But the pardon can allow those with convictions on their record to live a normal life.
Edit: major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to. It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually, and there are a whole lot of them, they operate under the radar, and it’s hard to contact them. Finally it’s impossible to verify they actually did.
Well you see, in the business of verifying someone's background it's really common to break the law and get way with it. The Verifiers are criminals themselves.
>major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to.
if they 'are supposed to' then it sounds like a potential civil liability if they have not done what they were supposed to do.
>It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually
or a lawyer could find some firms that did not do as they were supposed to, and some people that would have standing to sue, and ka-ching? This of course depends if my understand of "are supposed to" is correct.
But the quoted statistic is confusing. Under what specifics would 300 people = 0.5% of the total prison population? As I understand it, the total prison population of the USA is over 1 million, and the subset designated 'federal prisoners' is, by itself, over 200,000.
Note that terminology in this space is very important and subtle. 7 million people are arrested each year, and > 600K are sent to prison, but the total number of people in prison (and number that are incarcerated one way or another) is much lower than those numbers suggest. The total incarcerated population is about 1.75 million.
2% of the total population arrested each year sounds like a lot!
If we believe chatgpt, then the median time in prison is a couple of months.
I'm unsure about the math: "The arrival rate $\lambda$ is the rate at which people arrive in the queue, and the service rate $\mu$ is the rate at which people are served and leave the queue. In a stable system, the service rate must be greater than the arrival rate, otherwise the queue will grow indefinitely.
Given that the total number of people in the queue $n$ is 1750000 and the arrival rate $\lambda$ is 600000 people per year, we can find the service rate $\mu$ by dividing the total number of people in the queue by the arrival rate:
$\mu = \frac{n}{\lambda} = \frac{1750000}{600000} \approx 2.92$ people per year.
This means that on average, about 2.92 people are served and leave the queue every year.
The median waiting time in the queue can be calculated using the formula for the median of an exponential distribution, which is $\frac{\ln(2)}{\mu}$.
So, the median waiting time in the queue in years is $\frac{\ln(2)}{2.92} \approx 0.237$ years."
> 2% of the total population arrested each year sounds like a lot!
It's probably mostly people getting arrested multiple times.
But yeah, there's a lot of arrests where police in other countries would have just ID'd people and sent them on their way. Arrests are simply the default operating procedure in the US, which is likely related to the fact that the lack of reliable national ID makes it harder to identify people on the spot.
I think most libertarians argue holds water that weed and dealing weed is a victimless crime. Now redo that with "how many people are in for dealing weed (and only weed) and other drugs" and that number goes way up. Obviously people found with guns and doing violence while selling drugs is another thing, no longer victimless. The War on Drugs is multidecade failure
The Biden administration—HHS, specifically—has recommended rescheduling marijuana as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.
> "If the recommendation is approved, marijuana would no longer be listed as a dangerous substance like heroin or LSD and it would reduce or potentially eliminate criminal penalties for possession. The decision rests with the DEA, which has rarely, if ever, rejected a rescheduling recommendation from HHS."
Yeah I mean if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order and have it rescheduled tomorrow whether the DEA wanted to or not. this is just a performative act. He is the chief executive ultimately its his decision to leave it as is of to reschedule it. if he doesn't then it means he doesn't care and anything less is just a performance for votes
> if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order
The guy is President, not king. He's supposed to delegate those sorts of policy decisions to experts. Ruling by consensus, not fiat, is a _good thing_. It's like having a change advisory board or code review process vet changes before they get deployed in production.
The bit about performing for votes is a circular argument with no way to refute it. You could say the same thing about any elected official.
Sure, but thousands of people now have one less obstacle to passing a background check for a job, etc. I agree with you about the scheduling, but this is more than a gesture, and will have a material impact on a lot of people, especially in DC.
The president only has the power to pardon people convicted or accused of violating federal law and prosecuted in federal court.
The problem is that nearly all people arrested for simple possession of marijuana aren't charged under federal law nor prosecuted in federal court. They are charged under state law that similarly outlaws marijuana possession and prosecuted in state court. The president does not have the power to pardon convictions and punishment in state court.
As the proclamation says, the District of Columbia's local laws are technically federal laws. So it wipes out the convictions of a good number of people in one of our major cities.
I can't quite tell if this applies to military convictions. That would be the other area where the Federal government takes the time to prosecute something as minor as mere possession or use.
Another interesting question: does this actually pardon, or is it more like an open call for applications? It looks to me like you'd want to get that pardon certificate from the WH Pardon lawyer well before the next election.
It depends on the statutory scheme for the acquisition of the federal land. In some cases the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction, in some cases concurrent, and in some it only has a proprietary interest (i.e., the federal government is the landowner but the state has legal jurisdiction).
> What other places outside of DC does federal law apply to?
In theory, anything owned by the federal government is under federal law. This means federal court houses, branches of the fed, federal waters (anything above 3 geographical miles from shore), national parks, etc. Sometimes law enforcement is delegated to state local authorities though.
> As the proclamation says, the District of Columbia's local laws are technically federal laws. So it wipes out the convictions of a good number of people in one of our major cities.
According to the report that preceded this action, more than 75% of all federal possession convictions were prosecuted in Arizona. Apparently it was just a rogue jurisdiction.
My guess would be that by the president pardoning these crimes, it would potentially make it more acceptable for governors to do the same for state level crimes.
However, it still doesn't solve the overarching issue of draconian drug laws.
Ia that really ironic though? If anything, it should be something we value. Granted, this was much later than would have been liked, like decades later. But a politician going, "oh, wait, that policy I helped passed turned out to have bad side effects. I see it now, recognize it and will do something about it." We have too many politicians who pass bad policy, and better yet pass it, watch it blow up in their faces and move on with their life to never revisit again. Chances are, most to all politicians are at some point going to pass bad policy, the important part is, recognizing when things go off the rails and correcting course.
Believe it or not, I actually know someone who was federally charged for possession of marijuana in the last few years.
He worked as a mover and moved someone onto a military base (in a decriminalized state). He forgot he had his weed in his jacket pocket when they got searched entering the base. Didn't get jail, but did get probation and a record of it.
> The president only has the power to pardon people convicted or accused of violating federal law and prosecuted in federal court.
The president can pardon any offense against the united states except impeachment. State offenses have always been left to governors to pardon but states are what make the united states and as such state offenses while violating only state law, they are an offense against a state that is part of the union and affect a citizen of the union, as such the president has ulitmate power to pardon.
This is similar to how state legal dispute or prosecution can ultimately be decided by the supreme court of the united states. It does not stop at the state's supreme court.
If trump gets elected next year for example, he can pardon himself of his upcoming likely conviction in georgia. Else you have a situation where in 2028 as soon as he leaves office he becomes a wanted criminal.
Presidents know that pardoning a stare criminal is overriding state law and alienating voters from that state and risking rifts in the union.
I believe the president supersedes state governors in every power they have except things like appointments and firings at the state level.
> Does the President have authority to grant clemency for a state conviction?
No. The President’s clemency power is conferred by Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution of the United States, which provides: “The President . . . shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Thus, the President’s authority to grant clemency is limited to federal offenses
That's DoJ policy. The legal community in the majority also agree with that, but, here is the text from wikipedia:
> The Constitution grants the president the power to pardon "offenses against the United States".[5] An offense that violates state law, but not federal law, is an offense against that state rather than an offense against the United States; however, the Supreme Court has never ruled on this matter or in the President's power to grant a habeas corpus petition for a state offense where it has been denied by a federal court.
If you consider english common law and the absolute nature of the pardon power, including presumptive crimes then this is an untested grey area. If the power was limited, the limit would have been stated. The current consensus is that the limit is implied, but an argument can be made that since english kings had pardon power over their whole domain, the same is implied when stating "offenses against the united states".
Federal authority supersedes state authority in every other case, if this was different it should have been stated so as it is a deviance. But ultimately this would come down to a supreme court opinion.
And when they are charged under federal law, it is often a negotiated downgrade from distribution, i.e. people rarely get sentenced for mere possession.
This pardon is for the entire United States, at least at the federal level. I don’t think kids sitting in a county jail for brining a joint to school in west Texas are going anywhere, though!
And the last is specific to possession on federal properties.
So no, the headline is not overselling the implications. If you simply possessed marijuana and were convicted under federal law, your case is going to be pardoned.
The president can however pardon in states using “emergency powers”.
Our constitution does not define the breadth and depth of emergency powers and it would be up for both congress and SCOTUS to decide that the president can’t do that.
I would hope that a president would just say fuck it and try this though. As much as I want things to be done “the right way”, I value lives of folks more than my neurodivergent desire to have things done neatly.
I don't think it is the case that the President can use "emergency powers" to pardon state crimes; the same argument suggests that the President can use those powers to declare themselves dictator for life.
POTUS: I'm pardoning everybody in your state who has a drug conviction.
STATE GOV: No, you aren't.
POTUS: You have to let all of those people out of prison.
STATE GOV: No, we don't.
POTUS: It's an emergency!
STATE GOV: No, it isn't.
Did the Federal Government send in the military to enforce the federal 55 mph speed limit? No, your state would just get cut off from federal funding (funding for which, BTW, came from the state’s citizens to begin with).
So, don’t let ‘em out? Have fun funding the housing of the pardoned with your own state’s dollars. Is it worth that much to you, Governor It-is-the-principle-not-the-money?
This is exactly the answer. It's also the reason for perennial disputes about states rights, and the exact reason that the constitution was written the way it was - all rights not specifically enumerated lie with the states. Unfortunately, the interstate commerce clause has become the mother of all loopholes, and the federal government has ballooned to be an order of magnitude (at least) larger than it was ever intended to be. And now it wields all this unintended power and collects copious amounts of tax revenue, which it then turns around and wields against the states to exercise yet more power.
The federal speed limit is a law passed by Congress. We're talking about executive action here, and the President is specifically forbidden by law to impound funds without Congressional authorization.
I suppose the idea is that the "pardoned" prisoners would sue their states demanding release. If the Supreme Court bothered granting cert it would be to write the shortest, nastiest 9-0 "absolutely not" opinion ever.
Emergency powers are not in the constitution, they’re basically “up in the air” of precedent.
It is likely that if an action like this is taken, feathers will be rustled. However if that rustling would impact anything is completely up in the air.
> Emergency powers are not in the constitution, they’re basically “up in the air” of precedent.
No, emergency powers that actually exist are components of Constitutionally enumerated powers and, for the President, are mostly spelled out in statute law passed by Congress under its Constitutionally enumerated powers.
There is no source of powers for the US government outside of the Constitution.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Nothing in currently recognized emergency powers allows the president to pardon state crimes, and in fact it’s very clearly settled law that he cannot do so.
No state or federal court is likely to respect or uphold such an abuse of power as long as US democracy remains intact … and while US democracy is very much in jeopardy right now, it won’t vanish before the next president takes over - Biden will follow the rules of the democratic system.
That is fairly wild when you phrase it like that. Especially as you could literally be 100ft from someone getting cuffs put on who is across the border in another state, while you are getting gold treatment in a dispensary trying to figure out what strain you want.
I don't disagree that this is good for those involved or affected.
However, nothing stops the same from happening to someone tomorrow. The past several administrations have been relying too heavily on executive fiat for the optics.
The DEA needs to reschedule it. Anything else is at best a band-aid, if not simple lip service to buy votes.
Calling it “for optics” is downplaying the severity of the situation. The reason presidents rely so much on executive fiat is because our actual legislative system has paralyzed itself with partisan politics, gerrymandering, and the filibuster.
Obviously it’s intentional that it’s hard to pass things, and legitimately controversial things should be difficult to pass (and shouldn’t happen by executive fiat), but there are 2nd and 3rd order interests overriding what should be the 1st order interest of effective legislation.
Among these 2nd/3rd order interests: not looking bad to your party, making the other party look bad to their constituents, not upsetting some specific demagogues, not losing personal or party power at all costs, winning dunks in social media, looking good for the camera, ensuring that no third party could emerge, ensuring that if the other party gains power that they are incapable of exercising it, etc
The problem with blaming Congress is that the harms could be easily mitigated by the DEA changing the scheduling, which was my point.
Rumor has it that is in the works, but the fact that it has taken so long starts and ends with the executive office.
That said, Congress decriminalizing it entirely is definitely something that is going to take too long, and will also be entirely the fault of Congress.
DEA rescheduling would be the "executive fiat" and is more undo-able than pardons.
The DEA is entirely under the control of the executive. So if you want a more permanent solution, the only one is legislative, and that is extremely unlikely to happen even if there were extremely broad public support.
If we can get 2/3 of the state legislatures to agree, and 3/4 of them to ratify we can amend the constitution without Congress via a Constitutional Convention.
Still long odds but we technically don't HAVE to do it with Congress.
The DEA needs to have this authority rescinded. They clearly cannot be trusted with it, and they have no impetus to remove historically misclassified drugs off the list, as it would reduce their overall budget.
It's the federal version of the Siebert strategy and it's completely injust.
> They clearly cannot be trusted with it, and they have no impetus to remove historically misclassified drugs off the list, as it would reduce their overall budget.
If that's their logic then someone there can't do math. Between fentanyl, other opioids, and meth they have plenty to do.
Meth is historically misclassified, too. Why are we drawing the line at marijuana?
If we lower the scheduling of opioids to Schedule IV, fentanyl usage in the United States would drop almost entirely within a month. Importing clean prescription drugs from other countries would have low enough risk that the reward would be easily met. Odds are, it would also undercut wider organized drug crime.
You may find this article in The Economist worth a read:
First, I don't draw the line at marijuana. Notice how many drugs I didn't list there.
Second, stepping down from fent to heroin, which I think is what you're implying, is not going to happen that fast and frankly the way you phrased this whitewashes an entire series of events that happened that gave fentanyl the dominance that it has as a street drug; the prescription pill to fentanyl pipeline is one built from a cost and strength. For one, it's much cheaper than high quality heroin. Second, heroin used to be the dominant drug when people couldn't afford prescription pills. Peoples tolerances on opioids quickly build and some subset of the population were using so much heroin that they could more cheaply inject or smoke fent. Going up that pipeline can happen in months, going down could take years.
The scheduling of the drug is irrelevant to the problem that there are and will be people who illegally manufacture and sell meth and fent. The DEA has plenty of those people to go after, even if we legalize and regulate every drug today. Why? Cost. The same way prescription pills are a pipeline to fent, meth is the final stop in a similar pipeline of stimulants.
OP is technically incorrect that rescheduling alone would solve the fentanyl problem, but not for the reasons you state.
> For one, it's much cheaper than high quality heroin. Second, heroin used to be the dominant drug when people couldn't afford prescription pills. Peoples tolerances on opioids quickly build and some subset of the population were using so much heroin that they could more cheaply inject or smoke fent. Going up that pipeline can happen in months, going down could take years.
Fentanyl is cheaper than heroin because of supply-side constraints: specifically, fentanyl is produced in larger quantities for pharmaceutical purposes, and the illegal markets are structured in a way that promotes the distribution of fentanyl over the distribution of heroin. However, that does not mean that fentanyl is inherently cheaper in an abstract sense. If legal restrictions were lifted, both fentanyl and heroin would be dramatically cheaper than either one is today.
This is, incidentally, another argument in favor of maintenance programs. Almost all of the indirect harms associated with illicit drug use, and many of the direct ones, are a consequence of the legal status and the expense (both financial and nonfinancial) associated with them.
Clinical trials present overwhelming evidence that, when provided with a low-cost, pharmaceutical grade supply of heroin, users are able to hold down stable jobs, maintain permanenent housing, etc., all things that they previously struggled with due to having to spend so much time, effort, and money in order to address what is fundamentally a medical issue for them.
> The same way prescription pills are a pipeline to fent, meth is the final stop in a similar pipeline of stimulants.
This is more or less the "gateway drug" theory, and it's simply incorrect. There is no "pipeline" of stimulants, and to the extent that one can even be argued to exist, methamphetamine is not the "final stop" in one.
"Gateway drug theory" has to do with going from one class of drugs to another. That is not what I described. I described usage within a single class of drugs that has to do with chemically addictive properties, strength, and cost dictating the choice of the next drug.
I can see your argument about cost, but I think it ignores that, for instance, tranq is now being used in combination with fent. The reason for that isn't cost, it's entirely strength and chemically addictive properties. I think ignoring those kind of factors falls squarely outside of harm reduction. Where your argument with cost runs foul is in states like California where the legalization and subsequent regulation of the drug shot it's cost up. I'd argue marijuana probably doesn't need that kind of regulation, but chemically addictive substances I think do.
I think you are mischaracterizing the emergence of tranq.
"Xylazine proliferated as a response to the shorter fentanyl highs, with drug sellers using it to extend the high & mimic a traditional heroin experience."
The optics, for a modern democratic republic, aren’t even that fantastic: pardons and proclamations are the acts of Kings. Democracies change laws through debate, legislation, and the voting by the representatives of the people.
I hope this pardon doesn’t dilute the will for more substantive drug policy reform.
High officials have pardon power in a great many democratic republics. And when the country has a parliamentary system and government is led by the prime minister, sometimes pardon power rests with the president whose position is seen as aloof from all the debate and strife in parliament.
The problem is that the US has difficulty operating as a modern democracy in general.
Yeah sure, I agree with you that proclamations and executive orders are inherently vulnerable to the whims of whomever happens to hold the office and have no place in a democracy.
But the legislative branch, as it currently operates, is not much different. In practice it results in huge pendulum swings and deadlocks, making every 2 years (because midterms) a nail biting event for the populous because hard fought rights and legislation can be undone in the blink of an eye.
As someone who grew up in a coalition country, it’s saddening to see how people around me here in the US are constantly in a state of anxiety, filled with despair like someone who’s awaiting the return of an abusive spouse from work, wondering what will happen this time.
If we somehow could get rid of the FPTP system in our legislative system, then we can rid ourselves from the two party system.
Not only will this significantly lessen things like gerrymandering, and the power of lobbying, but it would force parties to form a coalition because it’s less likely that one single party holds the majority of seats.
Parties would have to actually debate each other and try to convince each other, make concessions on all sides, in order to form a coalition.
The result of this is a more steady course in government policy, with sweeping pendulum swings being rarer and the changes being made being more nuanced.
Subsequently the citizenry doesn’t have to be on high alert 24/7 and the country can function more like a modern democracy.
And next thing in the agenda would be judicial reform.
Until then, both the legislative branch and the executive branch will subject us to whims and other pendulum swings.
Congress set the initial scheduling of some drugs, and set a process for updating the schedules within the executive branch going forward, with the DEA (in statute, the Attorney-General, but in practice within Justice its the DEA doing the main work) playing the key role (HHS in statute -- via the FDA in practice-- plays a mandatory role in advance of the decision, which is controlling in the case of a currently non-controlled drug that HHS recommends not controlling, but advisory in, I believe, all other cases.)
I don't know about the power of appointment there and it's limitations. Regardless, that's still an influence move. It's either trying to influence the existing people in power via threat of unemployment, or influencing potential replacements with a promise of employment.
I don't support a train barreling toward derailment just because I prefer the view from a moving train.
If there is a single negative consequence from this pardon, some sort of Willy Horton moment for Biden, it will definitely derail the path to decriminalization and strengthen the resolve of the opposition.
I support pardons for miscarriages of the procedures of justice, not for freeing incarcerated people for actions that are still considered crimes. I guess "hooray, our team won today" is what I am supposed to be saying; time will show us the good or bad of having chosen the shortcut.
I believe the Biden administrations has gotten the ball rolling in getting the DEA to start the process of investigating it for rescheduling. Along with what looks like a few congress people, Cortez and Gaetz? I could be wrong on that. Granted, if so, the process should get sped up. [1]
But ideally we have the solution on two fronts. The DEA should still reschedule it. But Congress should also seriously implement a law decriminalizing it.
Would the House ever pass it as it would give a huge win to one side? A bit unaware in terms of US politics, but up here since legalization, life is exactly as it was before — people who smoked just continue to smoke but legally, people who don’t… don’t.
> Would the House ever pass it as it would give a huge win to one side?
The House doesn't have to pass it, resecheduling is an executive action. (Congress could act to block it by legislation, and there is a streamlined process for doing that for reg changes in the Congressional Review Act but, it would take both Houses and -- since presumably the President will support his own administration's regulation -- sufficient supermajorities to overcome a veto.)
The House doesn’t have to do anything for rescheduling to happen. HHS (one federal agency) has already recommended it to DEA (another federal agency), which has the final say unless Congress were to affirmatively intervene.
With that said, they aren’t proposing to grant federal legality to the state-legal recreational marijuana market. They are planning to reclassify it from Schedule I (no recognized medical use) to Schedule III (the same category as anabolic steroids or testosterone and less restricted than Adderall), so the proposed federally legal way to get it would need a prescription and dispensing by a pharmacy or doctor.
One thing the President might be able to do is to remove legally-sourced marijuana use as a disqualification for holding a US security clearance. It is also disqualifying for other Federal background checks related to buying handguns. Maybe the change from Schedule I to Schedule III would do this automatically.
"One thing the President might be able to do is to remove legally-sourced marijuana use as a disqualification for holding a US security clearance."
Just to clarify, current use of marijuana is a disqualification for a security clearance. Past use of marijuana is not a disqualifier. When I was a younger man I used marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, cocaine and MDMA. Several of them very frequently. I disclosed all of this prior use and was able to get multiple security clearances through the years.
I no longer have nor will in the future have a security clearance so I now enjoy my legal weed.
> The House doesn’t have to do anything for rescheduling to happen.
The entire theme of this thread is "nothing stops the same from happening tomorrow". One president can order the DEA to reschedule it, and then the next can undo that work just as easily. We need a law, not an executive fiat. Most of the country is in favor of legalization, including most republican voters, so you'd think it would be easy to get the house on board, had it not been co-opted by right-wing extremists.
Under current federal law the President doesn't have the authority to simply order rescheduling. There is a process that must be followed and substantial changes to that process would require an Act of Congress.
The house is incapable of passing the most basic of funding for national security to let Ukraine win the war, let alone something even slightly controversial
Marijuana cannot be legalized without an act of Congress. The executive branch could always just stop enforcing the laws passed by the legislative branch, but I thought we wanted less executive overreach.
> Marijuana cannot be legalized without an act of Congress.
Marijuana can be rescheduled without an act of Congress; what is on the table is not full legalization (which, AFAIK, could also be done within the executive, because IIRC drugs can be descheduled by the same process for rescheduling) but rescheduling from Schedule I to Schedule III.
And by "on the table", I mean the first step -- FDA recommendation to DEA -- has already been done.
One moral risk we play is does legalizing our recreational drug (eg alcohol/cannibis) increase the harm done to addicts[0]? While I maintain that there's a logical inconsistency to having legal alcohol and illegal cannabis, I'm on the fence if the consistency should be that both are somehow controlled/illegal (though absolutely not criminal).
Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...
For the vast majority of drug users that are not addicted, this is obvious.
And for the addicts, criminalization is the last thing they need. Deterrence might prevent a few people from getting addicted, but not many. A lot of drug addiction is downstream of homelessness and mental health issues meaning the illegality is a very weak deterrent for the most vulnerable.
If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm.
The current regime is not really interested in harm reduction; there is no effort to compare interventions based on objective harm metrics. Instead non-harm metrics like arrest rates and usage are chased. The policies start from Puritanism and historical racism and justify themselves claiming to care about harm after the fact.
To your second point… I think the racial discrimination baked into the history of drug enforcement should steer us away from giving police more excuses to incarcerate on their discretion. But even ignoring that, I don’t think we should support “we knew but could not provide evidence to prove guilt”, the justice system requires evidence for a reason.
> If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm.
This point seems plausible, are there any sources that might prove it?
Also your point about racial discrimination might be a good utilitarian argument for it's better to let those racially discriminated against free alongside some folks who were also upto other crimes... The replies have definitely given me more food for thought.
The go-to example is Portugal, where drugs were decriminalized, and death rates went down. Not without challenges though, as they are now seeing issues with public drug taking and associated crime (which could be more about pandemic homelessness since we see that in US cities too). I think the harm reduction results are clear here but you also need to do the part where you invest more broadly in social programs (and with sufficient funding for homelessness services, taking a zero tolerance approach to public intoxication seems perfectly acceptable to me). See https://www.cato.org/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-port... on harm.
There is lots of evidence supporting needle exchanges as good for harm reduction. See Scotland, Netherlands, and many other EU countries.
Another one to watch is Oregon, where they did the decriminalization bit, but I think without the shift in funding to social services. Haven’t dug much here. (I think “reduce policing, increase social services” is the most sympathetic interpretation of what the moderate Democrats were thinking when they initially supported the “defund the police” slogan, which is now associated with more radical policies that are toxic to the center.)
There is a risk of “no true Scotsman” in the following point, but this is really an extremely radical policy proposal, at least it looked so until a couple years ago; there aren’t actually good examples end-to-end. So I think we need to employ epistemic humility and do local iterative experiments to prove it out (the advantage of the federal model in the US is a federal decriminalization would result in 50 natural experiments as states passed their own laws.) I don’t want to concede too much uncertainty though, the harms of criminalization are objectively very high, so you’d need to measure very high costs from the proposed new policy which I’m very skeptical that you’d see.
But recreational use of those drugs isn't legalized and the highest death toll from opiate use comes from people who move from the pharmaceutical-grade drugs to unregulated street drugs.
Legalization & certification of quality is a good endpoint, if you can buy cheap heroin of good purity and stable dosage, no need for underground sources laced with fentanyl of variable purity.
I’m here for the FDA regulating what is on the label matching what is in the pill. But there is so an argument for optional certification; it might end up that the steady state cost for FDA compliance leaves room at the bottom end of the market for Mexican underground labs, and I’d rather have US above-ground labs filling that niche (because there are other recourses for egregious behavior like lacing oxy pills with Fentanyl if your supplier is in the US, which are not available against cartel labs in Mexico). It’s an empirical hypothesis though, you might not see prices high enough to matter with FDA compliant labs.
Another temptation to resist is taxing the drugs to pay for social services, “sin tax” in this case would again leave the door open for illegal labs. Again you can tune the parameters when you have evidence from the market.
My point is that we effectively did this for a couple decades with oxycodone and hydrocodone… the result has been disastrous.
We can probably keep more existing addicts alive by full legalization, but we pretty much invite a huge wave of new folks who will spend the rest of their lives with an opiate dependency.
As a sibling noted, I think the takeaway from oxy is a lot more complex. I don’t think many people are dying from prescription meds, I think most are dying when they go to the black market to service their addiction when they cannot get prescriptions, or cannot afford them.
For example if you want oxy, it’s very expensive on the black market, and so many end up taking fentanyl instead, which is more dangerous even if you have known purity medical grade, and is extremely dangerous when purchased on the black market with variable and unknown purity.
So in summary, I really strongly disagree that “we effectively did this”. The decriminalization program has not been seriously tried for opiates anywhere outside Portugal (where it didn’t cause an increase in usage, and did result in decreased harm).
I agree with you but there are pathways for decriminalization and legalization ala cannabis in states that have fully legalized it. There is still a difference between the "medicinal" products which require something resembling a prescription and recreational ones which are sold to anyone of age. Those recreational products still undergo testing and regulation.
What about sugar? Processed meat and fat? Carcinogenics in general? What is the extent of the control we are willing to relinquish to the government in order to control substance abuse?
And how about shifting the discussion from prohibition and control of use to the democatization of healthcare access for people to heal from addiction, if we are so interested in the welfare of addicts at this point?
I’d like governments to continue to regulate how corporations can use and productize addictive and damaging substances. Heroin in big macs would, i’m sure, sell well.
The arguments we made for drug prohibition started spreading to other areas of society. So the prohibitionist mindset was expanding, with potentially disastrous consequences for innocent people caught up in it.
Your argument about marijuana being easier to prove is a very bad scenario, regardless of how common it is/used to be. By the same logic why not make it illegal to wear socks, it would provide reason for the system to punish anybody they are 'fairly sure' is up to some other crime.
> While I maintain that there's a logical inconsistency to having legal alcohol and illegal cannabis, I'm on the fence if the consistency should be that both are somehow controlled/illegal (though absolutely not criminal).
"Illegal but not criminal" for a drug just means a very clumsily implemented tax, if you want to do that, it would strictly be better to just do a tax.
> Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...
Eliminating crimes whose main use is as an end-run around probable cause (for arrest) and proof beyond a reasonable doubt (for conviction) on other crimes (and thus, which exist to be selectively used to end-run due process) is an unqualified good thing.
>>> Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...
Then don't prosecute them. It's supposed to be hard to convict people.
> Another thought on the subject is how many small charges were simply because the police were fairly sure the defendant was up to some other crime, but were unable to make a court case over it (due to difficulty of evidence etc)? It may be that it was hard to prove the accused was doing X, but the bag of weed in their pocket was undeniable...
That is an excellent argument in favor of legalization, not one against. What you're describing is selective enforcement and prosecution, and the use of it as a tool to arrest and convict someone because they can't be proven to have committed some other crime.
Along that line of thinking, if you prohibit alcohol and cannabis (and I assume tobacco?) to protect addicts, what about casino gambling? How about micro-transaction games that are gambling in all but name?
I support full legalization of cannabis and I agree that those are valid concerns.
Yes, the harm done to addicts will probably increase. There's always trade offs. I think people on the pro-legalization side are not doing enough to address this.
One of the problems with public discourse is that each side doesn't want to give an inch to the other side. I think a lot of people who support legalization of cannabis kinda know that harms to addicts might increase, but they're afraid that if they mention that then that will just give a talking point to the prohibitionists.
Both sides are guilty of misusing or ignoring facts and concerns that don't benefit their preferred take on the issue. However, it seems to me the prohibitionists are far more egregious when it comes making bad arguments.
to be clear the kind of "fairly sure" i was referring to was the kind of undeniable first hand proof, but difficult to prove in court. Such things exist, a police officer can give testimony in court about what happened, and it's subject to a level of scrutiny, but their body cam recording confirming evidence makes it nigh impossible to argue (instead folks go for inadmissible evidence or other avenues to discredit the evidence).
My point being that sometimes criminals get away with things not because we don't know who is doing what, but because we cannot make a court case. IANAL but my understanding is that the bar (no pun intended) is extremely high (no pun intended).
Some will say "It should be high" but in the realworld we need a pragmatic approach that balances difficulty of proof vs innocent people incarcerated. It's my assertion that the only system which has 0 chance of false positives is the one which incarcerates no one. So it's about finding a good minima / balance.
I don't use cannabis. If it were to go away tomorrow, my life wouldn't change one bit.
I am absolutely thrilled with this blanket pardon.
Rephrasing the statement slightly, like:
> I am pardoning additional individuals who may continue to experience the unnecessary collateral consequences of a conviction for simple possession of beer, attempted simple possession of beer, or use of beer.
and it sounds utterly obvious, and ludicrous that it ever would have been an issue in the first place. I love a good stout or porter, and I can walk into just about any grocery store, flash my ID, hand over some cash, and walk out with a bottle of drugs that's caused far more societal harm than cannabis ever did. That I can drink a beer in public and no one bats an eye, while my neighbors could smoke a joint in their own house and go to jail for it, is insanity.
Good on you, Mr. President, for making life better for a whole lot of Americans.
100%. The War on Drugs was always in contradiction of the spirit of the 21st Amendment, which ended Prohibition.
It needs to be formally acknowledged as such, and further as fundamentally unconstitutional, but these kinds of victories take time. At least that so-called "War" is destroying fewer lives now.
How else was the government to continue to systemically hold down minorities in this country post-Civil Rights Act, while simultaneously enriching the Military Industrial Complex by flooding local law enforcement with military equipment paid for by US taxpayers?
It's pretty clear what certain people wanted in response to the 70s stemming from the rise of minority groups like the Black Panthers or the American Indian Movement trying to use their newly-enacted rights to fight oppression. Even the NRA was pro gun control when the Black Panthers were using the 2A for open-carrying to protect black Americans.
If it was truly about marijuana use, then when usage rates for white and black Americans are effectively the same, black people would not be 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.
Or say, one group has historical disadvantage which causes them to be disproportionately poor which causes them to be more likely themselves to commit crime and/or live in high crime areas. Which then leads to an increased police presence and, therefore, an increased chance of police interaction.
There's no need to add in the practically unprovable presence of deliberate targeting when other explanations sufficiently account for disparities.
I think the thing you said about priors is repeating a talking point about prosecution or sentencing disparities that isn't particularly relevant in the context of an arrest.
I have no idea what you mean about multiple charges.
> I think the thing you said about priors is repeating a talking point about prosecution or sentencing disparities that isn't particularly relevant in the context of an arrest.
Arrests don’t occur in a vacuum. The prior convictions are known and are a factor.
> I have no idea what you mean about multiple charges.
Person A is smoking pot and is arrested. Person B is smoking pot wearing a bloody t shirt with a knife in his hand. If you’re more likely to engage in criminal activity, you’re more likely to be smoking pot while engaging in criminal activity (again, on average).
> If you’re more likely to engage in criminal activity, you’re more likely to be smoking pot while engaging in criminal activity (again, on average).
I think a slightly simpler way of putting your point is that Black people are more likely to be serious criminals than white people. Am I missing some nuance?
Yes, and if person A and B are white American and African American, the AA smoker is much more likely to be actually arrested, rather than given a warning, etc. at the officer's discretion.
Dog whistles about unknowns like previous convictions or criminal history, and fictitious scenarios attempting to justify your point, don't actually help you the way you think they do.
If you're ignorant enough to think there isn't a disproportionately racist response in the WoD and the application of anti-cannabis laws on the citizenry, you need to open your eyes.
Attempting to claim "the prior convictions are known and are a factor" without admitting the disproportionate affect race has on such convictions being sought in the first place, is ignorant.
"Arrests don't occur in a vacuum." - If you deliberately and willfully ignore the existence of racism in the policing and justice systems, then you're not considering all the factors - and are being misinformed at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst.
For example, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67214409 - a world championship medallist and Olympian sprinter were arrested on entirely fictitious charges of having suspected drugs and weapons - with no basis, and with no evidence of such items being found.
If you can't see how the factor of race fits into the application of these laws against certain citizens more, that's your failure - it's nothing new.
None of what you say counters their point. At the end of the day African Americans commit a disproportionate amount of crime, it would be a miracle if they didn't have more prior convictions on average.
All the stats we have focus around arrests, charges, convictions, so any systemic racism in enforcement is included.
African Americans being arrested more per capita for a crime is not inherently the same as committing more crime per capita.
I have a hard time figuring how you could ever prove your claim, because how do you show who committed crimes that were either not suspects, or crimes that weren’t discovered or reported?
They're trying to denounce the racial aspect of likelihood of being targeted/prosecuted, by going "African Americans are more likely to be involved in crime already" - which is also inherent on racial biases and profiling in the police and criminal justice systems.
The point is that they can't jump to racist dog-whistles and then pretend like race isn't a factor in targeting to begin with.
I don't think anyone wanted the sweeping disinformation campaign about marijuana that flooded both the airwaves and law-enforcement training syllabuses that we got from the federal government.
It is hard to expect a republic to make sensible decisions when it's citizens are being actively misinformed. It is also hard to not impute malice on people who push blatantly false information.
It does make one wonder why, given the history of known deception, many people have recently seemed to abandon all critical thought and fervently believe whatever the government tells them.
"You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Nixon was certainly an enigma compared to other US Presidents:
Advocated for "Universal Healthcare" by basically mandating the Federal government to provide stop loss reinsurance to employers and creating a marketplace for poor people with income adjusted premiums... sounds familiar.
Families often raise a concern about how they never knew member X to be a baddie (eg The Golden State Killer). This is not a compelling refutation. Whether anyone can be wrong or lying about anything, is equally weak.
The part about "enriching the military industrial complex" is certainly a conspiracy theory though. The MIC has only ever shrunk in importance in the American economy, and giving people their used products is like the opposite of enriching them.
That’s not even an uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.
I was talking about the domestic law enforcement continuing to use the stuff they got for cheap/federally subsidized, or free, because “it’s effective.”
They generally don't actually use it or have a use for it though, that's part of the problem. And I don't think buying replacement tires for an MRAP is a lot of subscription revenue.
Please tell me more about Congress spending money on equipment the military doesn't need or want isn't corporate welfare for Defense Contractors.
Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961, and literally if there was ever someone who would know: it would be a man that was on both sides as a high-ranking general and President.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
This article is not about giving used equipment to police departments.
> Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961
Yeah, and we did what he said. US military spending as % GDP has gone straight down since ~1985. (Except around 2008 - but that's because our GDP went down.)
Since 1997, the 1033 program has handed $7.4bn worth of surplus equipment from the Department of Defense (DoD) to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies across America.
sure, let me spend my Saturday going on Google for you, to find the overwhelming evidence that has been gathered for the past several decades, which you somehow missed.
We know that the US police are more likely to shoot white people than black people based on the FBI data, so it’s not unreasonable to think this may also be an urban legend
The unfortunate part of the 13th amendment was the addendum that slavery wasn't slavery if it was part of the prison system. Which had the effect that those who wanted to continue the slavery system figured out "Oh, we'll just criminalize being black, and then we're legal again!"
Lack of understanding isn't the issue. Most fentanyl deaths are accidental poisoning. Mexican drug cartels are manufacturing counterfeit prescription drugs like Xanax and Oxycodone but substituting fentanyl for the active ingredient because it's cheaper. They have bad quality control and sometimes put in a fatal dose.
Fentanyl is administered daily by medical professionals in all sorts of situations. If "not understanding it's strength" is not what causes people to overdose on it, then why aren't millions of people dying from its administration in a medical setting?
The claim upthread is that regulation in labeling would materially curb fentanyl deaths. It would not. Materially restricting access to high-test opiates might, but we have ample experience from well-labeled high-test opiates to suggest that uncontrolled access to any of them is likely to be deadly.
If by "regulation" you mean "restriction", then, sure, I buy that, stipulating that it's somehow possible to restrict access. But what the preceding commenter meant by "regulation" was labeling. No, that won't work.
Because we had (and still do have) an epidemic of fatal abuse of labeled, regulated opioids. I'm not saying restriction works either; I'm rejecting the pat solutionism of the original comment and acknowledging how difficult the problem is. Maybe legalization is a good idea, maybe not; what it certainly isn't is a solution to opioid deaths.
And I believe the problem isn't so much that those legal opioids are dangerous, because in theory you still have a medical system to curb access. It is that they are addictive, and that users who get addicted will either abuse them or switch to illegal drugs if they can't access them.
I am not against drug legalisation, on libertarian grounds. If you want to kill yourself, kill yourself, it's your life not mine. But I don't buy that banning drugs results in more harm that making them freely available.
And it's very paradoxical for liberal societies to want to ban or heavily control the use of alcohol and cigarettes and to consider legalising hard drugs at the same time.
I'm not advocating for legalization. I'm pushing back on what I felt was a too-pat appeal to legalization and labeling as a cure-all for opioid deaths.
I don't have to. We've had a nationwide epidemic of deaths from regulated, labeled opiates, which is a fact that refutes your argument without requiring me to provide an alternative.
The overdoses per abuser from regulated, labeled opiates is on the order of at least 100x lower than illicit opioids. The consistent formulation is hugely safer than street drugs with inconsistent dose.
Sure. But I am responding to you, not that guy upthread.
Your implied claim, as I read it, is that "opioid-ness" is "why fentanyl kills," and there's nothing special going on because we had a bunch of deaths from licit opioids in the early 2000s. But I think that there's actually something special about illicit fentanyl in particular, as opposed to regulated opioids, and dose inconsistency is one plausible difference.
Anyway, you could just share what your thoughts are more explicitly, and that would be interesting and maybe harder to misunderstand.
I was responding to a particular argument. I've lost track of what we would be arguing about here. My point was pretty straightforward: high-test opiates don't simply kill because they're unregulated; they do a very good job of killing simply by being widely available at all.
They are not at all meaningfully controlled. There are drive-thru markets for this stuff with people doing traffic control in Chicago, and presumably in every other major market.
I don't believe it much matters. The death stats on oxycodone are staggering. I'm sure the street drugs are much more dangerous dose-for-dose, but given free access to oxycodone, you're just as likely to die, perhaps on a marginally longer schedule (there are survivor high-functioning maintenance addicts on both natural and synthetic/street opioids, obviously). Remember as well that a great many street fentanyl deaths were pts started on regulated, labeled opioids who spun off into addiction; they transitioned to fentanyl because it was easier to get, not because it was stronger.
Remember as well that a great many street fentanyl deaths were pts started on regulated, labeled opioids
Primis, this is an unbacked claim. Secundo, why didn't they die from prescription opiods?
The truth is fentanyl has a low safety index which makes the dose more important.
"The calculated safety index (ORantinociception/ORrespiratory depression) for fentanyl of 1.20 suggests that fentanyl has a low safety margin, implicating that fentanyl needs to be titrated with caution."
Now you're way off the map. The originem claim was that controlled fentanyl dose would decrease overdoses. It wasn't about oxycodone being 'safe' (even though I gave you stats that showed 80% of deaths of from combining drugs), it wasn't about oxycodone vs heroin. Not to mention that way more people take oxycodone than heroin, so even from a stats 101 angle this doesn't make sense. Really, what is the point of a reply like this?
I don't think I am. The subtext of the original comment was that making opiates more widely available but more carefully regulated as to content and dosage would save lives. It pretty clearly would not do that. The high order bit of this problem is the number of people that start habitually using opiates; I think basically nothing else matters.
Clear according to what? You gave no statistics and made nothing but unbacked claims. Most of what you did say is directly contradicted by the CDC.
Fentanyl is extremely potent and has a very narrow window between therapeutic dose and an overdose that kills you. Other opiate cause deaths overwhelmingly only when combined with other drugs.
Everything you have said about increased use or more deaths is an assumption not based on data. Why won't you source your claims?
You are making a claim then saying you don't have to back it up while making another dubious claim.
Among synthetic opioid–involved overdose deaths in 2016, almost 80% involved another drug or alcohol, such as: another opioid, heroin, cocaine, prescription opioids, benzodiazepines, alcohol, psychostimulants, and antidepressants.
FWIW, 2016 is somewhat dated as far as fentanyl goes. It has really exploded since that time.
> In 2021, nearly 71,000 drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids (other than methadone) occurred in the United States, which is more deaths than from any other type of opioid. Synthetic opioid-involved death rates increased by over 22% from 2020 to 2021 and accounted for nearly 88% of all opioid-involved deaths in 2021. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2021 was nearly 23 times the number in 2013.
What I posted wasn't about fentanyl. They implied that overdoses happen just as much with prescription pain killers that have consistent doses and what I posted shows that people aren't overdosing on known doses, they die when they combine drugs.
I would recommend https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-are-drug-dealers-p... , but the TL;DR is roughly "drug addicts are highly motivated by their addiction to find the most powerful drugs they can, to get the most powerful high they can get. Fentanyl being so strong that people overdose is, in this regard, a selling point"
Fentanyl is legal. It’s part of most epidurals given during childbirth, used for palliative care, and for all kinds of pain relief in medical settings.
Measured by annual average alcohol consumption in the US before and after prohibition, the 21st amendment was a huge success.
I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy. Afterward, individual mandatory punishment/rehab for those who abuse drugs/alcohol and harm themselves and others should be the norm.
> Measured by annual average alcohol consumption in the US before and after prohibition, the 21st amendment was a huge success.
That begs the question by assuming that's a good measurement. Is it? Since prohibition ended, has alcohol become so uniquely destructive here (compared to all other alcohol-allowing societies) that we've wanted to ban it again? I'm of the strong opinion that it's not.
> I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy.
Add that to the long list of things I agree with in principle, but reject in practice. Our timeline of such experiments is a series of social disasters.
In any case, I think there a clearly distinct categories of drugs. I don't want to live around meth users, because drug itself makes them paranoid, irritable, and hard to be near. I couldn't care less if my next door neighbor smokes weed.
In the same house, even! There's a huge difference between a low dose taken under a doctor's supervision and a recreational dose taken as large and frequently as desired.
> I think temporary society-scale prohibition when drug use becomes a widespread societal ill is good policy.
OK, but we passed a constitutional amendment saying the opposite, and the so-called "War on Drugs" operates in defiance of the spirit of that amendment.
>OK, but we passed a constitutional amendment saying the opposite
Which amendment is that? The 21st repealing prohibition did not make any value statements on whether prohibition was ever good policy, it merely repeals the amendment banning alcohol.
> and the so-called "War on Drugs" operates in defiance of the spirit of that amendment.
There is no "spirit of [the] amendment". It repealed a ban on alcohol. Alcohol was undeniably an extreme social ill before prohibition.
I've always taken it for granted that stuff like MIPs on your record get sealed or expunged once you hit 21. IMO it's silly to have it be a mark on your record even temporarily, but insane to me that some states don't automatically expunge misdemeanors for kids.
The counterargument is that these people are punished not for carrying weed, but for breaking the law.
The law could say "nobody shall wear a red tshirt", and I think it would then be morally okay to arrest and punish anyone who continues to wear red tshirts.
Anyone not okay with the red tshirt law can go get the law changed through the usual democratic process. But if they just ignore the law and wear a red tshirt anyway, then punish them.
Well, not all states have drugs laws that are absurd. At least one decent thing about California, Oregon, and Washington is some sensibility about legalizing or at least not prosecuting non-dangerous drugs. But, sad to say the ultra religious/conservative states are still stuck in legacy reasoning and it will take generations to change minds. And yes, alcohol is much worse than marijuana, shrooms, LSD.
Hey, let's not forget that, somehow, Mississippi has decriminalized possession for a very long time now. And more than 75% of the voters wanted medicinal marijuana. Now the state officials continue to brutally enforce their morals against medical patients,
having already dragged out the legislation to provide a legal framework for medicinal use, but that's regrettably hardly unique to medical marijuana patients.
I'm writing this from California, so I was using "neighbors" expansively to mean Americans in general. My experience in California has shaped how I see the argument. I grew up in the Midwest and heard a million reasons why weed was a ticket straight to hell. Now that I live somewhere that it's completely legal and normal for your average person to possess and use it, I can see that, literally, none of the dire warnings I'd been taught have come to pass.
California legalized weed, people who wanted to use it started admitting that they use it, and... that's about it. Nothing bad happened. If anything, I know people who switched from alcohol to weed in the spirit of harm reduction, and they seem to be better for it.
Decriminalizing drugs and other progressive changes to law enforcement have led to some problems in San Francisco and Portland.
There’s a real sense of the breakdown of social order.
"Should be acceptable" is the wrong way to look at it. "Should be illegal" is the question that should be answered.
There's a subtle but important distinction between
> Alcohol is allowed, so cannabis should be allowed.
and
> Alcohol is not illegal, so cannabis should not be illegal.
Our legal system is a default-allow denylist: unless a law says you can't do something, you can. The government doesn't grant permission. It removes it.
So because the government hasn't made the case that we should ban alcohol, I think it's on them to prove that cannabis is somehow worse to justify its banning.
In absolute numbers, the harm from weed is increasing as more people use it. As a rate, it’s a rounding error compared to alcohol.
For instance[1]:
“According to the 2022 Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 29.5 million people ages 12 and older (10.5% in this age group) had AUD in the past year.”
Compare that to[2]:
“The incidence rate of cannabis-induced psychosis increased steadily from 2.8 per 100 000 person years in 2006 to 6.1 per 100 000 person years in 2016.”
You’re orders of magnitude more likely to suffer harm from using alcohol than cannabis. I’m saying that as someone who enjoys the occasional drink but doesn’t use weed; I don’t have skin in the game.
Yes, drugs come with risks. You know what else triggers latent psychosis? Alcohol. Prohibition is not the answer to this problem, education, harm reduction, the freedom to seek information and help without prosecution, is.
> You know what else triggers latent psychosis? Alcohol.
from the link I posted: "The risk for developing schizophrenia spectrum disorders is greatest with cannabis, although other substances such as amphetamines, hallucinogens, opioids, and sedatives also increase
risk"
I'm truly sorry about your brother. I lost a sister and it wrecked me.
But statistically, he got very, very unlucky. I quoted this in another post[1]:
“The incidence rate of cannabis-induced psychosis increased steadily from 2.8 per 100,000 person years in 2006 to 6.1 per 100,000 person years in 2016.”
If people live to be an average of 80, that would affect about 1 in 200 people over a lifetime. Incidentally, the disease that took my sister has almost exactly the same incidence.
Again, I'm very sorry. Both our families were hit with very unlikely tragedies.
It's impossible for the general public to understand any actual risks associated with marijuana while they still believe in the reefer madness nonsense from almost a century ago.
I'm sorry for your loss. Your comment reads like you disapprove of this pardon, which would seem quite short-sighted.
>Your comment reads like you disapprove of this pardon
you are reading into what I said, since I said nothing like that.
>actual risks associated with marijuana while they still believe in the reefer madness
Sure, back in those days, we didn't even know that cigarettes caused cancer, so
we can't judge them based on today's knowledge, but many traditional beliefs did have a folk wisdom "correlation might just be causation"... so how is THC induced psychosis an indictment of the reefer madness hypothesis?
Sorry to hear that. Beyond loss of life, what I’ve seen is an incremental loss of human potential.
Weed smokers tend to lose motivation at larger life goals. Short-term memory issues affect their ability to get to work on time, pay bills, take care of their health, etc.
Yes, there are some who avoid these impacts; yes, alcohol is also bad. But there are a bunch of 40yo wake-and-bakers out there who don’t realize they got caught in a trap. Their life, not mine, but it’s sad.
difficult to measure for sure, like the effectiveness of many criminal statues. How effective are the various restrictions on tobacco, and are you passionate and principled that we should lift all those too, because the side effects are less important than personal freedom?
As a gesture, this seems fine. But the continued presence of cannabis on Schedule I makes an absolute mockery out of our entire code of laws.
[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/weighing-impa...