Mexico is on its way! We have three candidates for our upcoming elections this summer. The two women candidates, Sheinbaum and Gálvez, have participated in public debates favoring lenient regularization, and Álvarez has spoken publicly about full legalization.
Claudia Sheinbaum is leading the race, so not only will we most likely get our first woman president, but legal weed as well!
Germany legalised it last months so I would expect some of the neighbouring countries to follow suit soon.
Germany did not legalise. It got decriminalise to a very Limited extend.
E.g. the "Bundesgerichtshof" ruled a few days ago that 7.5 g of pure THC is a "nicht geringe Menge" which means 3 months Minimum. Which means that If you have 50 g of Hash with 40% THC you already have 20 g of pure THC. The CannG explicitly states that having 50 g of Hash at Home is legal. Lets See how that plays Out.
In a shocking turnabout, Atlantis announces legalized marijuanna and also their continued existence.
The West has lost the 'war on drugs', whatever that means.
The only way out is to regulate (and therefore tax) them. Cannabis is the gateway drug (pun intended).
I'm old and tried something mild ish when I young. It didn't really do much for me so I never went down that path. I don't even drink more than a unit a fortnight, usually I'm driving and I only drink socially. Just don't fancy it much anymore.
As far as I'm concerned, the benefits of living today are mainly being funneled to an elite. Taxes were mostly levied on companies and have become taxes levied on the individual, with companies not really paying tax at all. People are struggling to hold it together. Drugs represent escapism pending some kind of revolution.
I'm one of 'Thatcher's children' - A Gen X watching young people today giving up. If you had told me last century that I would have written such a thing today, I would have punched you.
I believe that the move left of the politics of today represents the population asking for help.
Alkohol is the gateway drug. Socially accepted everywhere. It's normal as a recreational drug.
They already tax alcohol everywhere as far as know. Maybe you're in the 'Mercan mountains and you're a moonshine master; but noting the instance and name probably not!
Hullo to Deutschland!
Whether they tax it or not doesn't change whether it's a gateway drug or not, which is all that comment seemed to be about
Im guessing the 22 states that have banned for-profit prisons overlaps heavily with the list of recreational weed states
“What country do you think…”
obligatory not a country, but…
Why is this the thing every time in every thread.
Sometimes it's an easier answer. The US is a country, but it seems to decide this not at the country level.
It’s an attempt to thread-hijack. If you want to discuss about statehood legalization, make your own thread to kickstart the discussion.
It's not. My answer was "The US, but maybe not the whole country".
But if you'd like my guesses, it'd be the Netherlands and Portugal. They seem pretty forward with regard to drugs, and possession is currently decriminalized for personal use.
From Canada, where legalization has happened, it's pretty much like nothing changed, except there are way more products on the market at way cheaper prices than before. Most people consume cannabis in their personal spaces, and there has been a ton of tax revenue, despite consumers paying about half of what I was paying before on the black market.
It's all-around a huge win.
Yeah I'll gladly pay 6% (the recreational-use tax here) to have access to whole array of products of varying strengths and methods of delivery. The ability to just walk into one of dozens of shops and purchase whatever flower/concentrates/edibles I want was an absolute game changer for me. The black market prices are super competitive but legal shops have so much more variety and you have a better idea of what you're getting.
What's wrong with a government deciding to regulate and tax a previously illegal substance that is less harmful than many legal drugs at the moment, thus reducing revenue streams for cartels and gangs along with getting more money that the government can use?
Because it's still harmful, and we should be making the drugs that are even more harmful illegal
Hopefully none. Cannabis is really bad for your health and should NOT be used for "fun":
There's thousands of activities with less adverse effects than doing drugs. PLEASE get a hobby other than trying to fry your brain with chemicals.
I respect your suggestion, but not your hope that people are unable to make their own choices.
your hope that people are unable to make their own choices.
My only hope is to stop people from destroying their physical and mental health in their short-sighted pursuits of feel-good chemicals.
Alcohol, caffeine and tobacco should also be banned, but their capitalist industry is too big at this point to be stopped. Let's not add another monopoly to the list of legal-drugs
The way the US went about banning alcohol was extremely poorly implemented, with ignorant and insensitive policies. Over the last few decades we have made tremendous advances in the field of psychology. I do believe substance-abuse could be eradicatedin in an effective manner with the knowledge we have nowadays.
Dosage matters. Adults should be capable of making informed choices about something like this. We should be encouraging education, not banning it
We should be promoting about viable recreational/medical drugs,m instead of completely banning drugs
Again, you give good information and you have made your choice, I only ask that we allow others to do the same.
Strawman
I believe that it's recreational use should be illegal, not that it should be punished with jailtime. The best punishments for that "crime" are fines and forced rehab, not jailtime.
Well, it takes away the money they would've used to buy more substances. Also its not meant to bankrupt anyone lol. Fines should be proportional to the reported income
So the government should have all the money? Stuff like that doesn't stop anything. And what did the users do wrong to the world? You're stupid in your own shitty world 🙃 there's probably something someone should give you a fine for lol. At least just for being dumb
- Marijuana causes an "increased risk of stroke, heart disease, and other vascular diseases." (CDC, 2020-a)
Only when smoked, from the link you provided:
It is hard to separate the effects of marijuana chemicals on the cardiovascular system from those caused by the irritants and other chemicals that are present in the smoke. More research is needed to understand the full impact of marijuana use on the cardiovascular system to determine if marijuana use leads to higher risk of death.
So this is only a health issue if smoked, marijuana can be consumed in other ways, therefore this point is moot. Smoking oregano probably causes the same side effect, I doubt you're in favor of banning oregano.
- "Smoke from marijuana has many of the same toxins, irritants, and carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) as tobacco smoke." (CDC, 2020-b)
So do cars, do you think we should ban cars? In fact almost all smokes contain carcinogenics, should we also ban coal? Power plants?
- "People who use marijuana are more likely to develop [...] long-lasting mental disorders, including schizophrenia (a type of mental illness where people might see or hear things that are not really there)." (CDC, 2020-c)
Correlation does not imply causation, have you read the actual studies? All of them concur that it's possible that people with schizophrenia are more likely to use marijuana. And a lot of the meta-analysis point to the fact that no study has normalized for family history which is the largest predictor for schizophrenia. It's actually kind of funny, a study finds a possible correlation, other study lists that and another one and claims the fact that two different studies found correlation implies a stronger link, another meta-study links that and other similar and claims that because so many have found a strong link it implies causation, if you go back the 4 or 5 levels from the study you publish to the ones that actually studied people you'll notice that none of them claim causation.
Only when smoked marijuana can be consumed in other ways
That's good to know. At least the vascular diseases can be avoided when smoking pot. That does nothing for the carcinogens though.
So do cars, do you think we should ban cars? In fact almost all smokes contain carcinogenics, should we also ban coal? Power plants?
Yes. They must eventually be replaced with environmentally friendlier alternatives. Carcinogens are unacceptable and should never be willingly ingested just for fun.
All of them concur that ...
Citation needed. Which specific articles are you referring to when you say "All of them"? Call me crazy, but I have a hutch you did not read every single cannabis study that's ever been written.
... a lot of the meta-analysis point to ...
Citation needed. Which meta-analysis? Written by whom? When?
none of them claim causation.
Citation needed. Which specific articles are you referring to when you say "none of them"? Call me crazy, but I have a hutch you did not read every single cannabis study that's ever been written.
I'm quoting the articles you provided, have you even read them?
From the link you sent:
including schizophrenia (a type of mental illness where people might see or hear things that are not really there).2
And the 2 reference is:
Volkow ND, Swanson JM, Evins AE, et al. Effects of cannabis use on human behavior, including cognition, motivation, and psychosis: a review. JAMA Psychiatry. 2016;73(3):292-297.
On that article it reads:
The link between cannabis use and schizophre-nia could stem from direct causality, gene-environment interac-tions,sharedetiology,orself-medicationforpremorbidsymptoms,although some researchers have suggested that only the first 3 hy-potheses remain open questions.48-50
References 48-50 are:
- Ferraro L, Russo M, O’Connor J, et al. Cannabisusers have higher premorbid IQ than other patientswith first onset psychosis.Schizophr Res. 2013;150(1):129-135.
- Large M, Sharma S, Compton MT, Slade T,Nielssen O. Cannabis use and earlier onset ofpsychosis: a systematic meta-analysis.Arch GenPsychiatry. 2011;68(6):555-561.
- Miettunen J, Törmänen S, Murray GK, et al.Association of cannabis use with prodromalsymptoms of psychosis in adolescence.Br JPsychiatry. 2008;192(6):470-471.
Of those only 49 refers to psychosis, from that article:
Perhaps most importantly, few studies explicitly state whether the substance was being used prior to the onset of psychosis, which makes it difficult to draw causal inferences from a reported association.
Also from that paper:
patients with schizophrenia are more likely to use substances than members of the wider community.
Long story short the study agrees that people with schizophrenia are more likely to use drugs, and that the studies it references don't take into consideration what came first. Long story short the links you provided are proof that people with schizophrenia like cannabis, not that cannabis causes it.
Your turn to provide studies that claim what you say that they claim, because the ones you listed disagree with you, they're just being misquoted in several layers.
I’m quoting the articles you provided
You didn't quote any articles initially.
have you even read them?
You're rude and presumptuous.
Long story short the links you provided are proof that people with schizophrenia like cannabis, not that cannabis causes it.
That's your personal conclusion, not the conclusion of the paper that the CDC cites.
Cannabis use preceded psychosis in these studies:
Also: "Controlling for familial risk in one large epidemiological study considerably attenuated but did not completely eliminate the association of cannabis use with schizophrenia, with odds ratios of 3.3 and 1.6 with 3-year and 7-year temporal delays, respectively." (Volkow ND, Swanson JM, Evins AE, et al. 2016)
The study in question:
You can't cherry-pick the sections of the article that benefit your personal opinions and simply ignore the rest. Its clear that you did not read these articles with objectivity in mind, and for that reason I will no longer respond to you. Best of luck, hopefully you can overcome your rudeness and lack of objectivity some day.
No, initially I told you what they said, but since you didn't believed me (or read them yourself) I had to quote them verbatim.
Yes I'm rude, that's because you're being obnoxious control freak that wants to prevent people from using one of the safest recreational drugs out there on the off possibly that a small number of people with predisposition to schizophrenia might abuse of this substance and make their condition appear earlier than it would otherwise. And I'm presumptuous because when I quote a scientific paper I read it first, and if I smell bullshit I read the thing they're quoting, I've written enough papers myself and been around academia long enough to know how these meta-analysis get written.
Again, did you read the study you just quoted? Because you're quoting the meta-analysis of it, not the study itself, here's what that study actually concludes:
population-based estimates of cannabis-schizophrenia co-morbidity substantially overestimate their causal association. Predictions of the cases of schizophrenia that might be prevented by reduced cannabis consumption based on population associations are therefore likely to be considerably overestimated.
Also that study analyzed people with a schizophrenia diagnostic, and looked at previous arrests for drug related crimes to classify who used Marijuana, which is a very bad methodology for several reasons:
I'm not cherry-picking, I'm pointing failures in their methodologies, and misquotes from one paper to the one that's analyzing it, to show you how "A drug related rap sheet together with family history is a predictor for schizophrenia" becomes "Marijuana causes schizophrenia".
Edit: also forgot to quote this, it's not just my opinion z the paper itself admits this is a possibility:
Second, we identified CA from medical and legal records, using ICD and conviction codes to capture prevalence within our study population. Although this method has the important advantage of not requiring accurate respondent recall and self-reporting, the risk for misclassification bias remains. Furthermore, we have assumed that those admitted to hospital or convicted for cannabis use represented a subsample of heavy cannabis users, which are labeled ‘cannabis abusers’ in this study (i.e. it is likely that there were many more people who used/abused cannabis than those who were registered as CA). Therefore, some risk remains that CA identification in the current sample may be contaminated by evidence of prodromal schizophrenia. Because our subjects experienced adverse medical or legal consequences of their cannabis use, our results are not directly comparable to studies that examine cannabis use or even heavy cannabis use
And finally, I don't care if you answer or not, I'm not answering to you, I expect you read those papers and got to some conclusion. I'm answering so that other people who're just going to read the title and your response know that that's not exactly what the paper says, as usual people do a very shallow approximation of what the paper actually says.
Yes. Their production should be illegal and punished with fines and jailtime. Their recreational use should be punished with fines (take away the money they would've used to buy more substances) and forced rehab, ie. Classes on how to stop relying on those drugs.
Right, nothing more totalitarian than wanting to save people's lives. Let's allow everyone to do everything that makes them feel good, consequences be damned. What's the worst that could happen?
Genuinely curious where do you draw the line?
Like honest question: Do you think we should ban every activity that is as risky as consuming marijuana? If not, why not? Why marijuana and not everything else.
If we’re banning marijuana to save lives because it’s too risky we should be banning driving a car, and climbing a ladder, and hundred other common everyday activities that are more likely to kill you then smoking pot.
You’re not wrong, there are health risks to weed. But there’s risks with literally everything, and weed is really far down on the list of most risky activities.
Going up a ladder and using a car fulfill a practical purpose, and there are numerous safety precautions you can take to minimize the potential risk of an injury. On the contrary, recreational cannabis is explicitly done for fun, and there isn't really a "risk-safe" way of developing schizophrenia due to substance abuse lmao
Do you think we should ban every activity that is as risky as consuming marijuana? If not, why not? Why marijuana and not everything else.
Your use of the word "risky" implies that there's a consequence-free way of doing cannabis. There is not. You will always suffer adverse health effects by doing marijuana.
And to answer your question, no. Because security precautions can be taken to do other fun activities safely. There are no sufficient precautions which would allow you to do marijuana 100% safely.
Should we ban roller coasters? They fulfill no practical purpose, and only add risk of injury.