It's official - California's gone to pot.

Government: "OMG think of the children!"

...ten minutes later after the tobacco industry lobbies for only 'inspected and regulated' marijuana to be available for sale through federally-licensed distributors

Government: "It's a really great idea!"

California tends to lead the rest of the country (and the world) in technical and cultural trends. It's not as though nobody else smokes weed.

Marijuana is probably bad stuff overall, and it's far more potent than it used to be. Expect car crashes and psychosis and school dropouts. Old-fashioned concepts of public health seem to have lost ground to libertarian ideas of personal freedom.

Relevant:

how is that different than alcohol?

the prohibition worked great /s

"historical reasons"

What nonsense.

What's different is that we could have kept weed illegal, and we didn't.

Den tirsdag den 2. januar 2018 kl. 19.39.14 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

so again, how is that different than alcohol?

How come? Don't Real Americans know how to just say no?

I drink alcohol for the flavor, and stop drinking to avoid getting high. That's quite different from why people take drugs.

You're in the minority. The alcohol industry firmly follows the "80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers" rule. Statistically, around 80% of Americans are teetotalers (maybe four drinks a month or less), 10% of Americans drink four or five drinks a week, and the last

Well, minority majority I should say. But people who buy enough alcohol to be statistically relevant from a profits perspective aren't drinking for the taste.

So 10% vs 100% isn't a significant difference.

We couldn't reasonably make alcohol illegal.

Proposing a moral equivalence doesn't change the fact that legalizing marajuana is going to hurt people, especially young people.

It's sad how many human appetites are being exploited at industrial levels, with harmful results.

What I meant was that the alcohol industry doesn't on the whole care about the reasons people drink or don't drink, they're in it to make money. And the reason they make any money worth continuing the enterprise is off of addiction, same as the sale of any drug (except for perhaps marijuana where it's unclear how physically addictive it is.) Not because people enjoy the taste.

If alcohol addiction ended tomorrow most major brewers would be definitively out of business.

And while alcohol is fundamentally different in that it's purpose to most people is not to get high, pot is fundamentally equivalent to heroin and meth in that sense. Are we going to legalize those? Or just cocaine? They've already made pot more potent, or so I've heard, so how far does it have to be improved before it should not be legal? Obviously making the whole world smell like a skunk isn't far enough.

Which has nothing to do with whether or not it should be legal. Video games can be addictive but the reason we don't consider outlawing them has nothing to do with corporate profits. It has to do with most people who play games not doing so to the point where they loose their jobs and families. Obviously you consider corporate profits to be a crime.

Pot is way, way more powerful than it used to be, factor of 10 roughly, and the wholesale price has dropped by a factor of about three in the last year or so. It's being grown and sold in huge quantities now.

The folks up in Humbolt are generally not happy about legalization. It will wreck their profits.

I don't think so. Some people sell cheap vodka by the gallon, to addicts, but there are lots of vintners and brewers and distillers that make expensive stuff where the taste matters. Not many alkies are going to kill themselves with Roederer Crystal or Chimay or Ron Zacapa

2. I don't think the average Bud Lite drinker is an alcaholic.