58 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana | Hacker News Reader

58 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana

gallup.com

69 pointsambler037 comments

Even though I don't touch drugs (besides caffeine, duh) I tend to fall into the "legalize everything" category --

http://www.economist.com/node/13237193

My general stance is pretty much aligned with the above article; that drugs should have never fallen under a crime and punishment policy, but rather all focus should have been placed on public health policy. While I'm not pretending for a second that drugs don't ruin lives and families, it's only doubling the damage to criminalize these people's choices with little chance for rehabilitation.

This isn't even touching the political issues covered in the wonderful documentary The House I Live In

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/

That link (economist.com) is behind a paywall. Is there another link I can read?

Google: "How to stop the drug wars - The Economist"

Interesting... I googled that, opened the exact same link and it worked? I suppose The Economist checks the referrer header or something?

Yes.

Yep. You can also use incognito mode to follow the link, or even just copy paste the url

That seems to be becoming the standard model of how to operate a paywall - AFAIK the New York Times pioneered it and now everyone does it.

I couldn't believe the other day when I was playing GTA 5 and it said "You can now buy properties" and flashed a medical marijuana dispensary on the screen. I was stoked! Makes the world even more realistic.

In my home state, Michigan, if you drive around there are billboards for "The Best OG Kush" and "Grow The Best OG Kush" also signs for pot doctors everywhere! 2 certs for $100! Anyways, what I always tell people is stop reading the news and just go about your business. In my world, and the world of the people I am around marijuana is more than legal, it is accepted. I have made a lot of pro pot comments on HN as I sit here smoking a joint (totally legal btw, the doctor said I should keep using for the next 75 years!), this is the first time where I just feel like the pot people have won. It's harmless and people are actually accepting that. Now I just hope the police do.

Its going to be important for the US to figure out the marijuana. More states are legalizing for medical every year and it has caused havoc on local governments trying to figure out exactly what rules and laws are determined to mean. Better for states to step up and legalize it, but it is time.

Pot, like gay marriage, has simply been a demographic matter of waiting for enough stuck up old people to finally die that the preponderance of opinion is in favor of it. When you're old, statistically speaking, people younger than you will be waiting for you to shuffle off, too.

Sure, whole classes of problems will disappear as old people die.

But we may not need to wait for grannie and her bridge club to die for this one; TFA notes that support for full-blown legal weed is up 14% in people over 65 since 2011.

Note that the average life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years old. 79 minus 65 is 14 years. So in two years, we can expect that 2/14ths of the population over 65 will have died, or ~14% of that population. A 14% increase in the population over 65 in favor of legalization in two years does not conflict with the notion that this is a demographic issue.

Life expectancy for someone who is 65 years old is actually 82.5 or 85.2 years (depends on gender) [1]. You are making a very common mistake by using life expectancy for someone born today -- that's a very different thing.

[1] http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

I was hoping someone would correct me on that. So 84-65 = 19 years, and 2/19 = 10.5% predicted population churn in two years. 14% is 3.5%/10.5%, or 33% higher than the demographic factor alone would predict.

Your calculations assume nobody lives past the age of 84. You may want to rethink that.

It assumes that the average person aged 65 will live to 84, meaning as many will die before as after.

No. It is a prediction that someone who is 65 will live on average another 19 years to age 84. It does not assume "as many will die before as after." The wikipedia article on life expectancy is actually quite good, if you are interested in learning more.

If the definition of average used by life expectancy is the median, then yes, by definition as many will die before as die after.

I hope nobody is actually redefining the word "average" to mean median, because that would confuse all I thought I knew about statistics.

Is there a less allegedly ambiguous term for the "traditional" definition of average, that is, the sum of many measurements of the same characteristic, divided by the number of elements measured?

Mean, surely?

Very true. Thank you.

Average can refer to any of the common measures of central tendency, as Wikipedia calls them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average#Harmonic_mean

Average intelligence, for example, refers to median intelligence (equivalent to an IQ of 100). Mean intelligence, however, is likely the same as median intelligence due to its normal distribution.

I'm way too stoned to follow this conversation...

Not quite: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

That can still be a demographic effect. The people over 65 today are not the same people who were over 65 two years ago.

The correct way to control these statistics is by birth-year cohort, not age.

my father said that during the 60s and 70s he was sure that it'd only be a few years till pot was legalized...yet here we are...

It's kinda sad that while the US seems to be more and more open to the idea of legalised marihuana, here in the Netherlands we are slowly moving in the opposite direction. This might also have something to do with the EU: for example Franch citizens sometimes travel to the Netherlands to buy hash or weed. France doesn't like this, so recently our so-called coffee-shops[0] have been required to ask for identification and it's not allowed to sell hash & weed to foreigners. So what happens now is the weed is being sold on the streets buy Dutch citizens to foreigners - the new laws actually caused an increase in criminal activity.

Actually our laws are rather weird: a coffee-shop may sell hash or weed, but may not buy it - we still allow them to buy it, but I guess it has to be from some illegal sources since in the Netherlands we are allowed to grow a few plants for private consumption only.

Also, several years ago a French girl committed suicide in Amsterdam while under the influence of magic mushrooms[1]. Because of these kinds of incidents with foreigners magic mushrooms became illegal. There is still a legal alternative of course, "magic truffles", but it's saddening to see these kinds of changes in my country.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_coffee_shop

[1]: http://www.simplyamsterdam.nl/news/French_tourist_in_Amsterd...

On the positive side, if your country is rejecting money from tourism: they should allow a huge beerfest to regain their losses. If enough foreigners come you would have enough to repair streets or whatever. If they don't do this: they want less tourism, they don't like intoxicated people (then they don't like extra revenue for the police), they can't use money efficiently, or they're striving to be a sober country. I believe their whole point was to increase criminality because they're not receiving XX,XXX/ year for each person they inprison. Alternatively, they may actually want to speed the process of Bitcoin adoptation.

From Italy, I always looked at the Netherland's position on drugs as the way forward. Really hope the change opinion that is happening in the US will also happen all over Europe soon (as it did in Portugal, and with great results, IIRC)

I always looked at the .nl laws as sort of Italian in that it's illegal, but an eye is closed:-) I think it's best to have things legal and out in the open, and regulated.

It looks like it is actually legal for coffee shops to sell, but not to buy and produce...

But I agree, much better to make a clear choice. At least if possible.

So....while doing some research for a friend going through chemo for her recurring cervical cancer, I found myself watching this documentary on YouTube about GW Pharmaceuticals Cannabis Labs UK BBC Tour ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzFiC4UZqE ). They develop cannabinoid-based therapeutics (SATIVEX) and work with the world's leading Cannabinoid scientists in 7 Universities: Aberdeen, Hebrew, Buckingham, Reading, Complutense, Naples Frederico II & Insubria and The Institute of Biomolecular of the National Research Council, Italy.

I did more research on the company (this was around May 2013) and found out that their IPO just launched (ticker symbol: GWPH). I bought shares at around $8 a share. Today, 6 months later, their shares are trading at $29 a share.

I advise everyone to stop smoking and research the options on vaporising out there. There are good portable products from $50 upward. It is much better for your lungs than inhaling (potentially carcinogenic) combustion products such as tar, plus you use less plant material to achieve the same effect.

This is true for both tobacco and cannabis, though I can't help but tell you that nicotine is a really nasty toxin[0], that you should avoid at all cost.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Toxicology

I wonder what the percentage will have to be before it's legalised? 70%, 80%, 90%?

This is about so much more than folks getting high. This is about finally winding down the disastrous War on Drugs. For the first time, I feel like the end might finally be in sight.

Wait until their kids got their hands on it.

The kids might eat all their dinner and take a nap. That would be awful.

I'd rather my kid had got their hands on that than a bottle of gin and ended up in hospital with a stomach pump.

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