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

I made no value judgment on whether alcohol "should be" illegal, or shouldn't be. The fact is that it is and it's unlikely to be any different so it's not really worth debating the facts on the ground.

But another fact on the ground is that it's a psychoactive addictive chemical like many others; the big distilleries make the profits that they do on selling it primarily due to its addictive properties, and it seems pretty cynical to me to say "Here's this stuff that we need you to be addicted to to pay for the size of the salaries we have, but just use it responsibly and don't get addicted to it, the moral failing is on you!"

It's another one of those privatize-the-profits-socialize-the-costs situations that America holds dear.

The video game "addiction" thing isn't a good analogy, apples to oranges comparison. Video games aren't physiologically addictive in the way ethanol is. People don't end up in the ICU under heavy sedation to combat the risk of life-threatening seizures after withdrawal from several months of heavy video game use.

Sure, but most of the profits aren't at the high end. There's not enough volume. Budweiser is a $30 billion market cap company, AFAIK it doesn't have some ultra-premium craft beer line that costs $12 for a 24-ounce bottle (and there are definitely local craft beers that cost that.)

Why else in God's name would anyone drink that swill?! It sure ain't for the taste!

Libertarianism reminds me of one of Ayn Rand's novels - just about everyone in the story is a stock character who's dumb/stupid/evil/manipulative/consumed by jealousy/power mad/otherwise terrible except the noble, Godlike hero and his fictional girlfriend.

Pretty soon America will be called the stoned country.

Marijuana isn't safer than alcohol.

Andy

Den tirsdag den 2. januar 2018 kl. 20.58.26 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

I'm sure the criminals that are losing they state sponsored monopoly on providing weed thinks the same

Because we have one huge problem does it mean we need another?

Actually, it did. Alcohol consumption went *way* down during Prohibition.

No, he isn't. You're lying (something you lefties are really good at) with statistics.

I hear a lot of people like cocaine because it smells good

Den tirsdag den 2. januar 2018 kl. 23.49.15 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@notreal.com:

criminalizing a huge number of regular people for wanting to smoke a plant and criminals making gigantic off the books profit selling isn't a huge problem?

at least the official consumption went down, the rest is just speculation

Typical of your lies.

Hmm, profit or ruined lives. That's a toughie.

No, it really isn't. Do some research. Most didn't imbibe at all.

Why? People smoked this stuff before, and will continue to do so. People drove under the influence of pot before, and will do so again, just as they do with alcohol.

The difference is that now it is legal - that means it will be better regulated (less likelihood of a batch being surprisingly strong and therefore dangerous), and taxed (profit to the state, not to drug dealers). Removing the criminal aspect of it reduces crime. Removing the illegality means it is becomes acceptable to talk about it officially - you can tell your doctor you smoke it when he/she asks "are you taking any medication?", you can report a crime to the police without fear of them arresting you for smoking pot. And it makes the step from pot to harder drugs much bigger than it used to be.

The risk is that some people who previously did not use marijuana will now be tempted to start. And while it is /usually/ not a bad drug (with fewer health problems than getting similar levels of "high" from alcohol), it is sometimes very bad - psychosis can occur on the first try, and addiction is always a risk.

Legalising pot is a balance of risks and benefits. In California the marijuana usage was already high - so the risks are relatively low compared to countries or states where it is currently rarer.

Lots of people drink alcohol for the effect of the drug. And lots of people take just a little pot - to get "mellow", not "high".

You can't generalise a population from your own preferences. All you can conclude is that you are unlikely to try pot even when it is legal.

(I am the same about alcohol - quality rather than quantity. My whisky is too good and too expensive to quaff. And I am similarly unlikely to try pot, even if I were somewhere where it is legal.)

There's been no realistic constraint on people smoking pot for a long time.

"Public health" is a total legal and ethical quagmire, once it gets beyond the basics of stopping infectious disease.

Asking the question in that way isn't the right approach. Young people can get hurt, but a prohibition is still probably worse. I don't understand that particular drug to be too hard to find...

The Nixon War on Drugs as policy has a rather ... questionable heritage. For one, it was a reaction to *heroin* addiction rates among soldiers coming back from Vietnam; for another it was a mechanism for harassing "those people" .

It's led to seizure laws which are stupefyingly bizarre.

The system has also adapted itself -now - to find people, especially young people with mental health problems who are self-medicating. Most of those are using alcohol because it's less trouble.

So that's how industrial scale *works*. The benefits far outweigh the costs.

As to alcohol, it's arguably less exploitative than it's ever been. People of a certain age dream of opening a microbrewery just so they can be craftspersons. Last time I was in Kali-fornyuh, I went to a "Monkish" somewhere in the greater LA area.

They didn't even have a cash register.

The story goes - we have civilization - at least agricultural civilization - only because of beer. Given that our Prohibition in the US pretty much stripped the veneer of civilization almost completely away....

Right, busting and jailing hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly poor/minority citizens for possession and distribution of the stuff doesn't seem to have made a damn bit of difference. It did put hundreds of thousands of poor/minority citizens in jail and into the legal system, though. Which was actually the point of the exercise

"Old-fashioned concepts of public health" sounds like code for "I enjoy my own libertarian positions on drug use (I'm free to do whatever I want, or not, depending) best when the poor are in jail."

And if it has that purpose, who am I to judge? I can't tell if people are worse off or better off with/without it so I have to back off....

Once you *can* tell - and I leave that to the professionals - then it's wise to intervene but that's a filter with a much narrower bandwidth....

Yet it's MUCH MORE fundamentally different from those in every other sense... especially meth - meth is a drug that produces outright zombies.

And there is at least one *neurologist* ( Marc Lewis ) who thinks the case against heroin is overblown. I know, right, but still - one guy's put his reputation on the line for the idea and he's done research others have not.

I view legalization as a form of , or expression of, skepticism.

It comes down to - do I really, as a citizen, want the force of law to be used for this purpose? And if I happened to want that, why?

One time about 20 years ago myself and a young white woman were walking around a certain affluent Northeast at night in the summer. Unknown to me she'd been smoking up beforehand and still had a decent quantity of the stuff on her. We were sitting on a park bench and she was showing off her elaborate glass pipe when naturally two police officers roll up in a cruiser nearby (some of these small town police seem to have a supernatural sixth sense about things.)

"Hey! Whatcha got there? Oh, doing some of the weed are ya? Stand up. Empty your pockets, both of you. Now. Oh, yeah miss, I'd say that's a good sized amount. Dump it down the drain. Thank you. Okay, here's your pipe. Smash it. Thank you. Now, get out of here and don't let us see your faces again."

As a young white woman that was the extend of her "punishment." If I'd been with a young black man I'm guessing it would've gone down much differently

That was how Nixon and Erlichmann envisioned it, but as public policy, it's more of an expression of the American sense of Utopian naviete.

You had all these poor Silent Generation people - like my parents - who just couldn't grapple with the thing. All them hippies violently "dancing" in Golden Gate Park....

Oh, you mean the *un*deserving poor... they should go be poor somewhere else...