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Warchicken posted:This is what will happen. If Romney wins election, he will raid every medical dispensary and send every single medical patient to jail even if they are suffering horribly on their deathbeds. Welcome to america. Reminder that Obama's been raiding/closing medical marijuana dispensaries too  While the DEA legally could raid every shop in Colorado post-legalization I don't see that happening. I don't think the financial rewards would justify it, and it wouldn't even really send a message... people still run these businesses currently in CO and CA where it's in kind of a legal gray area, after full-on legalization there are going to be legit stores everywhere and taking down a handful of them would just look kind of silly.
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Oct 11, 2012 05:10
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The ability to grow legally (kinda, there's still the federal thing) will lower prices and then the tax will raise them again. I think overall it'll be cheaper or equal to what you'd pay now. There will still be a black market but the best analog is probably homebrew beer, and that's a nonissue in most jurisdictions. I mean, buying from a dealer sucks.
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Oct 13, 2012 00:40
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Weed is such a great way to shovel people into the system, though. It's bulky (compared to other drugs), it smells very strongly, and it stays in your system far longer than any other substance. Those other drugs just don't really have those qualities, the cops are going to have trouble meeting quotas if legalization happens 
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Oct 16, 2012 22:04
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Not that this was the plan from the start but the idea that law enforcement likes weed because it's an incredibly low barrier for loving with people isn't tinfoil hat nonsense, it's fairly basic. I mean look at the Stop and Frisk thing in NY if you need an example. I don't know if you can say that "drugs r bad" is the reason they're still illegal. That stigma contributes, of course, but there's also a huge amount of money involved and of course that's going to play a part as well.DeusExMachinima posted:Public institutions and agencies also aren't necessarily out to turn a profit, but you better believe that for the most part they'll do something that's a net loss to the taxpayer if it ensures their continued existence. Whether the issue at hand is drugs or not. This as well. Drug prohibition employs an incredible amount of people, in the public and the private sectors, and those groups are going to fight against anything that takes money off the table.
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Oct 16, 2012 23:32
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YOU COULD SAY THAT THE PROPOSITION... PUFF, PUFF, PASSED
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Nov 7, 2012 06:16
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escape artist posted:So this 60 year old guy is arguing with me that Homeland Security is going to enter these states and "crush" this based on a 60 year old UN treaty. Any more knowledgeable goons with thoughts on the issue? Nah. Just nah. I mean the 60-year-old UN treaty part is dubious by itself but in general, no, the federal government has neither the desire nor the resources to prosecute all recreational weed smokers in 1/25 of the nation. They will probably continue to flex their muscles, give a really serious answer when asked about their stance on it, and the DEA might still prosecute dudes who make themselves very publicly rich from this... but nah, the feds are not going to outright "crush" this in any sense of that word.
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Nov 7, 2012 06:40
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You can already fly out of SFO and OAK with weed if you have a valid medicinal card.
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Mar 18, 2013 02:40
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I guarantee you nobody in this thread cares about states' rights in the abstract, they care about marijuana legalization and if a states' rights approach is the best way to make that happen then so be it. If I wanted to discuss my feelings on states' rights as they apply to other topics I'd do it in another thread.
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Apr 24, 2013 06:12
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Red_Mage posted:Pretty much this. Everyone is for State's Rights as the solution when their state is being rad and legalizing weed and letting people get married, but that tune changes real quick when that state wants to change something they like, or when some other state is using those same rights to be uncool. Pretty much everyone is okay with baseball bats when they're used for baseball games but their tunes change with a quickness when you start talking about using them as assault weapons. Almost as if tools have multiple uses and you can be okay with the ones that fall within your personal moral code and not okay with the ones that fall outside of it.
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Apr 24, 2013 17:57
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SWITCH HITLER posted:Because people would rather pay the tax and be able to pick it up from an actual legal business instead of committing a felony? Well, maybe. I totally believe that people would rather buy from legit sources than from sketchy dealers all things being equal, but if your sketchy dealer can sell you the same stuff for a fraction of the price of the legal stuff you might think twice about it. Plus, as pointed out, the illegal distribution network for weed already exists and for the vast majority of people (especially in CO) it barely seemed like a crime.
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May 9, 2013 19:58
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That looks like a pretty great first step. No hash is kind of weird but whatever, if that's the main thing they messed up on then I'm cool with it.
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May 16, 2013 23:36
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echinopsis posted:I oppose cannabis use from a long term health perspective, but it's not too bad in the short term and yeah people shouldn't be punished for it. But who pays for the ambulance when johnny 16 eats too many cannabis cookies and gets scared? We live in a social society and this drug use is going to have a cost. It might be small. It's likely smaller than the cost of prohibition and/or the cost of alcohol to society. Doesn't mean it's "all good" Literally can't tell if you're trolling or not, and if not I'm sincerely struggling to see your point. Everything under the sun causes harm. Television, video games, driving, riding bikes, breathing, sex, whatever, these are all activities that harm some amount of people. What happens when people call 911 because they fell off a bike that they didn't need to be riding, or got a completely unnecessary sex toy stuck inside them, or get in a car wreck when they were making a non-essential trip to the video store? This is called life, many countries deal with it by offering medical care to everyone but unfortunately America is not so enlightened. I suppose we could tax bikes and set up a bike fund for people who are injured on bikes, and tax televisions for TV-related injuries (acute and long-term), and tax weed for weed-related psychosis and such and so forth but also that makes no god damned sense. As far as I can tell you're arguing for universal health care? Awesome, that's a perfect solution to all of these problems. Kudos.
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May 30, 2013 21:22
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Yes, but why is cannabis suddenly singled out for harm-related taxes above any of the other thousands of voluntary and harmful things that humans can do?
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May 30, 2013 21:28
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Right, I can think of tobacco and alcohol off the top of my head and it's almost certain that weed will be pretty heavily taxed to begin with. His point is that "the cause of the cost should pay for the cost" which is definitely not something we do for tobacco or alcohol or gambling or any of the other vices that are actually very detrimental. The societal costs of those things are far greater than the tax money we make from them. So why single out weed? Surely some of the relatively high taxes proposed on legal marijuana will go towards the relatively minimal (compared to, say, any other activity) social costs that legal weed will incur.
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May 30, 2013 21:49
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It is pretty funny to watch people take their inherent dislike of "stoner culture" and let it color their arguments about marijuana legalization. Ugh, the leaf of the marijuana plant is being displayed on the regulatory material that deals with said plant? How gauche.
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May 30, 2013 22:14
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echinopsis posted:Or perhaps no one can comprehend that someone might be for regulation but also takes a realistic approach and understanding that smoking weed every day isn't a positive life ambition Of course, nobody can understand that not only do I wring my hands about aspects of marijuana that nobody outside of a DEA office thinks are valid, I also look down on people who smoke weed Here, friend, why don't you hit this bong and mellow out a bit? 
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May 31, 2013 00:10
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Your definition of "doing it right" seems to be setting up a fund, paid for by taxing marijuana, for the relatively inconsequential amount of people who will get too stoned and call 911? Why don't you go back in the thread, see the proposed regulations from both CO and WA and our subsequent commentary on it, and comment on that? Aside from a few nitpicks most of the posters here are down with the proposed regulatory framework.
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May 31, 2013 00:27
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echinopsis posted:I understand the sympathy but why should everyone pay for those costs? I don't have a better solution and your argument is decent but what's a better alternative? [honest enquiry] Why should I pay for roads I don't use, or recreation areas I don't visit, or any other single thing from which I don't receive direct and acute benefits? Because that's what living in a society is like.
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May 31, 2013 00:32
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Install Gentoo posted:Would you mind showing where he's doing that? Because from where I'm standing none of his posts have anything like that going on, only other people blowing his opinions way out of proportion. It appears that you don't understand, clearly. There's about 50 pages of fairly solid discussion of weed here, much of which is about the specific regulatory bodies and procedures that have emerged since weed became legal in CO and WA. He appears to have missed all of that and instead wants to focus on the terrible social consequences of legal weed which are, of course, laughable in the face of the very real harm that prohibition causes today. Of course we want to "do it right" but tut-tutting over the cost of all the ambulances we're going to need in a legal weed world is just concern trolling. It's worth addressing him, concern trolling and all, because there are people who will say these same dumb things as weed legalization spreads.
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May 31, 2013 04:21
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Well, given that a ton of people already smoke weed and that traditionally legalization does not increase usage... who pays for the social costs of weed now? Of course taxes on weed should go for good things, up to and including offsetting any harm caused by legalization (lol), nobody will contest that. His attitude is lovely and his examples are laughable.
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May 31, 2013 04:54
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echinopsis posted:
Counterpoint: You don't listen to rap music
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May 31, 2013 09:31
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As far as we know, nobody has ever died simply from consuming marijuana. If you define "from weed" as simply ingesting weed then it is true that nobody has ever died from weed.
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May 31, 2013 20:27
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Weed has traditionally been an amazing way to throw people into the prison-industrial complex. It smells bad, is bulky, and is relatively prevalent. Once "I smelled weed" is no longer probable cause and possessing weed isn't grounds for a more thorough search the cops will have to try much harder to gently caress with people. The war on drugs will, of course, continue its death march but legal weed seriously puts a fairly large damper on that, and a significant amount of people are going to be able to keep their lives when previously they would have been straight up hosed for life.
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Jun 2, 2013 07:34
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Kurt_Cobain posted:These are lifestyle stoners, they are to be ignored. Nah, lifestyle smokers are smoking already, regardless of where they're located. Any tourism, and I suspect there will be a bit, will be older people who want to smoke weed without worrying about the legal issues or having to bug some high schoolers for a connect. Amsterdam has way more vice going on of course but I suspect that some of their tourism is simply people who want to smoke weed without consequence.
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Jun 10, 2013 19:02
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KingEup posted:Do people from Illinois holiday in Missouri because they can buy/use fireworks legally? This is a seriously bad example, going to the next county over to buy fireworks is as American as apple pie e: Here, have a guess at what the red things and the dotted line on this image indicate: 
Muck and Mire fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 05:27
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Can you think of anything that might differentiate fireworks from, say, marijuana? Have you heard of sex tourism? People will go places to do things that aren't legal where they live. Amsterdam thinks they get a third of their tourism from weedsmokers. I'm not saying Denver is going to be the American mecca for weed tourism or anything but people will definitely consider this when they make their travel plans, especially once the retail stores are open and the kinks are worked out.
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Jun 13, 2013 07:34
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Yeah, and honestly it's not too difficult to imagine that cops on the borders of the now-legal states will assume that some percentage of people coming through have weed on them. I'm sure a ton of people will get away with buying weed in CO and moving it across state lines but personally that seems like a fairly dumb idea. Kind of offtopic but I just imagined someone stopping right at the CO border, getting out and furiously smoking all of the rest of his weed while staring down a cop on the Kansas side
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Jun 13, 2013 18:41
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Powercrazy posted:So all of a sudden your Reggae festival is smoke free. You know, I'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about here
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Jun 13, 2013 19:46
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I don't think it'll be as serious as all that, but if you're crossing the CO/KS border with a Grateful Dead sticker on your car you are probably going to get hassled for that broken taillight
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Jun 14, 2013 00:23
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Powercrazy posted:The point is legality isn't and shouldn't be the barrier you care about if you are all grown-up. Uhh, you know what happens when you get caught with drugs in America right? In a lot of places weed will just get you fined, but it's also one of the main ways we feed the prison-industrial complex. Not smoking weed because you don't want your life ruined by the American penal system is a pretty grown-up choice.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:52
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It's one thing to say that you should disobey unjust laws, but in practice there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to. Again, for hundreds of thousands of people in America any kind of drug conviction is basically "game over" on a normal life. Once you're in the for-profit prison system and have a drug charge on your record you are basically hosed. Of course the laws are unjust, but when you know that you're one traffic stop from being food for the machine it's going to make you think a bit harder about protesting these laws.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:37
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Describing the prison-industrial complex and the way that normal possession arrests feed into that complex as a "bogeyman" is completely disingenuous. More people are arrested for drugs than anything else. Choosing not to smoke/use drugs because you don't want to be sucked into that system is a completely legitimate and in no way cowardly feeling.
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Jun 17, 2013 19:38
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The sheer audacity of writing "black people are going to be the most adversely affected by legalization" in seriousness is just amazing to me. I mean, obviously this is a bullshit think tank getting paid to spout this garbage but even still. My problem with "let's legalize it, but discourage use" is that, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread, nobody ever says that about hamburgers or watching TV all day. It just reeks of the moral baggage of prohibition and anti-stoner sentiments (hi echinopsis) and not an eye towards the greatest possible well-being and collective health of our society. Of course legalization will change things a bit and there will be issues that arise that will need to be handled but you have to be blind to think that the new issues will be even a fraction as detrimental to anybody or anything as the current drug war is.
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Jun 23, 2013 02:47
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You're right, I should clarify I guess. There are definitely campaigns against eating junk food and watching TV all day. It's just that "legalize and discourage" is almost always couched in moralistic language and prohibitionist sentiment, so I tend to view it skeptically even though I don't have much problem with it in general.
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Jun 23, 2013 03:25
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I wonder how many of those two million people would say "traffic" or "having to go to work" are causing "serious life problems." Delta-Wye posted:You'd make a terrible engineer I think he was talking about murders due to prohibition, in which case a 100% reduction would be possible simply by getting rid of it.
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Jul 10, 2013 18:37
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The first 90% is easy, the last 10% is almost impossible. The fact there is an 'acceptable level' isn't bizarre, even if having to sit down and work out what that level would be is a bit macabre.