Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country’s illegal drug business , more/less?
Prohibition of vice does not work and only empowers organized crime.
End of argument.
I don’t partake, but it’s been legal in my area for a couple years now and I haven’t seen any negative effects on society. More gaudy smoke shops is about it. They remind me of the payday loan places. I’m sure some people have a dependency on it, it can form a habit like anything else.
There are very few cons, all the negative effects of cannabis can be better handled when it’s legal.
I don’t care about health benefits/dangers of any vice as much as I hate how ingrained vices are in our daily lives. I’m sick of beer ads, I hate online sports betting sponsoring every event (and rapidly turning a lot of friends into gamblers), my recently weed-legal state is already flooded with local ads and shitty shops.
I dream of a utopia where no vices are sold in a store or advertised. If you want to indulge you go to the equivalent of a Native American casino on steroids. It’s a massive temple to hedonism, zoning for it is very restricted. You can do any drug you want there, everything carefully dosed and tested. There’s complimentary trip-sitters and emergency services on call.
Things that aren’t an immediate threat to yourself/others (mushrooms, lsd, mj, low abv drinks, etc…) can be sold for private personal consumption off-prem with a reasonable limit per person. You can’t partake in public and can be asked for proof of purchase during transit.
There’s no perverse vice tax that leeches money from addicts who can’t afford it, the government’s best financial interest is to keep people clean and spending money elsewhere. If you need something to routinely “take the edge off” you get easy access to medical services (mental/physical/otherwise) and a prescription from a real doctor.
Any time I hear arguments for full legalization of anything in the USA I just have nightmares of inane Budweiser-style weed/cocaine/heroin commercials.
I feel like you have issues with the way capitalism takes advantage of people’s vices and you blamed half of it on the vices. If it wasn’t exploited, and drugs weren’t criminalized, with normal and healthy social standards taught instead of total abstinence creating an attractive taboo, none of that would be an issue.
Except, there’d still be issues, because addiction creates issues. A society where drugs are allowed is not one free from issues. They’ll still ruin lives. They’ll still destroy families, and hurt children. Education helps, but it does not eliminate the problem
Neither does making a drug house that people need transportation to get to. That’s the same as criminalizing it for many people.
I’m of the opinion that unless it’s regulated in some way, people will be systemically/individually exploited. An addict can’t be trusted to keep doses safe, be sure they’re using in a safe place, or properly prioritize their personal wellness.
Just recognize it’s something that’s going to happen and take reasonable efforts to set limits without glamourizing it. Controlling ease of access is a simple way to do that (look at the bump in gambling problems since the 2018 SCOTUS ruling). You don’t have to kick in the doors of everyone with a personal grow or basement home brewing setup.
If these substances could be handled universally with education and social mores, total abstinence would have already worked. No amount of taboo can make crippling addiction sexy.
A drug casino doesn’t solve those problems though. Better social services for addicts can. Addiction is impossible to eradicate, all you can do is provide good social services for addicts and recovery programs (which aren’t judgemental and Christian). Requiring transportation to go get and use drugs is the same thing as criminalizing it for many people.
Any safety and recovery programs are a lot easier to manage when you know exactly where your source is and who’s using. Safe injection sites already exist and have been shown to eliminate overdoses and increase access to social services without any honeypot effect or increased drug use. Adding safe and tested drug sales to the site is a pretty logical step.
Requiring transportation is a detail for implementation, you already need it to do anything in the USA. Unless you think every person has a right to get drugs delivered to their doorstep?
There’s a big difference between the weed shop I can walk to down the corner and the nearest safe use site/casino. I think people should be free to engage in whatever recreational activity they choose to, and the existence of addiction doesn’t give the government the right to infringe on those freedoms. Safe use sites and social programs can exist without a semi-dystopian puritan system. I don’t understand why addiction is so huge a problem that it requires such insane overreach. Without capitalist exploitation, addiction wouldn’t be monetized. A different form of government and legalization do a far better job at managing addiction than creating a black market with draconian laws.
I don’t think it’s that crazy or draconian at all. You’re still free to engage in the safest way possible. You have confidence that it’s a safe location and your drug of choice isn’t cut with fentanyl. Why would there be a black market? Addicts generally don’t like buying from untrustworthy sources and passing out in alleyways.
There’s a strange pushback to accepting that humans are physical creatures that evolved for certain stimulus. Society functions by self restraint and a social contract that says, for example, my neighbor won’t go into a stimulant induced psychosis and assault me. Its not a poor reflection on his moral character, that’s just how a human reacts to the substance.
It’s kind of a childish libertarian view to demand full personal freedom at societies’ expense. Your freedom to use a drug anywhere at any time means that the rest of us have to distribute narcan at the library, regulate 45,000 liquor stores, hire more police to counter intoxicated driving, and expand EMS to handle completely preventable emergencies. All that to save you a weekly bus trip to the casino?
Changing the economic system has no impact on any of that, those are the set costs of addiction. Addiction doesn’t cease being a problem because you give up on preventing it. You’re undermining the money going to social services by avoiding simple deterrence-by-inconveince
As an ex addict to (too many) substances (not marijuana) I can easily see a few cons regarding drug usage but the real pro, if I had to pick one, would be to remove all that money from drug dealers.
I would rather my money went to drug dealers than to capitalists exploiting addiction. I reckon we only finally got legalization because of government corruption and kickbacks. The idea of fucking Fantino (you probably don’t know him, non-Ontario people) making bank after a career of using his power as a police chief to fan social stigmas and demonize users in the press all those decades is more than I can stand.
I would rather my money went to drug dealers than to capitalists exploiting addiction.
Those are the same thing, just with different amounts of revenue.
So we agree one is preferable to the other
Context first:
Canadian and I’m high more often than not, so this will be biased. I didn’t really vote to legalize exactly, it was just part of a campaign that promised voting reform. Only one of the two happened :( I didn’t use weed previous to Justin’s legalization campaign.
That said, I’m pro decriminalization of everything for the end user, and almost all manufacturing for most drugs except the notorious ones wreaking havoc in society. Opioids and meth mainly.
I do think we need to consider unwillful sobriety centers for these specific types of extremely damaging addicts, but that’s a tough conversation society needs to have that it won’t. Ideals over reals. They suffer in the street causing havoc and ruining public transportation all the same meantime. Then you have the Cons basically wishing them to die ignored in an alley without any aid at all and getting in the way of any action. Getting off topic here.
Question for those of you living in a country where marijuana is legal. What are the positive sides, what are the negatives?
Positives:
Not sending functional or good enough people to prison for dumb cruel reasons.
The big fear was the youth smoking more over time didn’t materialize.
Freedumb!1! I like vaping THC quite a lot, selfish positive :)
Cons:
Mainly it’s a few glaring flaws in the Liberal Party rollout. There’s still government enabled social stigma.
Given not a word was said about it in our recent election that I heard about, I’m pretty sure weed being legal is a complete non-issue for pretty much everyone voting except the nutters like MADD. Yet politicians are still afraid to finish the job properly.
Apt name calling themselves MADD, but I don’t mean what it stands for. Treating weed like alcohol for a DUI isn’t scientifically backed and it’s puritan/prohibition minded moral panic theatrics. Then there’s the fact you can still get fired for smoking on a weekend off work if your boss drug tests you week(s) later. That’s fucking bullshit.
Basically I just follow the data. Minimum age is too low. Getting high is bad for developing brains, I think it shouldn’t be legal to consume until the brain is done development. Age 25. That’s unpopular, I don’t care. I say the same for alcohol. That’d also kill most of the alcoholic binge drinking party culture, because 25+ hangovers and being out of grade school/college.
If you could go back in time, would you vote for legalising again? Does it affect the country’s illegal drug business , more/less?
Sure I would. It’s been fine.
Big dent, not totally dead. I mean we can grow our own too. Black market is still cheaper, but they’re not selling me 510 carts. I don’t smoke weed anymore it’s disgusting. Smell, smoke, tar, cleaning, bleh. Vape. Dry toaster vape instead if scared of glycol. That works well and I used to, but it’s pretty wasteful/inefficient for a chronic user I find compared to 510 carts. Plus I can control dosage way easier. I hate being too stoned by accident. I couldn’t do this when it was illegal, so my bad habit is made a little less harmful made legal. I got options now.
Legalize it, but it’s still addictive. I don’t think my nation has a weed problem, but how would I know? I don’t know where to get weed or crack or heroin
It’s important to make a distinction between drugs that cause substance addiction (alcohol, opioids, tobacco) and things that trigger some people’s behavioral/impulse addictions, Cannabis, food, sugar, porn.
I find it quite odd anyone would have them in the same category, even if you are not or have ever been a durg user.
Here in the Netherlands we have the “Gedoogbeleid”, which translates to Tolerance policy. It’s somewhere in between Decriminalized and legal. U are allowed to purchase and have up to 5 grams with you. And using it is okay in your own home and in places that don’t disturb the public. But it’s still partly illegal, as in no indoor growing and carrying more than 5g… It’s a weird setup.
It’s also a weird construction because technically the coffeeshops themselves are not allowed to buy the bulk amounts of weed to sell in their shops. So everything has to come in sneakily through the backdoor…
Lately legalization has been getting a good push, and now shops are buying their flowers from legit, government approved “Wiet boeren” weed farmers.
True Legalization Pros:
- Good alcohol alternative. It’s one of the better substances to abuse.
- Better byproducts of flower. So more room for edibles, hash, concetrates and all the good stuff.
- Quality control, now you have some traceability where your flower is coming from. They put de Wiet Boeren on the bags with a qr code to see your flowers origin.
Cons:
- The wallet doesn’t like the flowers.
- Weed is very habbit forming. Addiction might be too strong a word for weed. But oh boy is it habbit forming. Ppl who deny this, are in denial.
As for how it affects the overall drug trade. Our number 1 export in the Netherlands is XTC. But that’s a whole different beast. As for weed drug trade, it does decrease it. In smaller townds without shops u will always have you local dealers. But weed really isn’t drug to be afraid of as in violence and crime surrounding it.
Weed is very habbit forming. Addiction might be too strong a word for weed. But oh boy is it habbit forming. Ppl who deny this, are in denial.
They’re also in denial about it making you dumber if you smoke frequently. When I still smoked, it became obvious to me that my thoughts were slower and I’d have trouble finding the right words when I started smoking nearly every night. Took a T break and cut back to weekends only and the problem went away.
I’m not sure “dumber” is the right word.
Took a T break and cut back to weekends only and the problem went away.
So it didn’t make you dumber. You just didn’t understand that the effects of frequent weed usage takes longer to wear off than alcohol.
It does make you dumber, and so does alcohol. As we all know, the only drug that makes you smarter is huffing glue pantsless on a unicycle.
Saw a dude like that in Portland once. He had it all figured out.
I think that the pros are obvious. It should simply be legal, and other comments have given good reasons.
However, there are some cons that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.
It impairs you, so any activity where that is a problem, like driving, may need extra attention or public education.
For smokers, inhaling smoke is dangerous.
There are no negatives.
Background: I haven’t used weed in decades, I have no personal interest in its legal status.
I can’t think of a single bad thing that has happened. People are more open about smoking, you can smell it in the street sometimes. I live in a tourist destination, there are ads everywhere for dispensaries. I assume getting high is at least part of the attraction for visitors.
Also, I assume it has had a negative effect on illegal drugs - why bother? - but I wouldn’t know anyway.
Yes, I supported it at the time, have not changed my view.
If you think weed should not be legalized, then you should be consistent and apply the same to alcohol and tobacco. Both of these substances do far more harm than weed with far fewer medical properties.
Deal 🤝
It’s been legal in Canada since 2015ish. Haven’t noticed a difference, but now I can get better regulated gummies which is nice for my asthma.
There are some minor downsides, you can’t walk 5 minutes in downtown Toronto without smelling weed. I can tolerate it just fine, but some people hate it. Otherwise it has been great.
I don’t agree with recreational marijuana use. I’ve had it personally affect my life negatively and wouldn’t advise people to smoke it.
If it’s medically needed and a doctor approves, sure but smoking it everywhere just because you can and because it looks cool is not the move.
I also don’t think people should get thrown in jail for it, maybe rehabbed but not thrown in jail for it.
Skill issue
I don’t like marijuana at all for myself (tried it twice with different methods of delivery) and found it to be extremely unpleasant.
I don’t see why that should affect other people’s ability to choose for themselves to enjoy it or not though. Why should they go through rehab just for enjoying something that’s not negatively affecting them?
If I’ve had pineapples personally negatively impact my life, should I get to say you can’t have any?
You’re kind of gambling on the fact it doesn’t instantly kill you or you don’t get addicted to it. I’m just saying that people shouldn’t take the risk to do marijuana unless it’s medically prescribed to them.
Why only Cannabis?
I get you, but we also have to start somewhere.
