown, cut it, hang it upside down and wait until it's dry.
Anonymity. My neighbors, my parents, my wife's parents, the parents of children that visit my child, everybody passing our balcony on the street, and essentially every visitor to our apartment would assume that we consume drugs regularly. This is something I could not have cared less about when I was in my early twenties and living in a building full of students. But it is not something you want to be associated with if you have children in kindergarten or school and if you have to face other parents or teachers from your neighborhood on a daily basis. If I would start to consume cannabis, I would prefer to do it in private.
Visual guide: https://www.supergreenlab.com/guide/how-to-build-a-ikea-eket...
I’m not sure I believe the carbon filter reduces the smell to nothing, in my experience it still stinks while running through an internal AND external carbon filter.
Is there higher risk of infection transmission? I'm sure those reports a few years ago of serious lung infections from tainted vape oils are biasing my thinking here, but it also makes some sense that a high-temperature flame on a dry medium wouldn't transmit nearly as many microorganisms as a lower temperature vaporization of a wet medium.
If someone smokes a joint near your window, that smell will probably be gone in half an hour. If there is a plant that's just sitting there, it'll be more subtle, but it's not going anywhere.
That said – many people like the smell of Hopfentee (Hop tea), which is pretty similar.
Well, some people just prefer to go to the supermarket..
I don't know where you live but where I grew up in Germany this was, and still is, decidedly not the status quo. Folks I know literally "import" from hundreds of kilometers away because that's the next place where they could find someone who fits your description. The rest of the market is exactly as sketchy as I'd expect.
So, I don’t know. I probably would pay the state premium over the guy who doesn’t have great quality control.
What would be the reason for not wanting to join a club? Seems like a pretty OK solution between "it's totally illegal" and "the state store sells it", with some safe guards but still let non-profits organize the work and community.
FWIW, we have "social clubs" here in Spain, where it's neither illegal/legal on a national level, and it seems to be working out OK as far as I know.
The clubs have to be registered and need a license. They need to keep a register of members. It is not in the law that they need to give this register to the authorities, but it is still a risk.
EDIT: I looked up the details. The clubs need to keep track of every sale, including data about the buyer. They have to report this to the authorities twice a year in anonymized form.
I very much recall how long the promise of "Covid Guest Lists are not used by the police" lasted.
That said, "the authority" is not necessarily the police or public prosecutor; the determination who does this is left to the federal state (who might make it the police/prosecutor, or not…) — presumably if they're not "the authority" themselves, they would have to ask "the authority" to forward it.
Also, these are not social clubs but growing clubs. You are not allowed to consume Cannabis in the club and 100 meters around it.
This being Germany, I expect to have to spend weeks joining the waiting lists of overbooked clubs, hoping that one of them has a free slot. Then more forms, sent by post because email is evil, then finally I can buy weed 3 months down the road.
If you live in Germany for a while, you learn that you never get anything without a fight here. It's always tedious.
Apparently it doesn't.
"Nach der Zustimmung des Bundestags kommt das Gesetz am 22. März abschließend in den Bundesrat. Zustimmungsbedürftig ist es dort nicht, die Länderkammer kann aber den Vermittlungsausschuss anrufen und die Legalisierung so verzögern."
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundestag-livestream-can...
They can't veto it, but they could delay it.
As these clubs are not allowed to hire people and are also forbidden to allow non-members to act on club duties, a membership will mean some work too. How many of the 180 000 are willing to put in that effort.
This does not sound like you have to "join a club", you just have to buy directly from a club.
(… reading actual text now to check …)
Nope, nevermind… §1 Abs. 13:
"Anbauvereinigungen: […] deren Zweck der gemeinschaftliche nichtgewerbliche Eigenanbau und die Weitergabe von Cannabis zum Eigenkonsum durch und an Mitglieder sowie die Weitergabe von Vermehrungsmaterial ist."
⇒ you either have to grow it yourself or be a member of an association that grows it; can't buy directly from a club if you're not a member.
The data maintenance stuff is a bit more concerning, but I imagine once cannabis is embedded in the country the reporting will disappear in a round of cuts to gov spending
- charging individually for sales is prohibited by §25(2) and §24; the only allowed thing is to have consumption-dependent but standardized ("Pauschale") membership costs. (This is, honestly, worded a bit weird and might need a lawyer to interpret "properly".) [Edit: this got changed in the final version — and is now more restrictive, only membership fees are allowed.]
- you are only permitted to be a member of one association, §16(2)
- associations are only permitted to have 500 members, §16(2)
- there is a minimum membership duration of 3 months, §16(5)
You're not there to "purchase", but the effect is the same.
Free translation: non-commercial clubs can grow cannabis and hand it out in small amounts to registered members
Edit: ah, it's in 20/10426. "in range of sight", "sight is ≤ 100m".
I'm not sure where to find the actual text of the law in the final version.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-bundestag-votes-for-cannabis-...
The guidelines don't say anything about language
Even on HN we're seeing it as non practical or reliable enough to let users deal with their own needs directly.
That's one of the reason I'm so tired of seeing translation as one of the bullet point repeated over and over for AI use. At the end of the day it will never be more than a niche if people don't trust the result (for the record, I agree they're not great)
With this law, Cannabis will be removed from the list of scheduled drugs and turned into a simple prescription drug. It will be a lot less complicated to prescribe medical Cannabis.
The system set up by this law is extremely dumb, but at least small home grows are legal, and the government is still exploring a path to commercial sales that would be compliant with EU law.
That said, since December 2023 there has been fully legally-produced cannabis on the Dutch market. While media tends to call it "state weed" ("staatswiet"), it's not nationalized, it's just licensed production. Currently it's only available in a number of cities, chiefly in the South of the country, but more cities should be onboarded onto the system this year.
It's also still a disqualifier for federal employment.
TIL this is the polar opposite from the Dutch expression to rub your hands together which means "being happy about a success; being content; expressing happiness" (Ensie, translated by me)
Asking my german partner, they say it's a thing you'd do when plotting something evil, so more negative than positive I guess, but there is no expression to go with it like "hand wringing" or "in de handen wrijven" are common expressions. I would subscribe to it being a plotting thing in Dutch as well, but that also doesn't work with the US English definition and the way that you used it
Do people from the USA also use it this way in a physical sense, rubbing hands together when they are concerned or feeling guilty or is it just an artifact of history similar to "hanging up" a phone? In the Netherlands I've definitely seen rubbing hands for excitement
The actual act of wringing your hands is associated with generic Bond villains, though.
Language is weird.
Only thing which appears relatively safe is oral consumption over inhaling.
All the same, it’s really not THAT dangerous a drug and criminalization is senseless and a total farce. All the problems legalization causes combined pale in comparison to how dumb criminalization is.
At the same time, I'm about 30 days into quitting entirely after realizing that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with it. I'm experiencing intense anxiety, dark thoughts, and have struggled with the intensity of REM rebound. My resting heart rate immediately went up about 15BPM on average as my body starts the process of finding its new equilibrium.
I first started using it "medicinally" to cope with poor sleep and depression. It actually helped lower my anxiety (with the right strain). It suppresses REM sleep and dreams, which was beneficial since my dreams tended to be part of the reason I had such poor sleep. For a time, it was incredibly helpful, and it helped me establish some better habits and process some difficult things.
But over time, it crept into more and more parts of my life. I never went full "wake & bake", but found myself wanting to use it earlier and earlier each day. When I did use it recreationally, I started to feel the pull even stronger. It started to majorly impact my short term memory, and I started noticing myself forgetting important things while exploring a new relationship. I started to feel like it was no longer beneficial, and decided to quit. And that's when I realized how hard it was to quit. I tried and failed multiple times before finally building enough willpower to actually do it. And there's this part of me that still worries that I'll fall back into it when things get hard. For better or worse, I'm dealing with some really difficult situations in my life and I'm staying away from it anyway. This gives me optimism, but damn, I didn't think it would be this difficult.
In many ways, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far with legalization. This is not to imply I think it shouldn't be legal, but that the culture around it and the public messaging hasn't really caught up with the reality of the potential for harmful use. The public is well aware of the downsides of alcohol use, and there are well-established methods and institutions to help people deal with alcohol addiction and recovery. If someone is an alcoholic, the public understands the severity of this addiction, and recognizes the challenge that such a person faces in staying sober.
But people who are addicted to cannabis often have a hard time convincing people that this is a real issue. The fact that it's not physically addictive in the same ways as alcohol and other drugs has led to the misconception that the addiction potential is not real and that the difficulty of managing it is not real. The warnings that "using this can be habit forming" don't seem to convey the reality of what it feels like to form that habit, and how hard it can be to break it. Growing communities like /r/leaves and /r/Petioles tell this story over and over.
I think that the extremely high THC strains, and even higher THC concentrations in concentrates and cartridges has a lot to do with this. The stuff people are getting these days isn't your hippy uncle's weed, and while the public consciousness is calibrated on the relatively harmless stuff, the stuff that people are using all day looks nothing like that.
All of this to say: be careful. I have had some incredibly good experiences with it, and I think it helped me open my mind. It helped me through a tough time. It's also really enjoyable. But it has a much darker side than many people realize, and it took me far to long to accept that I might be one of the people who can't have a healthy relationship with it. And the fact that I'd had a "take it or leave it" feeling about it for years lulled me into a false sense of security. The slide towards maladaptive use happened gradually and took awhile to notice.
I hope that with the continued movements towards legalization, there is also an increase in public awareness and support for people who get themselves into trouble. More focus on the safety concerns of high THC strains and harmful use. More growers who focus on medicinally useful products vs. just chasing the highest THC.
First 3 to 6 months is always terrible. I also had issues with sleep because of dreams, and also used cannabis for that purpose. Getting back to sleeping without THC in the bloodstream is, well... an experience on it's own.
It's funny how all of the adults I've heard/read basically share the same experience of dropping it (REM rebound, heart rate and anxiety/strange thoughts). And, yeah, today's weed is far more potent than weed I initially started to smoke almost 2 decades ago.
I've done a significant amount of processing and have a good therapist now, which has helped me deal with the sleep somewhat. New tools and new habits make a big difference.
I don't think this argument makes sense. Alcohol could well be a net harm on society, while a ban is not realistic due to its established role in society. This doesn't imply cannabis should have been legalized.
The point more broadly is that if our society is willing to accept alcohol as a recreational substance with downsides, and more generally the idea that consuming recreational substances shouldn't be a criminal act, it makes no sense to send people to prison for consuming a substance that seems far less harmful in general.
> ...while a ban is not realistic due to its established role in society. This doesn't imply cannabis should have been legalized.
I disagree. Prior to legalization, cannabis already had an established role in society and saw widespread use. The primary difference between it and alcohol is that we sent people to prison for one, and didn't for the other, while also accepting the statistical reality that alcohol seems generally far more harmful. More harmful in terms of individual health outcomes and the downsides of becoming an addicted user, and more harmful to others around those who use it, e.g. deaths caused by drunk drivers, domestic abuse fueled by alcoholism, etc.
At least in the US (not sure about the climate in Germany), the reality was that cannabis use was already widespread, and that people's lives were routinely ruined for using it despite their use causing no harm to others. All while problematic use of alcohol routinely resulted in what are effectively slaps on the wrist, even when people routinely put other people at risk while driving under the influence.
It's against this backdrop that I'm comparing the two. Both were already pervasive. The difference in policy between the two made no sense.
And this is all before considering the clear upsides to cannabis. The medicinal applications are real, and have enabled people to live better lives without the downsides of the other widely prescribed pharmaceutical options.
Altering our mental states by consuming substances seems like a deeply human thing (in addition to be observed in other species), and is deeply embedded in us. I think there are very good reasons to ban some substances for the sake of public health. But I don't think a default stance against mind alteration is a good one either.
Legalizing cannabis in such an environment seems to me like legalizing alcohol in a country where alcohol use isn't already normalized -- like in Iran. A very questionable idea. One would need strong arguments on why the expected benefits are larger than the expected harms.
> And this is all before considering the clear upsides to cannabis. The medicinal applications are real, and have enabled people to live better lives without the downsides of the other widely prescribed pharmaceutical options.
Yes, but using cannabis (THC, presumably) as a specialized medication is very different from legalizing it altogether. It would be no different from other drugs that need approval from a government agency with regards to efficacy and safety, before being available only with a prescription.
(Being available with prescription only makes sense if there is a significant chance of abuse. Which is the case if the substance is addictive. Which suggests non-addictive substances like, perhaps, LSD and psilocybin, could be freely available. Though I'm not an expert on these drugs.)
> Altering our mental states by consuming substances seems like a deeply human thing (in addition to be observed in other species), and is deeply embedded in us. I think there are very good reasons to ban some substances for the sake of public health. But I don't think a default stance against mind alteration is a good one either.
I would argue that a lot of the harm comes from a substance a) being addictive, and b) being significantly unhealthy. To the point where the net harm probably outweighs the net benefit. Caffeine is pretty much the only substance I know that is addictive while being quite harmless. But actually banning things has to consider the real chance of being successful with such a ban. The more people are already addicted or otherwise accustomed to a drug (e.g. to cigarettes or alcohol) the less realistic is a ban being successful and enforceable.
> I would argue that a lot of the harm comes from a substance a) being addictive, and b) being significantly unhealthy. To the point where the net harm probably outweighs the net benefit.
I think it's important to point out that cannabis is a plant, and has a drastically different risk profile than alcohol. You keep grouping the two as if they're similar, but they're not. I say this as someone who has clearly experienced the downsides, but who still doesn't think banning it makes any sense, especially if there are criminal penalties involved.
Historically, the bans have been predicated on lies, and associating it with harder drugs that are a clear and obvious danger to public health. The issue I have with your argument is that it presupposes that these are plants to be legalized (vs. legal by default). The burden of proof should lie on why we think they are harmful, and why they shouldn't be legal by default, IMO. And when looked at through that lens, existing policies have clearly not been aligned with reality.
I'd support common sense regulations and requirements around public education, maybe even limits on strength. But there's a wide spectrum of possibility between banning something and making sure that people use it safely.
If we want to focus on banning substances that are addictive and a net harm to society, there is a lot more low hanging fruit across the food industry. Let's start with sugar.
If dealers are making lot of money from cannabis, and the state removes that opportunity from them, then they may switch to more disturbing businesses.
does it though? canabis still cant be sold, legally. from a realistic perspective, this only made the black market more valueable, as the dealers no longer have to worry about prosecution as long as they're carrying <25 grams. The legislation is definitely a step in the right direction, but I dont think that it'll have a significant impact on the black market.
Out of curiosity, what other businesses you had in mind?
Let's say that drugs are illegal and get prosecuted, and are counted as crime in the statistics.
If you legalize them, your amount of crime in your statistics drops, but the actual acts are the same in real world.
You mean the stealing for money for high priced black market drugs?
You mean the shootouts/high speed chases where people run from the cops because they have a bag on them?
Or do you mean lighting up a joint?
The thing is, it's very easy to look at the statistics of violent crimes before and after. Also the vast majority of law enforcement agencies classify their crimes so you get detailed statistics of what kinds of crimes occur on a monthly/yearly basis.
So you can only get it by joining a club or grow it yourself, both are a hassle for most people so the black market will remain, but I expect there to be a lot more competition since not only organized crime is now able to partake but anyone who (legally) grows.
The black market now accounts for only about 60% of the cannabis sales. Hard drug use like crack and fentanyl has become rampant as dealers lace their product to compete on a kick level (the legal stuff is relatively mild).
There's currently a shakeout and consolidation in the legal cannabis industry going on due to overinvestment. The mom-and-pop storefronts that cropped up on seemingly every street corner during the pandemic are starting to disappear. Regulatory charges and overhead eat much of the profit. There is still trouble getting financing for the legal industry because of US legislation preventing banks that do business in that country from lending money to such businessess outside of the USA, legal or not. Black market dealers do not have any of these issues.
Is there less opioid problems where they didn't legalize?
Yeah, there are a million pot stores, and many closing but that's just a bubble for you.
from i've read cannabis is not a money making product for "dealers". cannabis is used to introduce customers to other much more profitable drugs.
As someone who used to deal some every now and then, I think I could count on one hand the amount of people I sold weed to, who would be OK with whatever drug, the rest were only purchasing cannabis and cannabis only.
They didn't reach out to me to "get high no matter what cost" but specifically to "get high by smoking cannabis". If I didn't have cannabis, there was no interest in getting anything.
In Germany, the limit of THC in the blood while driving is almost zero, AFAIK
Less entrepreneurship means less innovation and less jobs and less tax revenue, it's bad for society overall.
Humans do not exist as entities to serve businesses for the grand goal of entrepreneurship. I tend to believe people that think this way have their own work addictions that are just as harmful as addictions to substances.
Furthermore your 'decrease in entrepreneurship' should be suffixed with 'where I am'. And when you put 'where I am' suddenly you'll run into a bunch of much more likely culprits such as 'administrative burden and bureaucracy', 'IP and copyright laws/legal complications', 'successful large businesses paying knowledge workers and keeping them out of the self market', 'tax burdens for self employed workers'
Drugs is going to be so far down that list in most places that it's not a serious consideration.
The Congressional Budget Office writes plenty about this and throws out statements like the following
>Some economists are becoming concerned about diminished competition among firms—especially those firms involved in Internet-based commerce—and its harm to entrepreneurship, and about the impact of noncompete clauses
Information technology has drastically changed the business landscape in such a way that it no longer looks or acts like the pre-internet world. Furthermore global marketplaces like Amazon allow entrepreneurs to exist outside of the countries doing the counting.
I don't think it's true that it is harmless to society, and I don't think we fully understand what the ramifications will be.
What you're looking for is the principle of least harm. Time and time again we've proven that banning drugs is not the least harmful option. It turns out that humans really love vice which causes even more harmful black markets. We have lots of articles and information about drugs and their effects on society, you were attempting to link it to entrepreneurship of which from what can be seen is a very tenuous link at best.
Legalizing alcohol was for the best, because it eliminated the organized crime aspect. But it came with serious harms to society that we really haven't done a good job of mitigating. Alochol destroys so many lives and kills so many people each year.
I'm asking, how we can not make that mistake again. To be clear, whatever the harms of normalized cannabis use in society, it will be far less than alcohol.
The reasons I haven't tried entrepreneurship are much more about financial risks.
Rent is expensive. Homeownership is barely attainable anywhere near an economically active metro area even with a decent tech income.
Healthcare is expensive and unpredictable. Insurance is expensive without an employer subsidy and insurance pool.
I think a great argument for better social safety nets and decreased housing costs is a lower barrier to entrepreneurship. If the policy answer for every question on paying for living is "Just get a good job with a good salary and benefits from MegaCorp" that isn't really conducive to striking out on your own.
A larger business with access to financial capital markets doesn't need to out compete you on merit. They can bundle your service for free until you collapse then raise prices later.
Just look at how many 'killed by Google' projects seem to work like this.
The positive outcome for many startups that take investment money is to be acquired in such a move to pay back those investors.
The negative outcome is that you get crushed without being acquired.
My question is: what's the "ideal" amount of entrepreneurship? Why is it the amount you chose? It's very philosophical and there really isn't a right answer.
More to the point: if it weren't cannabis, alcohol, television, social media then it would be something else.
Most people don't _want_ their lives to be driven by work. They want a paycheck and to live their life. Some people develop proper addictions, but that's (in my uninformed opinion) due to the stress of their lives. It's a _lot_ of work to find a higher meaning in life, and many (most?) people instead choose to seek momentary pleasure/sedate themselves.
Those who have an addiction or rely on substances aren't any "better" than those who abstain. Everyone is doing their best while trying to get by.
No new ideas.
womp womp
It seems like most people tend to become more content with their current situation and happy to enjoy the moment. This seems make most people less motivated, maybe because they have less problem with how things are.
But there are outliers: I've met a few folks over the years who are voracious weed smokers, and have an outrageously productive output.
I'm not sure if it's because people are simply wired different, or if these latter camp just figured out how to use weed really well.
But somehow for some people the state legislating about the behaviour of the average Joe to make sure he continues to be a well behaved cog is absolutely appropriate.
And South Park is the most realistic depiction of the clown world we are living in.
I don't care what weed smokers do as long as it doesn't negatively affect me. However quite often their stench does.
Yet another reason why I want to move to a supposedly eco-unfriendly single family home in the suburbs ASAP. Since weed became legalized, the stench in urban apartment buildings has been nauseating.
It is also important to note that the spread and lingering of smoke smells in apartment buildings is just one symptom of a general problem of poor indoor air circulation and air quality. Addressing those issues effectively will help with quality of life and health and should be done regardless.
No, by a mile no.
Source:
https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/service/gesetze-...
I've not looked into what exactly passed, but the proposal was joke. Even more so, it was joke regardless where you stand on this topic - and that's quite an achievement.
The proposal was constructed in a way that it technically legalized, but in a way that I'm sure will be of no practical relevance.
According to the proposal, to buy legally you had to be a member of a registered club, so no anonymity.
The club could only sell what it produces (three plants per member) and could only have a restricted number of members. The club can sell at most 50 g per month, it needs an addiction prevention officer, it cannot be near a kindergarden, and so on. Very bureaucratic, so these clubs will be exactly as popular as intended.
This is basically how it works in Barcelona, Spain as well. I don't think it's legal/illegal nationwide, but we have invite-only social clubs where you can only become a member if you know existing members. I think (but I'm not sure) there is a maximum number of members per club too.
And you don't "buy" weed there, but you contribute money to the organization, and you may withdraw this contribution in the future as weed.
Seems to work out just fine here.
Ownership is now legal for 25 grams if they are from your own plants or from the plants of another member of the club you are registered with.