Americas zealous crackdown on drugs is the reason that they are impossible to get.
Prohibition does not work unless the aim is to develop a police force and a criminal class. It does those things well. Graft, and crime = prohibition.
In places that have relaxed weed laws ,they have a smaller percentage of their population using.
I think a huge factor, also, is employee drug testing. We’ve discussed this here before, and granted every employer doesn’t do it, but it is widespread however you look at it. It’s always struck me as an extremely intrusive foray into people’s personal lives. I don’t have as much of an issue with testing workers in safety-critical jobs, but I think it’s too much to test aspiring bag-boys at the supermarket, or to test an established employee because of a mistake at the office, like misfiling a letter. Let’s face it–it’s extremely hard for the police to catch you quietly using marijuana in your home, and it would be equally difficult to make a conviction stick The law against it is on the books and in force, but if the user is discrete about it and isn’t otherwise a lawbreaker, the chance of getting caught is minimal. On the other hand, failing an employer drug test could mean loss of livelihood. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Therefore, in my opinion, employers who test for drug use have become Drug Enforcement Partner Number One, and I find the idea of law enforcement duty falling into the hands of private entities, untrammeled by any Constitutional or procedural restrictions.
And, ideally, a smaller percentage of their population employed as police officers.
More police officers isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if they can prevent crimes in the first place. Stopping a crime in progress can mean the prevention of violence and theft, and the perpetrator winds up being convicted for attempts rather than completed crimes, meaning a shorter prison sentence. Shorter sentences for criminals is a good thing, in my opinion, if it’s because the intended crime was stopped before it could be done. Shorter prison sentences also mean we don’t need as many prisons.
More cops can be a good thing, and definitely better than more prisons.
Additionally, if it were legal, I don’t think we would see a monsterous increase in the use of it…I think the same people who smoke it now will smoke it after legalization. Heck people smoke it now like it’s legal. Not right out in public necessarily [Boulder, Vermont, Alaska it’s a little easier] but people won’t all rush out to smoke it just because it’s legal. You may have the occasional friday night toker buy some for friday night’s after dinner…but the same number of people who walk around stoned in public now, won’t increase that much.
A friend of mine is putting an addition on and the guy doing it came highly recommended. He’s a master carpenter who does very nice detail work on crown mouldings, spiral staircases, really fine wood work… As he is building a barn/office with exposed beams etc…etc… This carpenter smokes everyday. Like he’s simply smoking a cig…He only has one but he does it while talking to other contractors and inspectors and no one says a word. I asked my buddy about it and he said, "*that’s just Andy… that’s just the way he is. Since high school he’s grown and smoked his own weed daily…and he’s what? 45? *
:shruggs:
I think people expect a drastic change if marijuana is made legal…I don’t think it will change much at all.
Really weed is just a silly drug. It makes you act silly and really lazy. It’s probably several orders of magnitude safer than alcohol. And you know what? If they legalized it and made the “smoking age” 21, you’d see LESS kids smoking rather than more. Actually if they made the “smoking age” 18 instead of 21 you’d see far fewer kids under 18 smoking than if it were at 21. Think about it.
Would I still be worried about messing with a dealer if i could get it legally at a store? Of course not. The entire system would disappear instantly. It’s simply not going to exist anymore. I say this as a stoner in highschool. I didn’t drink often because it was difficult. You have to find someone to buy it for you. Either you get someone older, or make a fake ID, both of those have risks. Of course high school kids did drink, but it was normally a special occasion type thing. Mainly at parties. I smoked weed every day because it was easy to get.
It certainly should be legalized, but I don’t expect it to ever happen for a long time. I don’t know anyone who thinks weed is a serious drug. We do a great disservice telling children that all drugs are equal. In fact it probably does more damage than good, this idea. If kids are told that marijuana is so bad all their lives and then try it, what are they supposed to think? “The Man” is full of shit, and all drugs must be okay. We should treat teenagers with a bit more respect than telling them that “all drugs are bad” That’s simply not the case.
But far be it from me to ask that we enact rational laws based on confirmed evidence.
I think marijuana legalization has already begun. It’s just going to happen slooooooowwwwwly. Penalties have been drastically reduced from what they were a few decades ago. A lot of states consider themselves “decriminalized” now; they give you a fine and a suspended jail sentence whereas in the past it was straight to the slammer. Medical marijuana is getting more popular.
I think local governments will start prosecuting it less and less aggresively and eventually start ignoring it. A lot of cops in more liberal/progressive areas already just take it away or make you stomp on it now instead of writing a ticket or sending you to jail. Eventually it will be legal in practice and someone will say, let’s go ahead and make it legal on paper, and no one will care.
But, there will never be a time when we go to bed one night and pot is illegal, and we wake up the next morning and it’s legal. It won’t happen instantly like that.
I give this whole process about 3 more decades to play out.
Within limits, but I’d rather not live in a police state. It becomes particularly troublesome when all those extra cops seem to devote themselves more to revenue generation (via ticketing and drug seizures) than to addressing serious crimes.
I dunno; Alaska was famous for tolerating small amounts of marijuana grown for personal use, and now they’ve banned it. The medical marijuana people are getting persecuted by the Feds, and local efforts to decriminalize get nullified by federal preemption. You can still do hard time in prison for simple possession. And as pointed out upthread, drug testing has turned into a vast system for narcing out users.
I wonder if marijuana legalization would take what it took to end Prohibition: a depression severe enough that the government decided that it needed to let people find what enjoyment they could.
See my post above about employee rules. They could legalize it tomorrow, but I doubt very much that employers who test for it will stop doing so.
Rising income tax revenue is what made giving up alcohol taxes feasible. Falling income tax revenue is what made politicians suddenly realize that prohibition didn’t work.
With an economic collapse looming (and the War on Terror assuming many of the more nefarious duties of the War on Drugs), I wouldn’t be surprised if marijuana was legalized fairly soon.
Help me out here. The proposed law would decriminalize possession (below 100 grams) at the federal level. What, if any, impact would its passage have?
I’m assuming that it is very rare, if ever, that people are prosecuted by the feds for small possession. I also assume that the issue would roll down to the states, who may not change their laws or level of enforcement one bit. Clearly, the states haven’t all felt compelled to align their marijuana laws with the feds anyway.
I can understand the “slippery slope” argument that it would be the first step toward legalization, public acceptance and all, but am I missing something about what direct impact federal decriminalization would have?
Are you serious? I can’t even begin to list the number of things that I’ve needlessly purchased while stoned. If anything it would stimulate the economy. And people can definitely be good workers and be high all the time also. Weed doesn’t have a universal effect on people. It is very different from person to person, and also from weed to weed. Some of it gives you a really up high that motivates you to do stuff, and some of it makes you want to just stay put and not move. But there are no hard and fast rules.
Sadly, you know this, and I know this, but the people who choose the people who write the laws don’t know this, or elect to pretend not to. People will act in accordance to what they believe is true, even when it’s not. As long as a significant number of people believe marijuana to be a threat to our culture it will stay illegal, and employers will continue testing and firing users.
I’ve never understood this. If it’s legal, it’s legal.
100 grams?
It’s legal for me to have a case of beer. How about five or ten? It might make sense to limit the amount of legal substances you can have because of taxes and resale to the underage.
But MJ? Before the GOV can limit how much you can have, they need to place restrictions on SOMETHING to explain why you can only own so much.
Guns are regulated to a degree, but I can own zero, one or a hundred. I can sell them if I want.
Will the GOV make it legal or not? I don’t think there should be a grey area about this unless they want to tax it like alcohol and tobacco.
Based on what you say: is it possible that legalizing weed, and thus making it harder to get, would lead to more teens doing harder drugs which are still illegal and easy to obtain?
My thoughts on this are that legalizing weed would have the effect of driving some sellers of illegal drugs out of business, making those drugs that are still illegal harder to get.
Well, about 10% of Americans live in a jurisdiction, California, where weed is indeed de facto legal. Technically, it is only legal for “medical” purposes, but many doctors are happy to approve it based on nebulous psychological symptoms. There was an excellent article about this in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago. Once you have your doc’s note, you can go to any of a number of stores and buy it over-the-counter, choosing from a wide variety of different strains as well as edible forms. As long as you have your medical note on you, you can walk around smoking in public. The DEA is not happy about it, and the cops and courts may still hassle you in more conservative areas, so your risk of going to jail for being a pothead is not QUITE zero, but in the large cities where most Californians live, it’s basically Amsterdam.
Very few of my pot-smoking friends in California have even bothered to get medical IDs, since a side effect of this huge basically-legal market has been to increase the availability and decrease the price of good stuff on the illegal market.
What all this means for the future of the rest of the country is unclear to me. On the one hand, we have a huge part of the country where de facto legalization hasn’t led to any obvious negative consequences.
On the other hand, although the current state of affairs is exactly what anyone who read the text of the proposition which passed in 1996 could have predicted, it’s a far cry from what someone who only casually followed the debate about that proposition might have predicted. The arguments in favor focused on people with AIDS and cancer, not surfer dudes with “insomnia and anxiety” (to be clear, I am personally all in favor of adults being able to toke up to their heart’s content). So, there may be some backlash against the medical marijuana movement for delivering something other than what they implied.
My guess is that, although I am not sure about the pace, the genie is not going back in the bottle, and cannabis will come to be increasingly tolerated and eventually legalized. Most likely there will be a lengthy period where it is not technically legal, but very few people are actually getting busted, and there will be considerable regional variation in the pace of the change.
Hey, that’s actually a good point! Perhaps the first sensible argument against legalizing THC products.
No, not anytime soon. Why? Big time SuperNational Capitalism does not want to lose a cheap labour pool, if our youth “turn on, tune in, & drop out”.
Still, I read that George Soros is a proponent of decriminalization, and has put his weight behind this movement. For the record, he’s NEVER lost a cause which he has endorsed.