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Comment by Rod | Hacker News Reader

"The last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized. We have enough problems with alcohol and abuse of pharmaceutical products. Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?"

That's a good point. Since I am not an expert on the topic, I will abstain from commenting on how mind-altering marijuana is. However, it does seem natural to conjecture that if one smokes more pot, then one's mind will be "more altered", right? Hence, why not follow the Dutch model? This would mean:

- all shops selling marijuana would require the customers to provide some identification card / document.

- a network would connect all the marijuana shops to a central database where each person's purchase would be logged. Each person would be allowed to consume a certain quantity of marijuana per day. If one exceeded this limit, the shop would NOT be allowed to sell marijuana.

That way, one could legalize the consumption of marijuana, but impose upper bounds on how much can be consumed daily.

Of course, the shops could sell pot and not register the transaction at the database, but if caught they would be closed down. There could be a limited number of licences to sell pot per county, so that no shop would have an incentive to break the rules, as that would lead to loss of the precious licence. The downside is privacy. All marijuana sales would be logged at the database.

Would this make any sense? What do you guys think?

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Just try it. At least once. Don't like the smoke? Have a cookie. Within 15-20 minutes, you'll be wondering why you can't get marijuana from a liquor store, taxed and regulated in a similar manner to the rest of the products they sell there (which happen to be far more harmful to you and society anyway).

Side effects from over-doing it are basically mental slowness and a lack of motivation (even this will go away if you just stop for a while). If you start sucking at your job, your suckiness should show up on your performance review and HR should handle you accordingly. Maybe you get fired. This is how an alcoholic would be handled, anyway.

There is way too much fear and over-analysis surrounding this topic. The tools to manage it are already here. Marijuana is already here, and will continue on just fine regardless of whether it is legal or not. Overachievers like Michael Phelps and Barack Obama will smoke marijuana and go on to do great things, just as they always have.

Just legalize it already so we can finally benefit from California's number one cash crop, out in the open, rather than letting the majority of the profits go into the pockets of people who very often do pose a credible threat to society and require insane amounts of tax dollars to manage.

> which happen to be far more harmful to you and society anyway

Are you sure that it's not that they're more harmful precisely because they're legal?

Yes.

As much as I'd like to leave it at that one snarky word and leave you to fill in the rest, I had better fill out my argument by pointing out that this experiment was actually, factually tried, and it went terribly. Illegal alcohol was far worse for society than legal alcohol. Prohibition resulted in the only flat-out repeal of an amendment of the Constitution ever.

You're right: I wasn't precise enough in communicating what I meant.

What I was trying to get at was not "wouldn't alcohol cause fewer problems if it was illegal?" but rather "won't legalization of a niche* drug be guaranteed to massively amplify the social ills it causes?".

I have no experience with cannabis, so I'm asking because I'm interested: how do you know that the massive increase in participation which would follow legalization will not cause cannabis to become more of a problem drug than alcohol?

* let's face it, cannabis use is niche compared to alcohol and tobacco

"Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?" - "That's a good point."

Actually, it's a terrible point. Three paragraphs after being informed that marijuana is a $14 billion dollar industry already, not a $14 billion dollar industry in potential but in actual fact, we get two paragraphs of people whining about "adding" pot into the mix. Adding? It's there! Like it or not.

This is why journalists get no respect from me. These guys ought to be asked how anything would be "added" to the $14 billion industry already in place. Perhaps they'd come up with some decent answer, after all, but in the meantime their argument as presented in this article is terrible.

At least the last paragraph showed some sane recognition that the horse bolted from the barn millennia ago.

Marijuana IS a mind-altering substance. Disregarding this scientific fact is potentially irresponsible. We are not even discussing policy / politics here, it's Science. And unless you are a neurologist or a pharmacologist yourself, I really do NOT believe you are qualified to argue against this. Recalling the words of wisdom my parents' old-school doctor friend used to say:

"the dose, not the substance, makes the poison" (it sounded more impressive in latin)

Thus, instead of discussing the BIG questions such as whether marijuana should be legalized or not, why not discuss the details such as how much marijuana would each citizen be allowed to consume on a daily basis without endangering others. The devil is always in the details, right?

It's true that the industry is there. But that fact alone does not mean it's OK to go ahead and legalize everything without any bounds and reason. Following that rationale, why not legalize prostitution, human trafficking and arms dealing? After all, these industries exist already, right?

You missed my point. It was simply a narrow point that there's no "adding" to be discussing. It's here, and it's huge. Speaking as if there's nobody consuming marijuana and legalizing it is going to suddenly cause a huge burst in consumption is simply factually incorrect. It may cause an increase, but it can't cause a huge increase.

It is a dishonest tactic that is almost always used by proponents of a law, to slip in the hidden assumption that the law already works, or will simply work if added, even when flatly contradicted by the truth. Personally, I can't hardly conceive of how marijuana prohibition could be any more of a failure than it actually is.

None of the rest of what you talk about is relevant, as you simply read into my post. I'm not even claiming "it's there already so let's legalize it". I'm just saying, "it's there already and arguing implicitly as if it's not is dishonest". Arguments shouldn't be based on dishonesty.

I will, however, point out that the badness that could be added is fairly sharply bounded by the ready availability of the product today. Prostitution and human trafficking have been at least reasonably well suppressed, and re-legalizing them would have an effect. I'm not convinced there's a large number of people for whom the sole reason they are not smoking is that it is illegal. So your metaphor, as is so often the case with terrible metaphors brought out to make a dubious point in an argument, is not applicable.

(Note I didn't add mention "arms dealing". I don't think that has been "reasonably well suppressed" at all.)

You probably think you're arguing with a pothead. Actually, I pretty much agree with everything about the nature of marijuana you said. I do not smoke it myself and have every intention of telling the truth about it to my children (which is that it isn't going to kill you but it is certainly dangerous with little compensating gain). But I don't mistake my morality for good government policy. The effects of prohibition have been a net negative, and no amount of moralizing on my part (or anybody else's) about how it just shouldn't be that way can change that.

I got your point that there's no "adding". We're not talking about a small underground economy. Like you said, "it's here and it's huge". I don't know why people are so focused on the law. The fact that marijuana is illegal is stupid and arbitrary. I am strongly against prohibition.

All I am trying to say is: let unbiased scientific studies (not emotional arguments based on "honesty", "morality" and "legality") dictate policies. Like I said, I am interested in knowing what would be a socially responsible dose. People drink coffee as a stimulant, but drinking 40 espressos in a row might kill you. Should we forbid coffee? No! A stupid example, I know. But replace "coffee" with "marijuana", "caffeine" with "THC" and it's just as stupid. Believing that something is "bad" because it's illegal is foolish. Once again, it's all in the dose.

Ironically, evidence seems to suggest that legalization does not lead people to over-consumption. Evidence also suggests that teenagers who consume too much pot are at higher risk of schizophrenia. I don't know how reliable these are.

> Marijuana IS a mind-altering substance.

You say that like it's somehow relevant, it's not. Sugar is a mind altering substance, so what. Caffeine is a mind altering substance, so what. It's only relevant if alters your mind in dangerous ways like making you want to kill people, but it doesn't, so it's not relevant, at all.

Dose is also not relevant, if you smoke too much pot you'll fall asleep... so again not relevant. There is no danger.

Behind all of your arguments is the presumption that it being illegal is somehow a justification of it being illegal. Your position is emotional, not logical, so you're looking for arguments to support your position, there are none. People who want pot to be illegal are not basing their position on reason, but upon emotion.

> But that fact alone does not mean it's OK to go ahead and legalize everything without any bounds and reason.

See, this is where your bias is evident. The very idea that legalizing something should require any argument at all is simply wrong. That is not freedom. The question is why should it be illegal? If you can't find a logical reason to outlaw something, then it should be legal, period. So answer me that, why should it be illegal?

Of course sugar is a mind-altering substance. It can even be lethal. Same for salt. Anything can be a poison if consumed in high enough doses. Too much caffeine and one will have a heart-attack (this upper bound is known).

I couldn't disagree more that dose is NOT relevant. Dose is EVERYTHING. Water is vital for humans to survive, but if you drink too much water, you will get high. Should we ban water drinking? Of course not, we should inform people how much they should drink each day. It's a no-brainer because thirsty people will drink water when they feel like.

Dude, I am ALL for legalization of marijuana (I might have given the impression that I am against it for some reason). I know there will be people who will use emotional and ignorant arguments against it and, hence, I believe that imposing certain bounds on consumption could be a good idea because it would defeat those weak arguments against legalization.

What I would like to see is unbiased, reliable scientific evidence. I would like to know how much an adult should be able to consume. Yeah, too much pot and one falls asleep (I have smoked, so I know it), but if you fall asleep while driving then you might be endangering others. In my humble opinion, marijuana SHOULD be legal, people should be informed about what would be a responsible daily consumption, and politics, religion, emotion should be left out of it.

I'm sorry, but your search for the recommended maximum daily allowance of pot just seems stupid. We don't restrict maximum daily allowance of any other recreationally used substance so you're trying to hold pot to a higher standard than anything else, which is just ridiculous.

You still don't seem to grasp that it's none of yours or anyone else's business how much one consumes as long as no one is harmed. If you harm someone while high, the fact that you're high really isn't relevant either, you can be punished by existing law for harming someone. Murder is murder, it doesn't matter if you did it while high, or drunk, or on PCP, the crime was still the murder, not the state of mind that led you there.

Dose is only relevant if the maximum dose is easily reachable. There is no practical maximum to smoking pot, you'd have to smoke literally a truck bed full to even get close to a dangerous level which is physically impossible. Thus, as I said earlier, dose is not relevant.

"There is no practical maximum to smoking pot, you'd have to smoke literally a truck bed full to even get close to a dangerous level which is physically impossible. Thus, as I said earlier, dose is not relevant."

Is that based on your personal experience, your (unsubstantiated) belief, or any scientific data? This is an honest question. Though I have smoked pot, I never smoked more than one joint per night.

Sure it's none of my business how much other people consume just as long as no one gets harmed. But you're assuming that people are responsible and most people aren't. Murder is murder, but there are accidents that could be avoided if people were not mind-altered. And I am referring to alcohol, not pot.

I don't think it would be too ridiculous to hold pot to a higher standard than alcohol, for instance. Solely for practical reasons. Alcohol is legal. Pot is not. If imposing caps on consumption would reduce the resistance to the legalization of pot, then it COULD be worth considering. This is speculation. I am not saying it would be worth it, I am just saying one should not discard any possibilities without a more in-depth analysis.

Here, http://lmgtfy.com?q=marijuana%20overdose since it's pretty widely known dose just isn't an issue with mj.

Please spare me of your pedantism. I can google myself, thank you. Please note that:

1) "Widely know" is not scientific at all. Opinions of laymen count for nothing. The truth is found through experimentation and observation, not by consensus. Show me scientific papers, please.

2) Overdose is not the problem. The problem is that people react differently to the same dose. Thus the need to come up with a threshold. Even if this threshold were not enforced, it could serve as a guideline.

3) If you have indeed smoked a truckload of pot and felt OK enough to drive (for instance), all you have proved is that the truckload of pot had little influence on your brain on that day. You can't generalize to the rest of the population.

You seem to be like the Inquisition: you're not even willing to consider any idea which goes against your dogma. Prove me wrong.

No shit, but we're not scientists and this isn't that kind of discussion. I have no need to prove you wrong.

You're spouting nonsense as if you haven't even done the most basic research on your own. You could have found plenty of scientific research that has been done with a trivial amount of Googling. I'm not going to do it for you; educate yourself on the issue because your fears about dosage are simply unfounded nonsense.

Dude, I talked about thresholds that would ensure that people would maintain their awareness within certain limits... you talked about overdose. We're not even discussing the same thing. The legal limit on alcohol is not to prevent people from dying, but to prevent them from driving when their reaction-time and situational awareness are reduced. Alcohol is easy to control because they can make you blow those alcohol-meters. How do you measure how "high" someone is? It's not so easy.

Scientific research on this topic does not seem mature enough. It's an ongoing effort. But it's better than nothing.

To cut a long story short: just because something as dangerous as alcohol is freely available and culturally acceptable, I think we should be careful about legalizing drugs. I have smoked pot, my friends have smoked pot. From my experience, it's a lot less dangerous than alcohol. Scientific seems to suggest that pot is not particularly dangerous (unless you smoke an entire field).

I don't think we disagree on much. The difference is that I believe that one should be exhaustive when analyzing this issue. All possibilities should be studied. Information should be provided in an unbiased manner. And, ultimately, people should be able to decide whether to consume or not without any baby-sitting from the government.

And my point is people have already decided; massive amounts of people already smoke it regularly. This is no need for any additional study, we know its effects, it's America's big dirty secret that a large minority of the population smokes all the time.

You're talking like there's some big bad unknown danger lurking around the corner and we should tread carefully. That's just bogus, pot isn't some unknown what if, it's something massive amounts of people do all the time already. It's a joke that it isn't already legal. It's a joke to suggest that it's even dangerous, it's not, and everyone knows it.

The last bit of resistance is people like you balking about moving too fast and not being careful enough or wanting to place limits and all that as if we aren't 30 years past that kind of timidness. People who are scared of pot are a joke.

Some decades ago they also said cigarettes were not dangerous. Purifying radium was not dangerous, either. Then, decades later people started dying of cancer. They say cell phones are not dangerous, though a friend of mine who did a PhD in computational bioelectromagnetics is not so sure.

I am concerned about the ethical aspect of it. If I were a scientist who had spent 30 years researching the effects of marijuana, I would say that: "scientific evidence seems to suggest that marijuana is not dangerous, but people should take into account that future research could lead to different conclusions". People should decide, and have already decided. There's a huge market out there and it's a scandal that marijuana has not been legalized yet.

Unless you are absolutely sure there's no danger whatsoever, you have no right to say that any fear is a joke. Your certainty stems from your ignorance, and this is not supposed to be offending. I think pot should have been legalized decades ago, and we're not moving fast... we're moving slow. Legalize it ASAP. Period. But do not advertise that there are no dangers, because you don't know. Moreover, the way you consume pot might be the danger, not the pot itself. I mean the paper used to roll the joint for instant. The hot air is known to increase the chances of throat cancer. Lip cancer is a problem. Using a water pipe should be safer. I know I know nothing, but for a layman you seem awfully certain.

> Unless you are sure there's no danger whatsoever

That's absurd. Nothing in this life is perfectly safe. Safety has absolutely nothing to do with whether something is legal or not. Sky diving is dangerous but legal. Riding bulls is dangerous but legal. What I'm asserting is that pot is known to be safe enough that it should be my choice whether I do it or not.

We're decades beyond the irrational fears you're peddling. Our president has smoked pot for Christ's sake, you can't get much more mainstream than that.

I know this might seem paranoid, but my main concern is the lack of ethics in advertising something as "perfectly safe", when it might not be... well... "perfectly safe". On the other hand, one could argue that nothing is indeed perfectly safe.

If I were a medical doctor in the 1940s and advertised that research suggested that cigarettes were safe... as soon as evidence started proving otherwise decades later, I would have felt horribly guilty and ashamed.

Medicine is not yet an entirely exact science. There are many things we don't know. I say: inform people of the risks, and let them decide freely. But just don't advertise something as "perfectly safe" when it's just "safe enough" because it sounds slightly dishonest.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/mj_overdose.htm says LD50 is 1/3 your body weight.

1/3 your body weight of pure THC, that's 1500 pounds of pot.

We don't restrict maximum daily allowance of any other recreationally used substance

Sure we do. Almost every country has a legal definition of sobriety when it comes to alcohol.

Murder is murder, it doesn't matter if you did it while high, or drunk, or on PCP, the crime was still the murder, not the state of mind that led you there.

There are many legal degrees of murder and state of mind certainly plays a role in how much trouble you're going to be in.

There is no practical maximum to smoking pot

If I smoke a certain amount of pot I shouldn't be driving. The effects of weed wildly differ between people. It's one reason legalization is difficult. It's very hard to determine how stoned a person is and whether or not it's even affecting their motor skills or judgement.

> Sure we do. Almost every country has a legal definition of sobriety when it comes to alcohol.

No we don't. We don't have a max daily allowance of alcohol, you can drink all you want, you just can't drive. No one will stop you from drinking yourself to death if you so choose. You can walk into any store sober and buy enough alcohol to kill 20 people and no one will stop you.

> It's very hard to determine how stoned a person is and whether or not it's even affecting their motor skills or judgement.

If you can't figure out if someone is stoned and they can pass the field sobriety tests administered by the police, then who care if they're driving.

This idea that you need some quick way to test for a particular drug because someone might drive while on it is just absurd. We take all kinds of drugs, legally, that are much worse than pot and no one screams about driving on it.

Alcohol is particularly problematic because it affects your judgment center and makes you do stupid think like drive when you should otherwise know you can't. Pot doesn't do that.

Why should a marijuana consumer be logged in a central database? Stores are required to do ID checks, but there is no database for alcohol or tobacco consumers.

True. On the other hand, some claim that THC is more mind-altering than alcohol. I don't know if it's true or not. I won't go into that.

Imagine stoned drivers losing control of their SUVs and running over little children walking out of school. This doomsday scenario could be used to argue against legalization. Of course, drunk drivers are as dangerous, and drivers high on valium are not harmless either. However, there's a cultural "problem" which leads most people to consider some drugs acceptable (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, valium) and some other drugs "evil" (e.g., marijuana).

I am not a big fan of the Dutch system of having a central database, but if it would help tame people's fears of over-consumption, then it could be a good idea. Why not devise a smart system which would assign a unique identifier to each person (think authentication instead of identification) so that people's consumption could be limited without compromising their privacy. That way, if there were a privacy breach and the data leaked to the public domain, no one's privacy would be at risk because there would be no way to map one's identifier to one's ID. Do you think this would make sense?

People smoke very different amounts, so at what amount do you cap consumption?

Imagine the same scenario being carried out for alcohol. You might drink a couple beers a month, but Joe the Drinker might max out his beer quota every day and still want more. You, or someone like you with an entrepreneurial bent, might then decide to max out your own beer quota every day in order to sell the beer to Joe with a markup. Then presumably the law would need to crack down on you for selling your alcohol ration to someone else, and we're in a legal place very similar to where we started.

Doesn't that issue crop up in the Dutch system? Or is the allowed amount high enough that people can essentially get as intoxicated as they want?

I haven't been to Amsterdam yet, so my description of the "Dutch system" is based on what I heard from friends who live there, not from my own personal experience. It sounds like a good system, though.

If what I have heard is accurate, then the quota is on daily consumption. I can't help thinking of algorithms that would update one's maximum allowable purchase of pot based on the exact dates and hours one last purchased. If the system allows one to buy enough each day to get "high enough" without getting "too high", no one would have an incentive to buy pot in the black market at higher prices.

The one thing I keep wondering is: what happens if I buy pot at 23:50 and go to another shop to buy pot 10 minutes later? Since, technically, it's a new day, will I be allowed to buy as much as the daily quota allows again? It's intriguing.

Unless this is a new development, this "daily quota" doesn't exist. There's no ids, no central database, no daily quotas. There wouldn't be "drug tourists" all over the Netherlands if there were such a thing.

And there's no mention of it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands

The description of the "dutch system" is totally imaginary. Downvoted for making things up and presenting them as fact.

1) I made it clear that I could not guarantee its accuracy. I made it clear that it was not a "fact" but something I heard.

2) the fact that the system does not exist (at least in the Netherlands) does not make it not worth considering. Unless you have something intelligent to say about WHY the database would be a bad idea, your input hasn't been helpful either.

Sorry, was in a bad mood when I wrote that. Gave you an upmod on this one to make up for it. Been to Amsterdam and there's no database.

To address 2) there's a lot of problems, it would be expensive to implement, there's a lot of security issues involved, it seems unnecessary - alcohol and cigarettes cause many more problems; they should get this treatment before weed does. On the other hand, I feel like the system you proposed may already exist in rural small town pharmacies for antihistamines which can be used to produce crystal meth.

I don't know where I got the impression that they had a database system in Amsterdam. Talked to some good friends living there years ago, and they might have mentioned that there was a proposal to implement such a system... or that it could be interesting to implement it. I should have been more careful when presenting "facts" whose accuracy I can't guarantee.

I agree that the database would be expensive to implement. On the other hand, taxing marijuana and all the money that could be saved from not fighting marijuana dealing anymore could perhaps finance the database system. I am not a security professional, so I don't know how to implement a system that could authenticate users without identifying them, but that seems to present lots of interesting technical problems.

I agree that if there's no alcohol database, then there should be no database for weed either. On the other hand, alcohol is tolerated by society much more than weed. This makes no sense, but it's a reality. I would say that being pragmatic would be a good idea: introducing a database would tame the "fears" of those who claim that legalization would "corrupt" the teeanagers and our society's "values". Sometimes it's better to take little steps. Legalize but control consumption using a database. A few years later, people will have gotten used to the new paradigm that there might be no objections to abolishing the database. I say, legalize one step at a time because it increases the chances of success.

Having a database and quotas will encourage illegality only a little bit less than it being illegal. Some people will sell their quote to others with larger intake, some will be encouraged to buy dope illegally just to avoid being in the database (how long would it be before the government used that db for employment screening, followed by the obvious next step - selling the db to private companies for the same reason?).

As a total aside, this came up in an episode of Weeds - our hero Nancy Botwin managed to discourage her clients from purchasing medicinal marijuana just by suggesting that there was such a central db.

It would be cool if Synthetic Biology advanced to the point where one could start hacking bacteria to synthesize THC ;-) One would order a few bacteria over the internet and have a THC factory in one's room. No need for marijuana plantations that can be spotted with evil remote sensing satellites. No need for a database that could be used against the consumers.

This is wild speculation, of course. I just wonder how the government will be able to enforce certain laws when citizens are able to synthesize chemicals on their own homes, for their own consumption.

Obviously you've never been to Canada. ;-) Hydroponic growing and "sea of green" techniques have made it possible to have marijuana "plantations" in containers the size of minibar fridges.

Wow!!! That's pretty cool. Thanks for the info!

> Imagine stoned drivers losing control of their SUVs and running over little children walking out of school.

Or how about don't imagine that, it's ignorant. Running over children walking out of school is already illegal. It's not at all an argument against legalization, it's just a cheap emotional appeal tossing kids into the mix to get sympathy.

We do not need to imagine how things affect the children every time society brings up some issue of what adults can or can't do to their own bodies.

Secondly, in a free society, you don't argue for legalization, you argue for making something illegal, legal should be the default status. The question is not why should we legalize marijuana, it's what justifies it being illegal. The answer is nothing, it's absurd and unjustified.

It should be legal because there is no valid reason for it to be illegal. There is no justification for telling an adult what they can or can't do to their own body. The drug is not addictive, tends to only calm people down and make them hungry, and is far safer than alcohol.

That it is illegal is far more related to the politics of the cotton industry not wanting competition from hemp 60 years ago than for any reason to do with the drug itself or the safety of it.

I know it's an extreme example (and a display of ignorance), but I am sure some "conservatives" would invoke something like that against legalization.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that adults have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I draw the line when adults consume certain mind-altering substances and might endanger others. However, moderate consumption of marijuana seems to be less dangerous than alcohol, so I believe the only obstacle there seems to be is the legacy of the cotton industry's lobbying some decades ago. Interesting how society takes so long to adjust...

I believe that bartenders are not allowed to serve drinks to people that are too intoxicated.

I think one could simply apply a similar thing, perhaps with subtle social pressures to smoke marijuana in public places?

Or, workplaces could still do drug testing. Since marijuana is non-toxic, the potential issues from marijuana use can be handled by employers and/or family and friends.

Sounds like what New York has been doing with pseudoephedrine sales for the past year or so, though I don't know whether the limit is daily, weekly, or monthly. I find the whole pseudoephedrine thing eerie, but I'm not opposed.

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