Study and publicize the risks, the rest should be left to personal decisions.
“Meth dens”, like “crack houses”, are a thing which prohibition may punish, but does not prevent, but instead creates.
Also, completely tangential. But poverty is the thing that really kills people (including driving them to seeking the thrills of hard drugs). I can almost guarantee that there is a correlation between income level/standard of living and meth zones.
Does that mean you should do stupid things and ruin your life? Probably not. But this is not about doing stupid things. It's about having the option and the option not being constrained by arbitrary things (ie who gets to decide that A is good and B is bad, A is okay, B is life destroying)
also, one thing to consider: It's mostly non-controversial that pot is harmless nowadays. The more you go back in time, the more pot was painted as wrecking your life, a gateway drug, etc. So a lot of what the effect of a drug are can (and is) hearsay + fear-mongering.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4337025/
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827335/
Definitely seems to suggest there are potentially harmful side effects.
ever take tylenol? the pain killer that is available OTC virtually everywhere? do you know what happens if you take double the max recommended dosage? liver failure. for something that's OTC.
for all intents and purposes weed is harmless. In WA, most people that I know have tried weed and some of them are actually doing it on a regular basis. I have yet to hear of any [mental] health issues.
If you do something all day everyday you are dealing with something else and the drug is a way of escapism.
Do you think a few hundred people in the central government should decide how to handle those situations, or the people most intimately familiar with the details?
The problem is that, like the old "we had to destroy the village to save it" cliche from Vietnam, the War on Drugs destroys the very lives it purports to protect.
The illegality of drugs means that the drugs people buy are either not what they're sold as or are of an unknown purity, which leads to overdoses. Such unintentional overdoses from mistakes in gauging substance or purity would virtually disappear if drugs were legal.
The organized crime that runs the drug trade kills many people and has a corrosive effect on our justice system and government and that of many other nations. That too will be greatly reduced with legalization.
Arrests of users, killing of them and their families by police during raids, imprisonment, separating families and ruining lives by all of the above and on top of that criminal records for possession are yet another horrific consequence of the War on Drugs.
Rights are thrown away, police power and surveillance of the population is ratcheted up to ever greater levels in the name of fighting the WOD. Billions of dollars are wasted and billions more given to organized crime instead of paid as taxes to governments.
And on top of it all the WOD is not even effective. People continue to use drugs anyway, if they want to.
So what is the point?
we want a caring society but not at the cost of restricting personal freedoms
And smoking weed doesnt? They are both plants.
The content of cannabis smoke is quite different from tobacco smoke, and in particular it contains a lot of terpenes, and the cannabinoids themselves, which are potent antioxidants.
Last I checked, cannabis smoke was implicated in COPD, but doesn't appear to contribute to lung cancer. That was at least a decade ago, however.
And quite literally everything is harmful in one way or another, it's just a matter of degrees, and people should be allowed to make their own decisions.
That's a strawman, but I'll roll with it. Yep, totally fine with it (although I have not used any illegal drugs). Mostly because there are massive amounts of people currently using prohibited drugs. Why not study and make known the risks instead of hopelessly trying to directly control everyone's actions?
At a higher level, I do not believe in any authority's ability to consistently produce a net benefit over long periods of time by deciding what substances are legal. I do however think that the markets will figure it out pretty quickly.
Just like if an adult wants to go skydiving, which is a risky activity, it should be their choice.
There's no reason we can't apply the same reasonable controls to cannabis.
As far as I know there's no way to tell. Last I checked the available drug tests could only tell if you've used cannabis in the last 30 days, not if you used it on the day you were driving.. and even if you had that doesn't mean you were high at the time you drove.
Drug tests should really be replaced with performance tests.
It's none of their business if you're high. What matters is if you can drive safely.
Seems that you are right that there is no reliable way of testing for this (and the 5 nanograms might have been pulled out of someone’s a…ttic when the law was written).
Cannabis is way more restricted and controlled than tobacco or alcohol in most places. If you buy cigarettes or alcohol, cops won’t bother you. If you’re caught with cannabis, you are potentially facing criminal charges.