NY Comptroller: Legalise marijuana, tax it and end wrongheaded war on pot
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That friend had trouble finding work and grad school for years because this haunted him, and everyone asks in advance about your criminal record. It was all over a dime bag, and using crooked legal tactics.
Another friend, reminiscent of an article previously posted here, was in the Midwest (we grew up on the East Coast) and stopped for a busted headlight. They then found a negligible amount of weed. He was detained and then arrested on the spot. He was told he either call his parents, as he was a minor, and to pay a wopping 1,000 USD fine, or face charges and a court date, in which case pleading innocent and receiving a guilty verdict would mean doubled fines and potential jail time. You can guess what his parents did when they got that phone call in the middle of the night.
And don't worry, they never had a problem scrubbing this from their record, as youths who had fun. Their record would never ruin their adult (+21) lives, no?
All I have to say is, what the hell is wrong with us as society we penalize people so harshly (let's not kid, the non-white kids I knew got worse variations of these stories) for something so much less powerful than alcohol (I would love to see someone argue with me re this point after four years in the very wet college environment in contemporary America)?
Screw it. I hope this guy, and those like him win. But there is something so disgustingly Puritan and fascist, I feel myself working up the "he was a real reactonary" voice of Big Lebowski, full of snark.
Sorry, end rant.
So they just love rules that filter a lot of resumes, can be applied without thinking and make superficial sense. Understanding how skills relate is more work than comparing lists, looking at the specifics of a criminal conviction is more work that just using it as a binary exclusion criterium.
I don't care if people smoke pot in their apartments. But once it's legal, it's not going to stop there and I am not sure what can be done about respecting others, if anything, since that is probably a core problem of personality far beyond pot smoking.
I worry if everyone is going to be walking around everywhere smoking it because they don't think anyone is going to stop them. I personally don't care for it and I suspect my right to not be bothered by it is not going to be respected in the least.
If there is a solution to making others respect smoking only in their homes, I'd love to hear it.
The gentlemen who live next door to me love to chain-smoke on their balcony. It annoys me but I have no legal recourse. I can only ask them nicely to please not smoke when I have washing on my balcony, or I'm sitting out there enjoying the sunshine, or I have the door open to air out my apartment.
Replace cigarettes with marijuana, heroin, alcohol, cocaine, loud music or any other substance people use for enjoyment and it's the same story. You're 100% right in saying it's a problem of people respecting others.
Also, if you've ever visited Venice Beach or San Francisco, you'll know this is not a problem that's solved by prohibition.
If you buy a house in a district, you may or may not buy an insurance against neighbour's misbehaviour. But the first condition of the insurance is that you respect your neighbours yourself according some existing arrangements (specified in your insurance). Now if anyone is too loud when not appropriate, or drunk as hell, or peeing on your lawn, the insurance company will:
1. Pay you a compensation.
2. Make investigation.
3. Penalize the neighbour by raising his insurance fees (or via his insurer as they'd have some mutual agreements) or demanding a compensation from him. If he does not pay, his insurance is simply cancelled without cops and jails.
4. For ugly cases when neighbour is misbehaving too much (killing pets, breaking windows etc.), insurance company may have also agreements with water supplier's, wifi supplier's etc insurance companies that supplier cuts water/wifi/etc until the guy pays a compensation. Again, without cops, laws, police.
And if the guy goes to journalists and alternative insurer to whom he'll prove he wasn't that bad, just someone is exaggerating, then that insurer will make a good PR case and steal customers from abusive insurers. Or highlight the whole neighbourhood as a weird place to be or something.
The main point is, it's all done without guns and jails. This way every party has voice and can communicate their position any time they want to anyone. And insurers would have to strike a good balance between protecting customers and pissing them off. Like any non-monopoly business is doing already anywhere in the world.
So in one district it could be 100% okay to smoke and get drunk, while in another people would prefer less loud activities. The idea of a regional law just does allow this to happen.
Second, there is no "giving power" anywhere in the voluntary agreements. Your water will be turned off only if your water supplier thinks it's more profitable to please some insured customers than not piss you off. If they turn your water off unreasonably, they risk losing clients.
Policemen and congressmen do not have to please any customers and never suffer economical consequences if they don't. This attracts psychos of all sorts in the realm of brutal state power.
No, they risk getting sued. If my water company decided one day to turn off my water based on some bullshit claim of one of my neighbours, I would sue the shit out of them.
There are such things as contracts and consumer protection laws you know.
As a disclaimer, I live in Romania, Europe and what you're describing wouldn't be possible here. But it's funny how we've got less problems with drugs, even though Europe on the whole is more relaxed about drug usage than you are. More than 50% of incarcerations in your federal prisons are for drug offences and you've got the highest incarceration rates of all countries. To me that's a sign that you've been fixing the symptoms, rather than the real disease, making it worse in the process.
And really, I don't think that placing such power in your insurance companies would do any good. In theory abuse would be prevented by competition. In practice however, monopolies / oligopolies happen and insurance companies are primarily focused on minimizing risk, so you'd better have a good story when going from one insurer to the next.
When I talk about insurance, I talk about voluntary agreements. About giving as much "power" to insurance company as you want. If they suddenly begin carrying guns and threatening people instead of having peaceful arrangements, customers will go away and all the funding for weapons will quickly end (or they won't, it's their choice). Also keep in mind that any enterprise needs savers who will invest their hard-earned money. They wouldn't like to gamble with a risk of losing all their money and customers by doing something people wouldn't like. Like shooting, killing, spying.
If you say that your ideal is being able to "sue" someone, what you are really saying is that you wish to use unilateral violent power to be directed on someone you disagree with. Now you have a problem. Because you won't be able to control that power. You'd either have to become part of that power (and fight hard with other such ruthless guys), or stay away from it and watch it being used upon you too whether you like it or not. Courts, police and politicians are not enterprise: they didn't have voluntarily invested private money that feeds them. They first take the money from every person by force, then decide what they want to do with it. This makes the whole motivational structure reversed and inherently abusive.
So fuck that shit. As I mentioned many times again on HN, pro-government or pro-law rhetoric is no different from religious bullshit that one group of people uses on another group of people at the expense of someone else.
"Without religion and church there's no morality" => "without government we'll have anarchic chaos"
"You must trust pope because he's set here by God" => "You must trust mr. president because there is society that elected him"
"If god does not exist, who created everything?" => "Without government how would we build roads and fly to the moon?"
"The Bible says what's good and what's bad" => "The constitution defines our rights."
"If you are against religion, you are against morality" => "If you are against government, you are against society".
E.g. if the "richer group" got rich not via favors from monopoly of violence, but from efficiently servicing "poorer group", why would they risk massive boycotts and end of well-running business for a short-term benefit? Imagine if Amazon suddenly decides to print books using blood of cute little kittens because it's slightly more profitable. Would they think twice whether customers would be eager to buy those books?
Or you'd prefer a mythically benevolent all-powerful organization with guns, nukes and tons of paperwork that will create an appearance of "protection of piece and order" which you will never be able to control or affect?
Then rest easy.
Really? Shouldn't the police be stopping people driving whilst drunk, rather than just following them around?
People shouldn't have to hide in their houses, but neither should they be allowed to spew smoke where others will breathe it.
The problem is that this is really an air pollution issue but is being painted as a drugs issue, from both sides. Grandparent poster thinks that air pollution from portable fires is somehow related to the legal status of cannabis. Conversely, lots of smokers probably think that efforts to restrict their ability to pollute is some sort of effort to outlaw their drug.
Really? The air you breathe is mostly polluted by fossil fuel combustion. We should by that logic ban cars and power plants, not cigarettes.
http://gothamist.com/2013/05/02/john_lius_ex-campaign_treasu...
Legalize it and the government can tax it. Dealers get wiped out, and with them, a lot of the violence. The tax money raised can pay for a lot of rehab, and the police can concentrate on actual crime with the saved resources.
I could go on...
Nasty way to run things, no?
I'm sure the DEA loves the status quo, but that's not where the votes come from. The votes come from everyone who bought into Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. People like my mom, who thinks pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day, and supports keeping it illegal because she thinks that's bad for the country. If you poll your mom and her friends, I bet you see that viewpoint pretty well-represented.
So why do they want to convince the public that drugs need to be pursued in the first place? If they were merely responding to pressure from the public, then that would be one thing, but they are fueling that sentiment. They want the public to think that way.
Do they want to sway the public because they are themselves 'true believers'? Or are there less noble motivations?
I suspect it is a combination of both.
My mom, who isn't a native English speaker, doesn't consume American media. And her Indian movies aren't being interrupted by ads for a Drug Free America.
The fact is that prohibition is a natural tendency in many societies. Whether its Jews not eating shrimp or Muslims not drinking alcohol, prohibitions have existed since long before modern marketing campaigns. In the U.S., prohibition of alcohol was not the result of government propaganda and powerful interests, but a grass roots movement, fully supported by women in particular. Just as that generation saw alcohol as an attack on their husbands, this generation of mothers sees marijuana as an attack on their teenagers.
"Just say no" was a propaganda campaign and you rightly describe it as widely influencing the population. Somebody told your mom that "pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day", she didn't dream that up all by herself.
There actually is a such thing as a stoner. I don't hate them or want to outlaw them or anything, but they do exist. Nancy Reagan didn't invent them.
Weed isn't the problem here. The kid and/or his family is generally the problem.
You are both absolute lunatics if you think government run propaganda campaigns have nothing to do with that perception.
Let's review:
1) rayiner describes the 'status quo' as stereotyping pot users, calls out media campaigns as one cause of this, and calls out his mother specifically as an example of this.[1]
2) I agree with rayiner.[2]
3) rayiner does not like it when people agree with him, and backpedals.[3]
4) I call him out for backpedaling.[4]
5) You "jump into the fray" damn near a day after rayiner's comment with a red herring large enough to make a professional fisherman blush.
Try reading the goddamn conversation before tagging in for your buddy.
[1] "The votes come from everyone who bought into Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. People like my mom, who thinks pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day, and supports keeping it illegal because she thinks that's bad for the country."
[2] "The government runs propaganda campaigns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Youth_Anti-Drug_Media_...) to convince people like your mother that drugs are the worse thing imaginable. Those people then turn around and support the government in its opposition to drugs."
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233377
[4] "So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no."?"
I don't think "Just Say No!" created the demand for drug prohibition nor do I think it is propaganda. I think for most people who push the message, Nancy Reagan included, it is a genuine and organic sentiment, consistent with Americam Puritanism. When I say my mom and others "bought in" to the message, I don't mean that government propaganda convinced them to believe something they would otherwise not. Rather, I think what you have is a group of voters with Puritan tendencies and authoritarian dispostitions who "bought in" and got behind a program that plays to those characteristics.
I think chalking it up to propaganda is short sighted, because it punts on the issue of how to convince the electorate. It makes it seem like if the propaganda went away, the drug war would go away. But the fact is that my mom and many people like her believe its the governments job to keep people from doing harmful things to themselves. They see drugs (along with alcohol and sex and a raft of other things) as something the government should regulate for the betterment of society. The culture associated with marijuana use, which is in many respects antithetical to what tjhey think is healthy for society, reinforces their belief that it should be made illegal, for people's own good.
Look, we live in a country where until recently I couldn't buy beer on Super Bowl Sunday in downtown Atlanta. A place where you can be arrested for walking down the street with a cup of beer. It's not big money and the DEA perpetuating that status quo. It's grass roots. You think the voters who passed blue laws all over the country need propaganda to decide people shouldn't be allowed to get baked?
The Drug War has been massively expensive. It isn't expensive because they hand money to drug dealers, it's expensive because money is used to manufacture prisons and operate them, money is used to buy military equipment for police forces, money is used to supply dictatorships around the world (but esp. in South America) with helicopters, US-made weapons and cash, money is spent on wars that drugs are used as a partial pretense for. This money is all spent with the same individual interests who also happen to be some of our largest political donors.
So politicians, the ones responsible for official drug messaging and for drug laws, have a spigot of cash that will be cut off if they have a nuanced opinion about drugs.
It also often helps politicians to be seen as tough on minorities (especially presidents running for a second term) and "tough on drugs" has been a stand-in for "tough on blacks" along with welfare reform. The same demographic who is becoming more pro-drug is also a lot less racist than their parents, so that message doesn't play to them anymore. I think the Drug War is starting to be seen as preying on the weak, rather than preying on the undesirable.
It's not really meaningful to put the blame on Puritanism, because there were hundreds of years between the Puritan landing and prohibition, during which time most people spent a lot of their time intoxicated on whatever they liked. Drug prohibition was initially a result of race-baiting.
>If you poll your mom and her friends, I bet you see that viewpoint pretty well-represented.
I'm nearly 40, and my mother has always been against drug prohibition as far as I can remember. Depends on your family.
>pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day
I don't know it to be a cause, but I'd say that there's probably an association. Alcohol is associated with falling, being poisoned and liver failure, fighting and domestic abuse. Both have been associated with a pleasant afternoon with friends, too.
Judging by the prescription drug market, the effects of either drug wouldn't keep us from trying to give it to children if a buck could be made.
I believe the Federal Government will only legalize pot under one of two circumstances: 1) it becomes more profitable to tax it (the theory being that it's not today) and 2) they can no longer keep the cartels under control and they become a direct security threat
See also: Iran Contra
They do get a cut. Property forfeiture, among other things. Right now I am reading Balko's "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" and McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" You'd probably be amazed. I am.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/25/the-wire-creato...
I get that he wants the whole thing to fall at once (but at the same time wants decriminalization, not legalization?), but that simply isn't something that we can accomplish in any foreseeable future, not for several more decades at least. Just getting the public to turn around on pot (something that is genuinely mild, not physically addictive, and is plainly mis-classified as Schedule I) has taken a ton of effort. Furthermore the only reason that effort has been so successful is because pot is so widely used; somewhere around half of all Americans have smoked pot at some point in their life. You don't have any sort of similar base on which to launch a publicity campaign for crack (in the specific case of crack, at least we've got the Fair Sentencing Act. Certainly a good start, but that has a hell of a long way to go).
[1] Per TFA: "Since Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, there have been almost 460,000 misdemeanor marijuana arrests. And while blacks and Hispanics make up 45% of pot smokers in New York City, they account for 86% of possession arrests." Saying that legalization of pot only helps middle class white kids is just plain wrong. It is so stunningly wrong that it seems almost maliciously so.
> As a result, "drugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and east St Louis" – an industry that employs "children, old people, people who've been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn't matter. It's the only factory that's still open. The doors are open."
I'm certainly not going to agree that that's a reason not to do what we have, but that race/poverty line point he's making isn't just about arrests.
If anything, keeping other drugs illegal while legalizing marijuana would provide a transition period for those impoverished drug dealers, a transition period that would be unavailable if the whole deal fell with one blow as he seems to desire.
Or we could fix poverty.
In reality, it is overwhelming minorities that are targetted. Legalization would stop that.
I can sort of understand government intervention for harder more addictive drugs, though it is horrendously misguided and broken (focus should be on rehabilitation), however for stuff like weed, MDMA, speed, even Ketamine or shrooms, the government has no fucking business locking people up for using, selling, or creating these drugs until they actually commit some sort of crime that affects people.
For those who are unaware, it is possible to grow hemp that does not contain the THC that gives people a high which is found in marijuana. Though I suspect most people here already know that.
In reality I expect we would let them continue to rot in jail since they were technically breaking the law at the time.
Why? If dealing pot shouldn't be a crime, why should being prepared to defend yourself with a handgun while dealing pot be a crime?
I don't understand the "illegal" qualifier. Isn't it always illegal to carry a handgun when dealing pot? Isn't having a handgun while committing a federal crime also a federal crime?
Obviously there are drug dealers who are aggressively violent, but if they haven't been caught for being aggressively violent why should they be punished as if they were? What other aspects of "innocent until proven guilty" should we do away with?
Even violent drug dealers represent a philosophical problem. Practically I don't think I'm willing to support letting them out of prison, but rationally I have some sympathy for some of them. Their involvement in the drug market shouldn't be a crime, and the violence in that profession is almost always due to the fact that it's a black market, with extremely high profit to be made and no legal protection against getting ripped off.
Their aggressive violence is not something to be condoned or accepted in society, but neither are laws that establish black markets that lead to such violence. Drug criminalization advocates claim all sorts of reasons why they're not at fault, from drug dealers being inherently evil due to bad parenting or genetics or whatever, to proximity to the criminal act and free will (no doubt legislators are further removed from the crime than the drug dealer who pulls the trigger). But who's really more at fault? The socially marginalized drug dealer from a relatively poor background who probably had poor schooling, who gets caught up in drug dealing, and who kills someone because his drug organization needs him to? Or a legislator with (supposedly) much more wisdom, who nevertheless votes to create a black market that leads to conditions where violence is commonplace?
I'm not condoning the violence. I simply think the root cause is not the drugs or the guns, or even the drug dealers themselves. Scapegoating gun-carrying drug dealers for the violence is just that... scapegoating. I think it's ultimately unproductive if we want to fix the problem.
If this were Vermont that we were talking about, then the situation would be different.
We're talking about a hypothetical ideal legal policy with regard to drugs, right? Why the return to the status quo the moment guns are in the picture?
Is that reason enough to keep them there? Isn't it better to do the right* thing at some point, than do the wrong thing forever? Should an innocent man be sentenced to death, if at some point before his extinction from this earth, we find out the truth?
Asking for forgiveness, and admitting the wrong had been done, is and will always be, the first step towards rectifying injustice.
<rant>
* Marijuana has never, from its physical effects, killed any one. It is one of the safest substances for humans to ingest on the planet. You would die from drinking too much water before you could kill yourself from a smoking/eating pot (long term smoking effects not included).
For those who insist on the "moral" cough bullshit cough perspective: People do not become menaces, belligerent, and or violent towards their families smoking weed. People don't black out and wake up wondering what happened. For alcohol, the same cannot be said. Yet, marijuana is immoral? Let me hopefully be the last to say, with a smile, fuck you and fuck that :)
Furthermore, as is the case, well in my opinion, with all drugs they are at most: medical problems, not criminal. The criminal system is anti-rehabilitation; and as a result; ensures the propagation of the problem and not the solution.
</rant>
It is one of the safest substances for humans to ingest on the planet.... (long term smoking effects not included).
I have yet to read a paper that actually shows smoking marijuana has or does not have adverse effects long term.
So I say it's trivial at best.
(Note: Seattle is in King county)
It's also politically hard enough to make people approve full MJ legalization, without having to fight the ghost of a wide-scale amnesty that would likely threaten deeper social repercussions.
In practice, a sort of low-scale amnesty for smaller infractions would likely have widespread support, even just to clean up personal records.
Now, that offense no longer exists. There have been attempts to pardon Alan Turing, as yet unsuccessful.
However, I feel it can be sensibly argued that what truly conveys justice is the retroactive abolishment of the crime - that he would be, tragically posthumously, of an untarnished record.
Ought not such be justly applied in these circumstances also?
It would be grown by government approved vendors and taxed. Private growing would likely be illegal. Sales by non-government approved vendors would likely be illegal. I'm certain the government would allow allow a single FDA approved variety: you wouldn't see the higher powered varieties or growing techniques. It would more highly regulated than cigarettes or alcohol. I have no clue about the number of how all this would work out, but it could be more expensive than it is now.
If you get caught with a cheaper variety, or more powerful variety, etc, then what? Probably the same thing that happens today. After all, you can get arrested for carrying around prescription drugs that aren't properly labeled; you'd probably see the same thing with government marijuana. Moreover, you can then be charged with tax evasion.
4th paragraph: under my proposal, only adults age 21 and over would be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana – which would be grown, processed, and sold by government-licensed businesses for recreational or medicinal purposes.
As written, this seems to imply those licenses won't be issue arbitrarily to individuals.
I believe Colorado has commercial growers obtain a license as well, though I cannot say that for sure.
edit - on the other hand, after reading zevyoura's post, evidently I may be talking rubbish.
Colorado has the most strictly regulated system anywhere, including the ability to trace all retail sales back to the plant they were grown on, 24 hour video surveillance of all legal growers, and background checks that should eliminate most of the criminal element in the trade (which is a huge problem in California).
That's how I see this happening, and what makes the most sense to me.
The next thing I'm also very, very upset with is the still illegal nature of hormonal supplementation. People say free the weed? I say free the testosterone and hgh. If anything will give people longer, healthier and more productive lives, it is those.
Note: I know TRT and HRT are becoming big business in the US, but it is still quite difficult to actually get these without the right insurance.
I think this plan is discriminatory.
"under my proposal, only adults age 21 and over would be allowed to possess up to one ounce of marijuana"
Why shouldn't 18-20 year olds have the right to blaze up? Those are the prime toking years.
EDIT: From last time we talked about this, some Google Scholar links--
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890856709....
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/180/3/216.short
http://www.bmj.com/content/325/7374/1195.1.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395607....
Note, though, that these are pretty inconclusive as far as causality goes.
And, as a bonus, here is a debunking of a similar, and similarly widely touted study that made it into the Lancet. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19560900
The point is: The whole purpose of these heavily funded studies is to penetrate mainstream journals. They were hyped in the mainstream press with the full weight of government behind the press blitz.
Not really, I prefer drinking. ...coincidentally, the legal age for doing that is 21. How discriminatory.
Check out the pro-legalization ads that ran in Washington last year when we successfully passed a MJ legalization initiative: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xja72pL-ZEM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...
Coincidentally, this weekend is Hempfest here in Seattle. The Seattle PD is on hand passing out Doritos and literature on how to stay compliant with our state laws: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/15/us/seattle-police-doritos-...
As for the age limit, take it step by step. Insisting on a perfect solution immediately accomplishes nothing except to delay any solution.
Marijuana is safer than cigarettes and alcohol but it is hardly harmless and we definitely don't know enough about its effect on the brain especially amongst younger users. But of course you will often see such concerns dismissed.
And few people are seriously proposing that we regulated it less than alcohol and cigarettes, so where exactly is the irrational bias?
It doesn't have to be magical hippy juice to legalize it, being safer than alcohol or tobacco is reason enough to legalize it. Hell, the clear racial motivations for the initial banning and the continuation of it are reason enough to legalize it.
True but they at least have facts ready to support their biases. ;)
So many nerds assume they're above confirmation bias without considering the sophistication effect.
I'm a great deal more worried about tobacco and alcohol binging in youths, or in the privacy nonsense and the social stuff, then I am about some weed.
If you really want to argue "Think of the children!" look at Portugal's decriminalization for the past decade, and see if they have any numbers for you. Stop scaremongering.
If we say that legalization is rational and its irrational emotional concerns that keep it illegal, it would make some sense, right?
See, when I talk face to face to people who are against it, they usually accept all the logic to legalize it, then say something like, "well, yes, but I just don't like the idea". They then shut down.
So, I do think there is something in it. Not universally, but I reckon there is a correlation.
[citation needed]
The collapse of the Roman Empire was by most accounts a setback, as was the the Black Death and two brutal world wars (though even after those we resisted the temptation of widespread nuclear, chemical or biological warfare). It really is quite difficult to find broadly negative trends. Even the loss of the Roman Empire becomes a temporary setback if you zoom your timeline out more. The Romans were doing better then the Babylonians (well, some of them were at least), and we are doing better than they were at their height.
Things get better because that is what humans do; we stand on the shoulders of giants. Stubborn incremental improvement.
PS I rarely downvote anyone to spite them solely for their opinion.
http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/
See "2.) Private Prisons Corporations"
Lobbying is legalized corruption, in most cases.
It's obvious that we need to get rid of it if we want to fix the country.
without ridiculously stiff penalties for drug crimes, the sky-high premium placed on the drugs themselves would be unreasonable. a higher price on street drugs leads to a similar near-linear relationship with the amount of USD exported outside the US. in this way "the war on drugs" is actually a mechanism to increase demand and circulation of the USD.
softening the penalties for drug "crimes" makes a lot of sense, just look at portugal and other areas that have decriminalized/legalized possession of small amounts of drugs. i hope the US continues along the current vector of softening its approach with drug "crimes".
I am worried about commercialization of it. Look at the tobacco industry and its lies.
Why? To give the IQ ≤ 100 voters something scary but harmless to criminalize. We know what happens when you criminalize pot, and it ain't that bad.
Create a punishment vacuum and they will cook up some mad new criminalization scheme, as surely as the dog returns to its vomit. The FSM only knows what insanity they will foist on us. Maybe they'll recriminalize condoms, it got so many votes last time. Inflation busting is always popular too, nearly made FDR president for life.