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?
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.