I understand that the end game is legalization. However, does the medical designation move the debate in that direction properly? It would seem to me that the desired state is that it become legal for recreational use - similar to alcohol. Would users be satisfied if the legalization comes with the caveat that it is only for medical use, with all of the attendant game playing that is currently present? Strategically, by going down the medical path, isn’t it going to be harder to steer in the direction of recreational use being legal? What is the expectation, that everyone is just going to vote “Yes” and then the next day all of the dispensaries become “bars” and everyone just pretends the past didn’t happen?
A big alleged reason behind the illegitimacy of weed is serving “no useful medical purpose” or somesuch.
Even though medical MJ is pretty clearly aimed at ultimate recreational legalization, this intermediate step at least recognizes that the drug can have notable positive medicinal effects, as compared with its negative side-effects.
Lots of regular potsmokers are self-medicating; it’s useful for depression, anxiety (social or otherwise), and or course the usual plethora of pain-management and appetite-enhancing effects. I used to be a very heavy user, and for many of my friends pot or antidepressants/benzos was an either/or sort of proposition.
Honestly the limits on possession for medical use are absurdly high (consuming even 1/8th of an ounce would be a really smokey day) and there’s really no reason why ‘patients’ need to be carrying around quaps (quarter-pound) of the stuff. I don’t know a single green-card holder who isn’t diverting most of his product into the black market and using the legal right to possess as a way to reduce the risk of distribution.
It’s political poison though and I think you’re all being hugely optimistic about the status of legalization. I think we’ll see something similar to gay-marriage, since public opinion can vary drastically from state to state. What would get me the equivalent of a traffic ticket here in Oregon would send me to jail in Texas. It’s political poison and pushed by a very marginalized population (we could probably debate whether Teh Gays or The Bros are less popular) which means progress will be slow, agonizing, and patchy.
My prediction; spotty state level decriminalization/medical legalization starting on the west coast, then the east, but nobody’s getting truly legal pot for at least two decades. It won’t be legalized nationally in our lifetimes.
ETA: Are you at all nervous about having your name on a big “list of pot smokers” database somewhere?
Once again, I think you’re being wildly optimistic. The only people who support legalization are potheads, ex-potheads, and a minority of principled pseudo-libertarians.
There’s just really no compelling reason for the majority of the population to care about whether weed’s illegal or not since they don’t use it. My (I’m 25) and the subsequent generation has a much different mentality about marijuana, but there’s a lot more resistance to legalization, than support for it.
Legal pot for a long time is going to take the form of legally-grey medical distributions from ‘doctors’ you find in the back of magazines. Locally we’ve started seeing late-night commercials for green-card providers. Every so often somebody’s going to do something too blatantly illegal and get hammered down and damage the whole process. Keep in mind I live in Portland, OR where I can and have walked through crowded park-blocks smoking a spliff without any particular concern.
I live in one of the most pot-friendly, liberal hippie douchebag parts of the entire country, and I still don’t see it happening. We have to wait for the last few generations to die off first, and that’s going to take a while.
A proposed state law protecting MMJ users from losing their jobs this way has made it through the initial committee process. This happened within the last week or so, so at the moment I think the answer is still “almost certainly not”.
I think the situation we have in California is really a kind of legalization. Yes, the law is fairly lax in the sense that would-be patients need not demonstrate conclusively that they have a terminal condition, nor one definitely known to cause great pain. On the other hand, the system of dispensaries provides a mechanism for regulating the market in a way that absolute prohibition does not. From the point of view of one who has obtained a card and wants to buy pot, it’s not that different from the way some states require most kinds of alcohol to be bought at special stores where they don’t sell anything else.
Given this situation, I have to wonder how hard it was to get a medicinal liquor prescription during the prohibition of alcohol. I suspect it wasn’t too difficult. The greatest concern for Dry advocates was the saloon, and later the speakeasy; alcohol sold by pharmacists for medicinal use was less of an issue.
Good cover, better than “Dave’s not here”
I think that the laxer the law the better. This would be a good way to see the effects of MJ use on the population, and when they see there is no “Reefer Madness” they may decide to legalize and make some money from it.
This may be better suited to it’s own thread but around here most of our drug problems stem from the legal stuff. We are losing kids every day to prescription medication addiction. The shopping mall that my friends music store is in has a Doctors office that has a methodone clinic. The steady stream of people trying to get clean of prescription meds is disgusting.
No really! There was a poster named Dave’s Not Here who turned out to be a sock, and we banned both the sock and the original account quite recently. As most of you know we don’t normally announce or explain sock bannings, but in this case I thought an exception was in order.
California was one of the first states to prohibit cannabis a few years before WWI. Not long ago, I took advantage of my academic access to the complete archives of the Los Angeles Times to research this. There is a different plant called “loco-weed”*, which contains belladonna-type alkaloids. These have occasionally been consumed by people looking to get high, and they will indeed get you high but they can also get you dead. These compounds are far more toxic and far more unpredictable in their effects.
From reviewing some of the Times articles from that era, it almost seems as if some writers were getting marijuana mixed up with jimsonweed. An early article, years before the prohibition warns about “deadly” plants from Mexico, and distinguishes between marijuana and loco-weed. Later, MJ itself gets the name loco-weed, and I’m sure that if you stopped people on the street to ask what they thought the word “loco-weed” meant, most of them would say it’s a cowboy’s term for marijuana.
Another interesting fact was that in the early days of the prohibition it was the Board of Pharmacy that ran the busts, rather than a division of the police force.
*IIRC this plant is known as jimsonweed.
I got it just to make my life easier. I would smoke regardless but it opened my options and lowered my liability.
Yes the shops were great because the people really knew what they were talking about if you needed something to sleep they knew what would work if you needed soething that wouldnt mess with your memory to much they had that too. It is like going wine tasting.
Do you think the difference in effects between strains is a real phenomenon, or just the “power of suggestion”? I’ve seen some skeptics say that even the alleged difference between indica and sativa strains is based more on user expectation than any actual difference in the composition of the plant.
Not having had the opportunity to perform a double-blind experiment, I’m not sure…
A lot of it probably is user suggestion but I do beleive I notice a real differenece. It is not the same as alcohol, their is not just one chemical. THC is the most well known but their are many other canaboids that take part as well. In fact the place I shop at lists the % of the top 3 chemicals, THC, and the other two i dont remember
I’ve got a card as well here in Colorado, I’m going to smoke for anxiety anyway, now I REALLY have lowered anxiety levels, it’s wonderful. If you have a great caregiver, he will deliver to your home, the dispensaries are ok. I can tell you that if something isn’t selling they will rename it though, it’s business. Right now they are calling everything lemon something whether it is Lemon Haze or not, just because that’s the hip strain right now.
And I can tell differences between indic a and saliva, but the strains just tend to have different tastes to me rather than various feelings. I’m still a newbie at having so many amazing choices, though.
I watched a little BBC program about cannabis not too long ago. It didn’t strike me as the most scientific or comprehensive treatment of the subject, but it did spend some time with a researcher studying the effects of cannabis that has been allowed to “ripen” longer, and allowed to go to seed.
The anecdotal suggestion was that users who are prone to paranoia or psychosis tended to experience more negative side effects from the most popular form of cannabis, which is seedless females harvested at peak THC content.
Cannabis that was allowed to go to seed and more fully develop before harvesting, as well as being properly cured for a long enough time, had significantly higher levels of other cannabinoids in proportion to THC, and patients could benefit from the desired effects, without the negative paranoia-causing side effects.
It seems there is a small percent of people with certain potential mental health issues who probably shouldn’t mess around with pot. But, with more research even they may be able to enjoy some of pot’s benefits without negative side effects.
I once flew cross country and had my sea bag searched by the TSA. It was a 60-70 lb. piece of luggage packed vertically. In about the center was my tool bag surrounded by clothes. I had a canister of Zippo lighter fluid in it which was confiscated. In the side pouch of the tool bag was a note from the TSA stating that they had seized my lighter fluid because it was a banned substance. The only other thing in that pouch was my unmolested sack of weed. This was post-911 but YMMV.
It seems like lots of jobs test for drugs these days. Particularly, menial retail jobs with employers that have no business caring whether or not their employees drink and smoke on their off-hours.
My question is, what happens if you’re drug-tested for, say, a work-related injury that’s clearly not your fault (say a box falls on your head). You come up positive for marijuana, but you have the card. Do you still lose your job?