Legalize Cannabis
- Thread starter SaltyDawg
- Start date
1. It's indeed good thing to have more force in your hand to deal with the sellers with kid customers, but will it increase your seller busting efficiency dramatically? With the way I used to get drugs, I don't think, 10 million police officers would bust me or my dealer. Anyway I don't like it being free because I don't believe that gateway of the cannabis is a lousy lie idea in the first place. Plus, by legalizing, there will occur more and more bigger market, will be more demand for it, with all the adults who likes to get that sweet highness, there won't even maybe any need of a dealer for kids.
2. So why not reducing all the unnecessary spendings other than busting recreational users and spend it for drug education etc? Then maybe even that recreational user number would reduce and you wouldn't have to arrest them?
Again I agree lots of points you made and already admit that it's grossly irregular by its current situation, but suddenly making them legal and free as its main solution won't work in my opinion.
GVC
Well-Known Member
No worries. I'm probably done with this one as well. That is, unless there's something substantive to respond to.
Sorry not being enough substantive for you. Peace. 
Not less valid, but (stereotyping here) less real-world. Alcohol leads to just as much as anything else. Weed is no broader path to destruction as much anything else. I was actually giving the LDS folks a lot of credit there .. that they wouldn't know .. but I think it's true. If you haven't made the mistakes yourself, you're less likely to actually know where one 'wrong path' will lead you vs. another.
I'll stop typing, because I mean it all the right way, but will be taken the wrong way. Sorry. Carry on.
Isn't Kentucky famous for their weed? PKM is probably a pothead.
Agreed. But my experience here in Utah is that of a group that doesn't understand the rest of the world all that well. No slight, at all, just an observation.
No. It makes me cough too much and makes me paranoid. Therefore, I do it less than twice per year, at most. My wife on the other hand ... sheeeeeeeshhhhhhsssshhhhshshshshshshsshssssssssssssheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh.
Holy ****, yes. She's probably smoked 10 joints in just the last 2 days .. because we've been hitting the bourbon, poolside, with friends in town .. but yeah, everyday for her.
OK, I'll admit I was being cavalier with the numbers he threw out. I was annoyed with his "Not much of a gateway" statement directly after quoting the 23% number. It's the old "correlation doesn't mean causation" thing. But correlation doesn't NOT mean causation either, if you know what I mean.
Glancing over this Wikipedia page just now, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_drug_theory, it looks like there have been studies that have come down on each side of the gateway hypothesis.
GVC
Well-Known Member
No offense Colton, but the first two studies in support of don't seem to find much (any?) of a causal link between cannabis use and future drug dependence/abuse. The third study employed rats.
This is all missing the point a little. Even if there is a gateway effect, since only a very small number of regular cannabis users abuse harder drugs, and since cannabis demand seems amazingly inelastic, legalizing cannabis could only possibly account for a tiny increase in addicts (if the US experience were similar to that of the Netherlands and Portugal). Or none at all. It seems as though the criminal law is not the best way to reduce and treat addicts as well. An ineffective yet extremely expensive policy is probably not the way to go. Nevermind that, on a much smaller scale, the US is experiencing some of the same ill effects under the War on Drugs as they did during alcohol prohibition. There isn't a single violent drug lord who wants drugs legalized.
Now I realize I'm tossing a lot of heretofore unsubstantiated (or insufficiently substantiated) claims around, but it's hard to commit to combating all the "I feel"s and "I think"s seriously.
What outcomes do we desire? What outcomes can we expect under different policy regimes? What are the costs and benefits of those policies?
Last edited:
As far as the gateway argument, I feel like I'm a good example. I started smoking weed at an early age (like 15). I've always smoked weed semi-regularly (a couple of times a week), but rarely more than that. The older I have gotten, the more I have become disinterested in marijuana. I still like smoking it, but I feel like I have more important things to do/spend my money on, so I don't really smoke it anymore except on occasion. During that time, I have only been interested in doing shrooms and LSD. I have done both of those a couple of times and enjoyed them, but I have never done them habitually or excessively. I have never developed any kind of drug dependence or addictive problem. If anything, marijuana kept me from experimenting with more dangerous and addictive drugs.
Hartsock
Banned
The real difference is that alcohol is very very dangerous and marijuana is not. Oh and marijuana is illegal.