You could make the same argument for alcohol... it can destroy lives and yet is still legal.
Cannabis on the other hand...
On 30+ years, I have never seen someone get violent from cannabis, but with alcohol, it is a regular occurrence.
Worked at a hotel when I was younger too, and you can bring me a hotel full of people high on cannabis, and the worst the ever did was buy a ton of snacks.
Alcohol, on the other hand, was responsible for noise complaints, broken televisions, furniture, sexual assault, violent assault, cops being called all the time, etc.
As an aside, my father was an alcoholic and a pathetic loser indulging in as much alcohol as self-pity. I am not defending excessive alcohol consumption.
My point is: Even if you think weed is relatively better than alcohol from a big picture societal POV (we can agree to disagree here), don't underestimate the bad effects of weed. Don't be a weed-smoking loser just because it's legal.
You have one body. Take care of it.
“This event wouldn’t be possible in Ireland”
There were several fights, some blatant abuse of cocaine, and one of my female friends had someone get a hand down her pants and squeeze her butt without permission.
No one got shot or stabbed, but it certainly wasn't a peaceful hangout.
Alcohol on the other hand...
I guess all sample sizes of weed smokers are small in public health studies.
Cannabis on the other hand will not.
I was a bartender for a while in college and off-and-on afterwards. I've seen dozens of barfights, several with people ending up in hospitals. No shootings, thankfully, but that absolutely happens outside of bars and clubs.
There were at least 3 fatal DUIs that were traced back to coming from bars that I worked at; it led to the closure of one of them.
Alcohol correlates directly to levels of domestic abuse, rape, assault, and murder. Most traffic accidents after 9pm are alcohol related.
But weed makes you crazy and psychotic.
If it is one’s self, then sugar, carbs, and sat fats are surely up there also.
Meanwhile CDC hasn’t been able to create actual evidence that driving while high causes more accidents. https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/health-effects/driving.html
I’m not saying it doesn’t but alcohol causes so many unnecessary deaths in society due to drunk driving. Note: I’m not advocating for alcohol to be banned.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-03-14/deaths-bro...
But I bet it would be very politically unpopular to address phone use while driving.
The only people against distracted driving penalties are people who are entitled and think they should be able to put others in danger for their minor convenience or libertarian assholes who think seatbelt laws are oppressive nanny stating.
Alcohol also heavily correlates with assaults, rapes, domestic violence, and murder. Something crazy high like 60% or more of assaults. Ditto for things like car accidents after 9pm -- overwhelmingly alcohol related. DUIs kill a non-trivial amount of people.
We don’t need gatekeepers to prescribe these things only when a legitimate medical use demands it. There are countless examples in society where we allow people do things that are dangerous purely for the fun of it. Just because these are drugs we don’t need to justify their use as medicines.
Instead let’s inform the public and have them make their own choice. The regulation should be in proportion to the extent of the harm. In both cannabis use and running, it’s restricted to the individual (and temporary), so we should regulate minimally.
Additionally there are health benefits to cannabis (and psychedelics) as well. Whether it’s stress, anxiety (ironically), depression, etc. so the comparison remains apt.
There have been a few cases in the past were heroin use was allowed, or at least not actively prosecuted. They were absolute disasters. E.g. Zurich, 1986-1922: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8044118/
I've visited several US jurisdictions where it's legal. While it's still illegal in my area, I'm adjacent to fully legal and medically allowed areas. The only time I've felt any pressure was visiting Las Vegas, where every cab/uber/etc driver volunteered a recommendation for a pot store.
I found the recommendations useful for knowing which stores are overpriced.
We can say the same for every popular consumer product.
I personally prefer people choosing what they consume over criminalizing the ?billions? of people that find it harmless.
That being said, any drug when abused will have negative side effects. If marijuana is legal it will be easier to actually test, regulated, and provide guidelines for safe use.
Everyone knows taking 6+ shots of some form of booze will likely cause you to be drunk. How much weed will cause you to be incapacitated? One puff? One joint? A dab? Half an edible? It's not clear. That feels like the real problem currently.
I deeply apologize for saying this but what an absolutely bizarre opinion. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.
I strongly believe that cannabis should be legal, but also find it quite problematic that many users and advocates will quickly bristle the moment the downsides that many experience are described.
I think the horrific levels of injustice prior to legalization has had a pendulum effect on conversations about safety and downsides.
If someone describing their own negative experiences and belief that those experiences warrant more controls is so bizarre, it might be worth exploring why that is.
That doesn’t mean one has to agree that controls are needed, but this notion that “well that’s just your problem, leave me alone” is an unhelpful attitude that does very little to illuminate the reality of the situation.
The reality is that some people form a habitual/addictive relationship with cannabis. The reality is that cannabis severely disrupts REM sleep. The importance of REM sleep is a growing concern as we learn more about the process of sleep and how a lack of it predicts serious mental deterioration later in life.
To be clear, I use cannabis regularly and find that it helps me deal with some aspects of C-PTSD. At the same time, I also find that it reduces the quality of my sleep.
This is a tradeoff I accept because the alternative is less sleep overall, which is worse than the degraded sleep I’m getting now. But if I could otherwise sleep normally, adding cannabis to the mix is something I’d be more cautious about.
The point behind that anecdote is simply that using cannabis involves tradeoffs.
I don’t think access should be further controlled, but I do think education needs to be prioritized.
>I think the horrific levels of injustice prior to legalization has had a >pendulum effect on conversations about safety and downsides.
I think you hit the heart of the issue. The negatives have been used as a cudgel and amplified beyond reason over the years to block progress on legalization. It's create a knee jerk reaction to anyone who talks about their negative outcomes. (This isn't exclusive to MJ legalization. Try talking about quitting alcohol in a group setting over drinks. Something I had to do because I had negative outcomes with alcohol.)
Very often these points are parroted by organizations that want to block legalization for reasons that have nothing to do with the issues of abuse or health, for example the Private Prison system which is one of the biggest lobbies against marijuana reform.
While at the same time, society happily brushes aside the same concerns about alcohol which proportionately has worse side effects and outcomes. We also still sell cigarettes with glee for the tax dollars while they essentially have nothing but negative outcomes. People pay 8-10 dollars a day to murder themselves and cause undo excess cost and burden on healthcare but no one give a shit anymore.
It's all so performative, inconsistent, and driven by capitalist motivations tangentially associated with the actual issue.
Consider substances like weed or alcohol that can ruin lives but usually don't. How should our laws treat these substances? I'm not sure but there's nothing absurd about thinking they should be illegal.
Also consider: what are laws for? To some degree they're about discouraging certain behavior. It would be nice to think that we could discourage weed/alcohol without making them illegal but it's not clear that we can do that.
Whether laws are here to protect and/or ensure prosperity of society, or whether laws are there to maximize freedom seems to be a huge source of contention in our modern society. Ultimately I think the two ideals, while overlapping many places, are incompatible. Hopefully we can rewind the consolidation of federal powers to allow people with different ideals to move to different states to achieve something closest to their desired way of life. Federal drug laws controlled by unelected beuracrats are an example of making this selection impossible.
That being said, I'm still for legalization, simply because it being illegal didn't keep me or you or anyone else from trying it. It just doesn't make sense for law enforcement to spend all those resources on fighting a battle that's already lost. Plus, in the US, all the lives ruined and money wasted on incarcerating people for marijuana-related offenses.
I will say though, that legalisation leads to positive public health outcomes sounds like just the sort of bullshit cherrypicked study that Reddit would jump on instantly. I don't know why this is on HN at all.
This doesn't mean that marijuana causes mental disorders; it only triggers latent disorders, meaning those already present in the brain due to genetics, environment, or brain damage (caused by concussions, drug use, etc.).
Other psychoactive substances (especially meth) can actually cause mental disorders due to the structural brain damage they inflict.
Could it be that some of your clients would have, say, benefitted from claiming a drug triggered nexus to take advantage of this?
For most of my clients, the cases were about whether they had mental disorders. And the consequence of being deemed to have a mental disorder that caused them to offend was involuntary commitment to a mental hospital for at least as long as their original prison sentence (and for violent offenders, theoretically for the rest of their lives).
Federal law allows the BOP to reduce the sentences of non-violent offenders who complete the RDAP program by up to one year. The RDAP program is voluntary and takes 500-hours, nine- to twelve-months to complete. The RDAP is authorized by 18 U.S.C. § 3621, which directs the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to provide residential substance abuse treatment for all eligible federal inmates.
>only applies to drug possession or drug use cases
Yeah but these are pretty common charges no? Seems relevant. For instance, my understanding is in some instances if you have a drug disorder with possession you're in a better position than merely found in possession and don't even use drugs (or use them without having a "disorder"), as the drug-nexus'd disorder might make you eligible for some programs.
I gotta say I didn't realize these programs were just memes, must be a lot of attorneys lying to their clients.
Yeah but these are pretty common charges no? Seems relevant. For instance, my understanding is in some instances if you have a drug disorder with possession you're in a better position than merely found in possession and don't even use drugs (or use them without having a "disorder")
Yes, they're quite common. But pure drug offenses (other than dealing) generally get sent straight to diversion if they qualify (and space is available). Most drug offenses in addition to other crimes and this generally makes the defendant ineligible for diversion. Given two similar defendants whose only difference is that one is substance dependent and the other is not, the dependent defendant will never get a meaningfully shorter sentence than the defendant who is not and is more likely to end up with additional restrictions on their parole that make it easier to send them back to prison.
must be a lot of attorneys lying to their clients.
The programs are not memes, but your understanding of them, and how they are actually discussed by attorneys with their clients, appears to be based on internet memes of these programs.
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
>he dependent defendant will never get a meaningfully shorter sentence
Up until the BOP report showed to me you were lying about the programs, I probably would have take your word on this. Now I'm not so sure. Would be interested in seeing the evidence that this never happens.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding me operating off of "memes." They may exist, but they're not something I've looked for nor noticed.
The programs you describe are not an alternative to prison for drug users convicted of non-drug offenses, which is what your original comment claims. And you keep harping on the FDAP program, which is a federal program for those convicted of federal crimes, not state level crimes, and which provides for substance abuse counseling within federal penitentiaries.
And I notice you deliberately avoid mentioning that your study was based on data collected from 2002-2010.
What's next? Are you also going to claim that Blackberry dominates smartphone sales, based on 13-21 year old data?
It's a more attractive sentence. You're simply lying about my original comment.
You've cited nothing at all, so you're upset about a (May 2022 published) study with data from 2010 vs your mere word that opposes it? You're aware that studies look at data for things that already happened right, not the future?
>And I notice you deliberately avoid mentioning that your study was based on data collected from 2002-2010.
I cited it... the date was right on it. Not hidden. What's even your point here? It's not unusual for an informal citation to not include the date as part of the citation. And even were it I marked the publish date next to the citation it would be '22 and you'd probably still be moaning as '22 isn't the data of the data.
>federal crimes
My original comment indicate "some jurisdictions." Not all. But I will note that the vast majority of people in the US are subject in various capacities to federal jurisdiction, so it seems quite relevant. I guess you could argue the UN Headquarters is exempt, for instance.
The smell of it is so ubiquitous now that it's legal and it's a great deal of anxiety for someone like me.
I acknowledge its benefits and that I'm probably a rare case. But it is disturbing to me how mainstream it's become. Certainly..some ppl will face the same repercussions I went through and I don't want that to happen.
I still think it should be controlled medically and not as available as lotto tickets