it is telling the author never bothers to attempt to explain *how* re-criminalization would be enforced as a practical matter.
further, this polemic contains some other major fallacies (perhaps by design).
for example: it is conventional wisdom that today's cannabis is much stronger than cannabis of yesterday. this is true -- and what was it that happened in the intervening decades? it was prohibition. it is also conventional wisdom, at least among cannabis experts, that the potency spike was a result of prohibition. thus the author's neat conclusion that prohibition equals weaker product is ill-informed speculative fiction.
further, to claim cannabis's effect on the criminal justice system begins and ends at marijuana arrests is to admit at best a superficial understanding of the criminal justice system. for starters: 1/4 of the prison population is incarcerated for parole violations. a common parole violation is a positive drug test. cannabis is the most readily detected drug. what is cannabis's effect on parole violations? this does not even appear to enter the author's thinking. what's more, he fails to consider (perhaps deliberately) marijuana criminalization as an entry into the criminal justice system. a drug arrest can lead to many downstream negative consequences, including reduced employment opportunities, which in turn can lead to (wait for it) more serious crimes.
as for the rest: I see cherry-picking studies that support his thesis and ignoring the many more that detract from it; I see hoary tropes and I see bias in search of intellectual foundation. at least he didn't trot out the gateway drug fallacy?
You are an expert at setting up straw men and knocking them down. The substitute isnt opiates - its alcohol.
Its not just pain and MS - its also ADHD and Autism. The arrests even if they don’t lead to prison can result in taking away of kids, denial of student loans, and losing of jobs.
I am ASD and ADHD. I am 40. Time and time again, when I quit THC/CBD, my life gets worse. My job performance actually suffers. I gain weight. I drink more alcohol.
You would vote to keep me away from it. It is hard for me to accept people like you.
I did quit again last year because my source was also dealing fentanyl.
Result? My life is objectively worse.
I can vape THC/CBD and it affects me very differently. Stimulants calm me down - I can drink coffee and go to sleep.
If I went to a doctor, theyd give me amphetamines or Xanax. Compared to those, pot is like water.
Here because the times columnist cited you in his pitiful op-ed "Legalizing Marijuana is a Big Mistake". As was already mentioned in the comments, arguing about the "costs of marijuana use" without comparing them to the costs of perfectly legal alternatives such as alcohol is misleading at best. For instance, alcohol is the fourth leading preventable cause of death, killing an estimated 140,000 people annually. Marijuana, on the other hand, is linked to about 350.
Further, trying to draw a connection between an increase in opioid related deaths and legalized marijuana is tenuous at best. It could just as easily be argued that the increase in opioid mortality is linked to the concurrent proliferation of Fentanyl in the American drug market as well as the fact that "street" dealers, due to a reduction of marijuana related profits, are pushing their harder products more, cutting it to boost profits, etc.
As for arrests generally increasing, it's also quite possible that law enforcement, not pre-occupied with marijuana related offenses (which tend to be attention grabbing due to the smell and possible indiscretion of marijuana users when buying off the street), are actually able to focus on more pressing issues.
However, I think my biggest qualm here is your dismissing something being recreationally enjoyable as a viable reason for legalization. Why is alcohol legal? Why are cigarettes legal? Its arguable that they cause far more harm than good, and cigarettes especially tax the American health care system extensively. These, however, are available primarily because people enjoy them (and of course, because there is profit to be made). Personally, I don't even believe that a reduction in arrests or opioid deaths is necessary in the argument for legalization. Instead, given that a large portion of the population enjoys it, and the overall costs are minimal and tend to be related to personal issues (self-degradation or potentially some mental health issues) as opposed to societal issues, I see any reasoning beyond it being popularly enjoyed as extremely superfluous.
If you don't want to smoke, then don't smoke. If you don't want your kids to smoke, well, even legal marijuana isn't available to minors. However, stop trying to hide behind useless, unrelated statistics and instead look at the fact that that cannabis prohibition in and of itself only came into being in 1937 and, generally speaking, is a very recent thing considering the history of cannabis use stretching back to ancient civilization. Is marijuana legalization really the hill to die on when people are being gunned down by legal firearms on a regular basis?
Not much commentary on what I believed was utter nonsense: That tax revenue from legal pot sales were going to be a game changer for state government. Any poll in NJ would find a major public concern is out of control property taxes and local government budgets. Yet Gov Murphy hasn't even suggested this supposed windfall of revenue as a cure for these issues.
Additionally, as a heavy user for 2 decades I can certainly attest to the the drugs inhibition of productivity and creator of other social ills.
Yes, alcohol creates similar, if not worse, affects. I agree 100%. But does that mean we should just throw the baby out with the bath water?
One other way that drugs and crime relate is that illegal drug markets are a massive funding source for criminal groups. The estimates I saw were billions of dollars in illegal revenue in California alone. Other evils like prison gangs are also amplified by drug revenues. Even if making marijuana legal doesn't keep people out of jail directly, perhaps it defunds crime?
It's also possible that, at least with recent legalization, we are in this awkward middle where the legal supply system is still too crippled to compete the drug gangs out of business. Or perhaps fentanyl and the other harder drugs are a larger source of revenue anyway. I don't know for sure.
If you can use killer alcohol, I can use far safer weed. Period. The damage done by alcohol supremacist thug bigotry over the last 100+ years is infinite and much of it is irreparable. Lives destroyed and blighted by this POS law.
Reductionist and paints an outdated, fragmented, and thus incomplete picture, all the while vacillating between passive language and a sort of pseudo-intellectual, authoritative "I..." statements.
Never a mention of ethanol, which would seem to check the exact same checkboxes that this author says merit criminalization. Inconsistency and blatant dishonesty(lie by omission) sticks out to any honest reader, instantly negating any authority might have been established.
Bulk of article is just boilerplate filler. With the exception of providing data charts, the author has put forward zero original thought, nor brought anything new to the table. Outdated: Not a peep about the Hemp(thca) Industry, 2018 Farm Bill, or other recent developments. Boilerplate: Never attempted to tie multiple ideas together(easiest way to have an original thought) that didnt already come prepackaged that way.
Not sure what the point of the libertarian rant was about. The "look where I was intellectually and see how much I've grown"-story betrays the genuine, underlying heart of, "look and see how smart I am." So you essentially went from having conservative values but not wanting to force others to confrom.....to having those same conservative values and now feeling a need to force others to conform.
Tl;dr: Your introspection is miles wide, yet barely skin deep.
Somebody definitely did & that's who I was responding too.
Ah, the slippery slope argument. You do realize that to make that work you have to explain why this particular slope is slippery, don't you? There's plenty of slopes I've managed to climb. Both literally & figuratively. And I stayed on top as long as I wanted to. No slipping.
No one has the liberty to use weed (smoked or otherwise) and no one has the liberty to use alcohol? Why not and who decides? What about the solemn pledge of liberty and justice to all? What else do you claim the right to ban cause you don't like it?
True, you said that you had on more than one occasion ridden in a car driven by a drunk person. In response I said you were stupid. Which I still believe. Whether I'm stoned or not.
As a 75 year old "Original Libertarian", I'd like to point out the "jurisdiction" issue. Does the State have the Constitutional authority to detain and punish me for possessing marijuana? Also, when talking about the "harm" issue, I would contend that more harm to more lives is done by the laws than by the substance. That's the conclusion they came to about Prohibition- pushed by the "temperance" women and the KKK, to persecute male (especially Black) drunkenness- it enabled/funded a criminal underworld which was more detrimental to society than the legal/regulated use of alcohol. So it got repealed. Politics makes strange bedfellows (it's said) and today's Libertarians (like the author) are cut from very different cloth from the originals. Original Libertarianism was a western (Colorado) group organized around resistance to the Vietnam War and the military draft. They gathered in the druggies, the pro-abortion, ERA, the LGBTQ, the anti-tax, pro-gun, "Sex,Drugs,R&R" under the banner of liberty and personal sovereignty to their cause by opposing unconstitutional laws and government overreach. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. The Original Libertarians lost their momentum with the end of the draft and the Vietnam War- and the rise of drug addiction and STDs-AIDS in particular. That was then. Today's "Gingrich" Libertarians have allied themselves with the same people the "temperance" women did when they passed Prohibition- the States' Rights South, based in Florida. Socially AND fiscally conservative. He might be unaware that one of the main "perks" of being a cop is being able to extort sex from female motorists who are caught with pot in their cars. Some refuse and get busted. White women are twice as vulnerable (see Table 16). In my "Original Libertarian" opinion, the answer is not prohibition, or fables to support prohibition- but education. If you smoke pot all the time, you're most likely to turn out to be a loser. If you're already a loser, what difference does it make?
My main issue is that I want pot to be lower status. I don't necessarily think pot should be regulated differently than alcohol, but I think pot heads should be viewed much like alcoholics.
Furthermore, we need to stop blaming the War on Drugs for crime. Crime happens because low IQ young men think they can get away with crime. That's it. Drugs lower IQ and inhibition, leading to crime. Most people in on drug charges are in because they pled down to it or it's what the DA could nail them on, but they are actual criminals. Anyone whose been on a inner city jury can see this.
Not one word about alcohol. What are the chances the author likes to consume alcohol? I'd say pretty darn good.
it is telling the author never bothers to attempt to explain *how* re-criminalization would be enforced as a practical matter.
further, this polemic contains some other major fallacies (perhaps by design).
for example: it is conventional wisdom that today's cannabis is much stronger than cannabis of yesterday. this is true -- and what was it that happened in the intervening decades? it was prohibition. it is also conventional wisdom, at least among cannabis experts, that the potency spike was a result of prohibition. thus the author's neat conclusion that prohibition equals weaker product is ill-informed speculative fiction.
further, to claim cannabis's effect on the criminal justice system begins and ends at marijuana arrests is to admit at best a superficial understanding of the criminal justice system. for starters: 1/4 of the prison population is incarcerated for parole violations. a common parole violation is a positive drug test. cannabis is the most readily detected drug. what is cannabis's effect on parole violations? this does not even appear to enter the author's thinking. what's more, he fails to consider (perhaps deliberately) marijuana criminalization as an entry into the criminal justice system. a drug arrest can lead to many downstream negative consequences, including reduced employment opportunities, which in turn can lead to (wait for it) more serious crimes.
as for the rest: I see cherry-picking studies that support his thesis and ignoring the many more that detract from it; I see hoary tropes and I see bias in search of intellectual foundation. at least he didn't trot out the gateway drug fallacy?
The house isn't on fire. Get a grip.
You are an expert at setting up straw men and knocking them down. The substitute isnt opiates - its alcohol.
Its not just pain and MS - its also ADHD and Autism. The arrests even if they don’t lead to prison can result in taking away of kids, denial of student loans, and losing of jobs.
I am ASD and ADHD. I am 40. Time and time again, when I quit THC/CBD, my life gets worse. My job performance actually suffers. I gain weight. I drink more alcohol.
You would vote to keep me away from it. It is hard for me to accept people like you.
I did quit again last year because my source was also dealing fentanyl.
Result? My life is objectively worse.
I can vape THC/CBD and it affects me very differently. Stimulants calm me down - I can drink coffee and go to sleep.
If I went to a doctor, theyd give me amphetamines or Xanax. Compared to those, pot is like water.
Here because the times columnist cited you in his pitiful op-ed "Legalizing Marijuana is a Big Mistake". As was already mentioned in the comments, arguing about the "costs of marijuana use" without comparing them to the costs of perfectly legal alternatives such as alcohol is misleading at best. For instance, alcohol is the fourth leading preventable cause of death, killing an estimated 140,000 people annually. Marijuana, on the other hand, is linked to about 350.
Further, trying to draw a connection between an increase in opioid related deaths and legalized marijuana is tenuous at best. It could just as easily be argued that the increase in opioid mortality is linked to the concurrent proliferation of Fentanyl in the American drug market as well as the fact that "street" dealers, due to a reduction of marijuana related profits, are pushing their harder products more, cutting it to boost profits, etc.
As for arrests generally increasing, it's also quite possible that law enforcement, not pre-occupied with marijuana related offenses (which tend to be attention grabbing due to the smell and possible indiscretion of marijuana users when buying off the street), are actually able to focus on more pressing issues.
However, I think my biggest qualm here is your dismissing something being recreationally enjoyable as a viable reason for legalization. Why is alcohol legal? Why are cigarettes legal? Its arguable that they cause far more harm than good, and cigarettes especially tax the American health care system extensively. These, however, are available primarily because people enjoy them (and of course, because there is profit to be made). Personally, I don't even believe that a reduction in arrests or opioid deaths is necessary in the argument for legalization. Instead, given that a large portion of the population enjoys it, and the overall costs are minimal and tend to be related to personal issues (self-degradation or potentially some mental health issues) as opposed to societal issues, I see any reasoning beyond it being popularly enjoyed as extremely superfluous.
If you don't want to smoke, then don't smoke. If you don't want your kids to smoke, well, even legal marijuana isn't available to minors. However, stop trying to hide behind useless, unrelated statistics and instead look at the fact that that cannabis prohibition in and of itself only came into being in 1937 and, generally speaking, is a very recent thing considering the history of cannabis use stretching back to ancient civilization. Is marijuana legalization really the hill to die on when people are being gunned down by legal firearms on a regular basis?
Not much commentary on what I believed was utter nonsense: That tax revenue from legal pot sales were going to be a game changer for state government. Any poll in NJ would find a major public concern is out of control property taxes and local government budgets. Yet Gov Murphy hasn't even suggested this supposed windfall of revenue as a cure for these issues.
Additionally, as a heavy user for 2 decades I can certainly attest to the the drugs inhibition of productivity and creator of other social ills.
Yes, alcohol creates similar, if not worse, affects. I agree 100%. But does that mean we should just throw the baby out with the bath water?
One other way that drugs and crime relate is that illegal drug markets are a massive funding source for criminal groups. The estimates I saw were billions of dollars in illegal revenue in California alone. Other evils like prison gangs are also amplified by drug revenues. Even if making marijuana legal doesn't keep people out of jail directly, perhaps it defunds crime?
It's also possible that, at least with recent legalization, we are in this awkward middle where the legal supply system is still too crippled to compete the drug gangs out of business. Or perhaps fentanyl and the other harder drugs are a larger source of revenue anyway. I don't know for sure.
If you can use killer alcohol, I can use far safer weed. Period. The damage done by alcohol supremacist thug bigotry over the last 100+ years is infinite and much of it is irreparable. Lives destroyed and blighted by this POS law.
Reductionist and paints an outdated, fragmented, and thus incomplete picture, all the while vacillating between passive language and a sort of pseudo-intellectual, authoritative "I..." statements.
Never a mention of ethanol, which would seem to check the exact same checkboxes that this author says merit criminalization. Inconsistency and blatant dishonesty(lie by omission) sticks out to any honest reader, instantly negating any authority might have been established.
Bulk of article is just boilerplate filler. With the exception of providing data charts, the author has put forward zero original thought, nor brought anything new to the table. Outdated: Not a peep about the Hemp(thca) Industry, 2018 Farm Bill, or other recent developments. Boilerplate: Never attempted to tie multiple ideas together(easiest way to have an original thought) that didnt already come prepackaged that way.
Not sure what the point of the libertarian rant was about. The "look where I was intellectually and see how much I've grown"-story betrays the genuine, underlying heart of, "look and see how smart I am." So you essentially went from having conservative values but not wanting to force others to confrom.....to having those same conservative values and now feeling a need to force others to conform.
Tl;dr: Your introspection is miles wide, yet barely skin deep.
Somebody definitely did & that's who I was responding too.
Ah, the slippery slope argument. You do realize that to make that work you have to explain why this particular slope is slippery, don't you? There's plenty of slopes I've managed to climb. Both literally & figuratively. And I stayed on top as long as I wanted to. No slipping.
No one has the liberty to use weed (smoked or otherwise) and no one has the liberty to use alcohol? Why not and who decides? What about the solemn pledge of liberty and justice to all? What else do you claim the right to ban cause you don't like it?
Guns are cool, though?
True, you said that you had on more than one occasion ridden in a car driven by a drunk person. In response I said you were stupid. Which I still believe. Whether I'm stoned or not.
As a 75 year old "Original Libertarian", I'd like to point out the "jurisdiction" issue. Does the State have the Constitutional authority to detain and punish me for possessing marijuana? Also, when talking about the "harm" issue, I would contend that more harm to more lives is done by the laws than by the substance. That's the conclusion they came to about Prohibition- pushed by the "temperance" women and the KKK, to persecute male (especially Black) drunkenness- it enabled/funded a criminal underworld which was more detrimental to society than the legal/regulated use of alcohol. So it got repealed. Politics makes strange bedfellows (it's said) and today's Libertarians (like the author) are cut from very different cloth from the originals. Original Libertarianism was a western (Colorado) group organized around resistance to the Vietnam War and the military draft. They gathered in the druggies, the pro-abortion, ERA, the LGBTQ, the anti-tax, pro-gun, "Sex,Drugs,R&R" under the banner of liberty and personal sovereignty to their cause by opposing unconstitutional laws and government overreach. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. The Original Libertarians lost their momentum with the end of the draft and the Vietnam War- and the rise of drug addiction and STDs-AIDS in particular. That was then. Today's "Gingrich" Libertarians have allied themselves with the same people the "temperance" women did when they passed Prohibition- the States' Rights South, based in Florida. Socially AND fiscally conservative. He might be unaware that one of the main "perks" of being a cop is being able to extort sex from female motorists who are caught with pot in their cars. Some refuse and get busted. White women are twice as vulnerable (see Table 16). In my "Original Libertarian" opinion, the answer is not prohibition, or fables to support prohibition- but education. If you smoke pot all the time, you're most likely to turn out to be a loser. If you're already a loser, what difference does it make?
https://scarboro-fair.medium.com/the-case-against-legalization-of-recreational-marijuana-7edf7885b38a?sk=45ac0e4c714798170e7034bb53f08196
My main issue is that I want pot to be lower status. I don't necessarily think pot should be regulated differently than alcohol, but I think pot heads should be viewed much like alcoholics.
Furthermore, we need to stop blaming the War on Drugs for crime. Crime happens because low IQ young men think they can get away with crime. That's it. Drugs lower IQ and inhibition, leading to crime. Most people in on drug charges are in because they pled down to it or it's what the DA could nail them on, but they are actual criminals. Anyone whose been on a inner city jury can see this.