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Marijuana Legalized In Oregon, Alaska, and Washington DC
Robotron23 writes: Coinciding with the midterm elections yesterday were state ballots proposing the legalization of cannabis. All three territories where full legalization was tabled approved the measure, joining Washington state and Colorado. The narrowest vote was that of Alaska at a roughly 52% to 48% margin. Washington D.C. meanwhile saw the vote strongly tipped in favor of legalization, at about 69% to 31% opposed. Oregon passed its measure by a vote of 55% to 45%. Buoyed by the news, advocates of legal cannabis are already contemplating the next round of state ballots in 2016.
I believe that even though it passed in DC...that congress can put the kibosh on this pretty quick?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I never in my lifetime expected to see this. It's about time
Yesterday's election was a message to Washington that America wants conservatives to represent them! Also, they want legalized pot, increased minimum wage, the right to have an abortion, insurance-provided contraception, and required paid time off at work!
Wait, what?
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Yawn. Everytime a story on marijuana comes up on a US-centric site, someone suggests that hemp is a miracle material, and it had to be banned so other industries wouldn't be threatened. If hemp is so great, then why is interest in it so relatively low in the many other industrialized countries around the world where industrial hemp has always been legal and easy to grow, even state-subdizied?
I would imagine Oregon and Alaska are recreational, but DC, too?
Let's hope the pace quickens over the next few years -- at 3 states every two years it'l take too long to legalize it everywhere.l
This is true. Hearst demonized marijuana because hemp fiber threatened his tree based paper products.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Let me guess: did the very same voters in these states also send people from the prohibition parties, to represent them in the federal government yet again? Right hand, you need to meet left hand some day.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I always just assumed that most of the government there was already made up of stoners.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
As a life-long resident of Vermont, I'm embarrassed that these other states have passed these referendums ahead of us.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
I assume a large part of the increasing "tolerance"(pun intended) towards recreational Cannabis use is that people, business and governments are FINALLY understanding it is revenue generating.
People use it anyway, whether it is legal or not. They have for thousands of years. Why not make some legal money out of it instead of letting the cartels have all the fun!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If marijuana is such a threat to tree-based paper products, then why does paper continue to be so heavily used in many fields even in countries with hemp industries?
Is there anything more to say about DC?
No, it's always been about racism and moralizing.
Du Pont really had nothing to do with it. And probably had more to gain from it if it were legalized because they had the capacity to grow vast fields of it. Same with Hearst. He only held minority stakes in paper mills. If hemp fiber could've out performed paper, moving his stock into hemp wouldn't have been hard.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Now that cannabis is legal in Washington, I think we can look forward to -
1. Much mellower politics
2. A massive increase in sales of snacks in the area around the Conress
I demand more intelligent trolls! Why does /. only have stupid trolls?
This is one of those topics where, if you go far enough left and far enough right, the two sides happen to meet on the same issue.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This. Not just this but this sort of moralizing and racism really goes well with jobs programs.
Lets not forget, when prohibition ended, it left a number of federal employees with budgets to burn and fuck all to do. They were not stupid, that is no recipe for job security. Harry Anslinger, one of the most vocal proponants of the marijuana laws of the day, was head of the FBN, the very people who were left with fuck all to do after prohibition ended.
Who better to justify law enforcement jobs than people who are seen as "immoral" or inferior and in need of being kept in their place? The thing about it is.... its a story so crazy you almost can't make shit like this up.
Good ole Harry spent years writting letters to police chiefs, asking them to keep their eye on "jazz musicians"....seriously.... claiming one day, they were going to have an operation to round them all up. One great quote of his that sums it all up:
This is from a man who testified before congress and was taken seriously.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
[crickets]
Paper from trees is produced by a well-established economy of scale.
And I am aroused by the fantasy that all those republican victories were a negative response to the NSA and is going to revive the civil rights movement.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If hemp is so great, then why is interest in it so relatively low in the many other industrialized countries around the world where industrial hemp has always been legal and easy to grow, even state-subdizied?
It's a chicken and egg problem.
There isn't much hemp cultivation, so nobody is designing purpose built harvesting machinery.
And since there isn't any purpose built harvesting machinery, it's much harder to grow hemp on a large scale.
There's also a reality that even though hemp can be used in just about everything, it's not always the best (or currently the cheapest) option.
This could change if hemp harvesting and processing ever catches up on the decades of R&D that synthetics and cotton have received.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
And you think alcohol isn't already doing that?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The US legal process is so unreasonably complicated.
No more so than any other major industrialized country.
Every region not only has it's own laws, but its own constitution defining how laws are passed and structured.
Every state has a constitution because they are by definition sovereign over that region. It's in the name: United STATES of America. The constitutions of each state are required to be compatible with the federal constitution and if there is a conflict the federal constitution wins. Local governments do not have constitutions typically though there are some exceptions. It's actually pretty straightforward in concept though law making everywhere is a bit messy in practice.
have an answer when someone says "I dunno what Congress is smoking..."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Who cares? This is about recreational use being legitimized. Like alcohol. Not about Industrial uses for hemp (of which there are many but you are correct they aren't going to replace trees for pulp any time soon).
Now, I'm 100% in favor of legal marijuana (The slashdice corporate position is that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate it) but I wonder what subsidy advocates are smoking when their argument for a subsidy is that most medical marijuana users are poor and don't have a job.
PS: plant some herb for arbor day. Even if you don't smoke, it's a beautiful plant, easy to grow (like a weed, you might say) and helps the environment and shit.
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The Democratic governor Mark Dayton is a dry drunk, so he has major cognitive dissonance and guilt when it comes to anything involving intoxicants and was in debt to police labor votes.
So instead of a groovy, California style medical marijuana we got some lame experimental thing involving cannabis oils or something.
But then again,. we can't buy booze in grocery stores or on Sundays, so maybe its a byproduct of our stern, Scandahoovian upbringing.
You mean you don't want to walk around all day smelling like Bob Marley?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I like the quote but it's pretty easy to prove that banning cannabis was race related when they gave it the Spanish name rather than the proper English term when referencing it in legal documents. See Marijuana is that scary stuff those dirty spics and negroes use, if they had called it by the proper English name, Cannabis, convincing the public would have been far harder because Cannabis was used to make hemp rope, the highest quality rope available at the time.
And you thought that nothing got done in the Government...just wait and see now. New take on that old song "I was going to pass a bill, but then I got high. I was going to do work, but then I got high"... They should have legalized crack instead. At least it might motivate some people in Government.
Honestly, it's been basically decriminalized to the point it's trivial to obtain here for quite some time. Anyone who wanted to use it, would already be doing so. Worst case scenario, probably 90% of the state's population is within a 2 hour round trip drive of WA where it's already legal. (IE, Portland metro south to Eugene)
The real concern I have as an Oregonian is the paranoia this will cause among police during traffic stops :(
...was taken seriously.
This is exactly the root of the problem, not that the man was extremely offensive, but that people believe what he said. If we only would address the issue from this angle, these people can chatter on as insistently as they like and will be nothing but background noise.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think it's like the old numbers stations on short wave radio. They're sending coded messages to someone.
Or they want us to think so so that we'll waste money trying to trace them and decode them.
As we discussed last time marijuana came up on Slashdot, that particular Anslinger quotation is hard to substantiate. The first attestation comes from decades after he supposedly said it. There are already plenty of rigorously sourced statements on marijuana with similar hyperbole, and trotting out that weakly sourced one only undermines the legalization cause.
Read parent again. Nobody said paper would be discontinued.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
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If you measure "respect" by "how little do they affect me in my little narcissistic bubble" then potheads don't need or want your respect, and heroin users certainly don't. They don't need enabling by the law, either, that much should be obvious by now. But they're gonna celebrate in public, mark my words, so get over it.
And you think alcohol isn't already doing that?
No, alcohol is far too busy creating addicts, who ironically don't have an addiction, but a "disease", which was yet another bullshit power move to justify billions in treatment facilities.
Alcohol is also far too busy killing it's users via poisoning as well.
No, actually, possession and manufacture (growing) of marijuana has been legal in Alaska since 1975. I've grown myself, and even had the attention of the authorities called to the matter, which worked out favorably. I've also had friends have growing equipment confiscated by the police, and subsequently returned with an apology. Nota bene: the legal protections applied (almost) exclusively in one's house or primary residence.
There are some cultural differences at work here; Alaskan marijuana was (semi-)legalized under a privacy clause, which mostly stems (ironically) from a far-right desire to be left the hell alone by everyone but especially the Government. Except in the form of pork barrel projects, which everyone knows are necessary in order to compensate for the state's underdeveloped "frontier" status.
Generally speaking, while it was legalized in the sense that cops were not going to bother one for private use, public consumption was strongly discouraged. This was not the first time full legalization has been on the ballot in Alaska, there were similar ballot measures in 2000 and 2004. It's a complicated situation; Alaska is almost ludicrously conservative compared to the other states which have legalized.
One must give credit where credit is due, I think it's significant that after years of effort and a long history of consumption in Alaska, this measure did not succeed until after Colorado and Washington. However, ultimately, I think that the most influential state in marijuana politics would be California: their medical marijuana dispensary system has paved the way for the de-demonization of cannabis. Now, the onus is on all of us to reverse the damage that the War on Drugs has caused, particularly in America's having pushed its drug laws on the entire rest of the world through the UN.
A side note on that: I suspect that this last part will involve the US pushing its drug laws on the rest of the world once more, but it would be nice if there were some process by which the international community could come to sane decisions about these drugs.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
As if anyone in Oregon, Alaska or DC has ever been given a ticket let alone arrested for blazing up. Unless you're moving shoeboxes of weed I doubt anyone's been bothered by the cops.
So a few people poisoned the idea itself? I heard Hitler liked puppies.
TubeSteak didn't claim hemp wasn't farmed, he claimed that nobody designed purpose-built harvesting machinery. We have purpose-built harvesting machinery for other crops which makes them cheaper and easier to use in our industry, so we continue to put more of our efforts into those other crops.
There is no legal minefield outside the US. In many countries, industrial hemp remained a perfectly legal industry for the whole the 20th century and beyond, and hemp continued to be used in certain niches. However, it has not managed to oust other materials like paper, it simply isn't the miracle material that many legalization advocates depict it as.
I always thought it was lobbyist pole.
Time to offend someone
It isn't. They love that they have an additional market of rich americans to pay for hemp products that americans aren't allowed to make for americans.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Where does that idea come from that just 'cause something becomes legal, suddenly everyone and their dog starts doing it? Or, as in this case, starts dropping any and all moderation.
For example, I like sushi. I really do. It's hellish expensive where I am, but it's something that I enjoy. If it suddenly got cheap, of course I'd go on a binge right away. But then? Would I really start eating sushi every single day? Rather not. I'd even doubt that my consumption would increase. Maybe during the first month, but after that... rather unlikely.
So I have a hard time understanding the argument "if it's legal, people will go crazy over it". Why? Would you? If, for argument's sake, Heroin got legal tomorrow, would you start shooting it into your veins?
Then why do you think anyone else would?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Winston Churchill said that America can be relied on to do the right thing, after exhausting all alternatives.
Is this an example of that? Perhaps once every state legallises it, it will end up being legal federally. Then hopefully my own country will stop ignoring all the evidence and legalise it too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ok, so, then they get fired, what's the problem? If pot smokers (or ingesters, etc.) can't keep their hobby to themselves and it affects their work, they won't last long, no different from people who come to work drunk, or for that matter, people who can't resist gambling or watching porn at work, etc.
Fun fact: not every person who enjoys using pot is a pothead, just like not every person who enjoys drinking is a drunkard.
As for public smoking, well, we already have laws against public smoking, thank god. Personally I actually don't mind pot smoke smell nearly as much as tobacco smoke smell, but I still agree, both are noxious. You can certainly ban things in public for smelling terrible and being health hazards without banning them in private for being drugs. Though in this case, you mostly wouldn't even have to, because a smoking ban is a smoking ban regardless of what substance is being smoked, and we already have plenty of smoking bans.
Exactly, even with the hemp of considerable subsidies to countries' hemp industries, the material has proven uncompetitive against others.
I doubt it. Rand Paul is an anomaly and not very popular in his party.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm all in favour of legalizing marijuana, but I also believe that it needs to be properly regulated while doing so. Smoking weed needs to be controlled in the same way that smoking tobacco currently is. Legal limits for driving under the influence of marijuana needs to be clearly established, and part of the tax revenue from marijuana sales put into safety campaigns against driving while stoned.
This would be of benefit to the marijuana industry as well - establishing proper controls in its use will ensure that it is used in a responsible manner, and avoid a backlash from prohibitionists. All it will take is the image of a toddler killed by a stoned driver to incite the prohibitionists and undo legalization efforts - it would be better for the marijuana industry to seize the initiative now, and establish an image of responsible and controlled adult use.
It's not that everyone will start doing it.... it's that those who already do it may do it more frequently, or certainly much more openly, since they would not have to pursue illegitimate channels to engage in the practice.
Honestly, if legalizing marijuana wouldn't affect how often other people might notice the smell of it because those that practice it would no longer have any need to at least try and keep their practices as hidden as possible, I'd have absolutely no problem with it at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Legalization of marijuana is by definition smaller government because it means that A) The government no longer has to police Marijuana, so it can scale down (or at least reallocate) that portion of its law enforcement activities, and B) We now have fewer laws.
You have still not addressed the point of the person you're replying to. Hemp is not really popular even in countries in which it's been legal all along. Your conspiracy theories simply don't match up to reality. Your retort about cigarettes is completely irrelevant.
Any amount of lost market share is lost profits. It wasn't that hemp was threatening tree paper, it was that it was competition and getting rid of competition is always profitable.
You keep downgrading the hemp risk to tree paper. Replacement to threatening to competition... but okay, I'll run with it: can you show me any place that hemp is actually competing with tree paper?
Note that I don't really have a dog in this fight. I lived in Colorado in 2012 and voted in favor of marijuana legalization, but I have never used the stuff and will never use it.
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B) We now have fewer laws.
Umm ... It doesn't really work that way. We (here in Oregon) now move from the realm of criminal law to regulatory law.
My states' 2012 elections were more than enough evidence of that. 51% of voters voted for democratic candidates, 9 out of 13 seats went to republicans, with another really close. Nothing has changed since then.
I'm a high school history teacher, so posting as anonymously, I lean independent/libertarian, but end up voting democrat most of the time. You can read into that what you will.
It's really tough when people say something sorta true, then give evidence supporting it that is pretty weird (you should wash your hands, because otherwise you'll overheat). Your evidence isn't support for your claim, but rather it's support of the fact that you live in a republic instead of a true democracy. It's the same reason why each state has real representation as opposed to just a few controlling all votes.
Not everyone agrees with a republic system (generally those in the current majority), but there are real reasons for it based on history and it's designed to protect the minority. e.g., as a way of picturing this you could imagine the top 6-10 states alone could decide to use the other territories as waste dumps eventually, causing them to be more desirable places to live, leading to them having more power. It's why individual states/territotires were willing to enter into a union as opposed to going it alone.
For those who are confused about the term gerrymandering, people vote in districts to elect a representative, and now and again those districts get redrawn. In many cases those who happen to be in power try to redraw the lines to make it more likely they'll stay in power. There are pushes in places like CA lately for this to be randomized via different ways, but for the most part this gets hashed out by the winners like europe being carved up after WW1. If you are a republican in a 50/50 democrat/republican district, if you can have things redrawn so you are in a 80/20 district you're almost guaranteed to keep your seat. For the most part this becomes about protecting the incumbant (until the tea party), as those redistricted don't go away and have their own reprentatives, though when being really tricky with it you can give your party as a whole a boost.
Yes, republicans engaged/engage in gerrmandering, but as you yourself note this has been a tit-for-tat thing with either party doing their damndest when they get a chance. The real brutal issue of gerrymandering , it's that you end up with very, very polarized representatives because they are representing very polarized districts with little desire to work together. So you end up with very liberal democrats, very conservative republicans, and a few moderates sitting in the corner.
In terms of a solution, having a fairer process for redistricting would help, though over the past while there has been a real trend of self-segregation along party/demographics (democrats, we can't look down on the republicans for the research shows we are the biggest commiter of this) and it might mute the effect. The problem is that it's like a reverse filibuster -- the minority claims how awful it is, then when they are in a position of power to change it with the current minority, they choose to use the hell out of it.
58 YES but needed 60% to pass. Is it not 60% everywhere else?
to a degree, absolutely. but i know people who can 'function' 24x7 stoned.. ive yet to meet someone who can do the same drunk. same same, but different.
Oh good, now the percentage of stay at home parasites who are too lazy to get a job can spend their free government money on marijuana instead of food for their kids and use getting high as escapism to "solve" all their problems all while giving themselves lung cancer. That'll be great for jobs and the economy and healthcare costs.
Gawd I love my state. /sarcasm
It is probably non-obvious, but to produce enough hemp you need to plant a lot of it. Hemp seed is barred from import into the US from other places in the world where it is grown (it is treated the same as the schedule 1 drug form of the plant), and there are no large domestic hemp plantations of sufficient size to create a native seed stock. Only recently has there been any delivery of foreign hemp seed (to Colorado) but it hasn't been planted because there are some legal questions (liability, escaping plants to non-authorized growers, etc.) that needed to be answered.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Tell that to Joe Biden's son. While I understand your point, you grossly overstate the impact.
Well i'm saying that any kind of 'erratic' or 'suspicious' behavior would be investigated far more closely, and without a valid test for being intoxicated at time of stop, I worry what kind of measures they'd take to enforce DUI laws.
It's not like there's a breathalyzer for pot.
Better then quoting a coward.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
At least now politicians can answer honestly
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Export. Tree paper can be exported anywhere; hemp paper can only be exported to places where it is legal. Hemp clothing is generally fine, as it ca only be made from stem fibers, which don't carry any of marijuana's active ingredients (which are found in trace amounts in hemp, as well), while the leaves and buds can be processed for paper.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
That still doesn't explain why it isn't used elsewhere. Not everything is sold to the US.
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So what happens when my neighbor and his "friends" all start smoking weed and stinkin' up my home?
Legalization sure... I don't really care what people do in their own homes, but when the stinky effects start impacting me and my neighbors respond to friendly, "hey would you do something about ..." with a FU reply... what recourse do I have?
I'm still undecided whether now I'll have to contend with stoned people on the road
http://www.drugwarrant.com/art...
Cite your sources too.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If that were the case, places like the Soviet Union (which had a steady industrial hemp industry throughout the 20th century) would have used hemp paper for its enormous internal market and export to Eastern Bloc nations. However, hemp simply doesn't offer significant advantages over wood pulp, especially in a country that has plenty of forest.
The Florida measure failed at 58% yes vs 45% no.
In 2006 a constitutional amendment was passed requiring 60% to pass a constitutional amendment...It passed with 57%.
60% was chosen because nothing EVER reaches that number, never once.
So Florida, even though the majority wants this passed, we don't get it. Yay democracy!
On another note, the congressional districts were re-drawn such that with an exit poll with 60% participation indicated a heavy loss for Rick Scott (like 30%), but because of the re-draw, he won by ~1%.
But no, tell me how this is legitimate and for our safety again.
That's interesting. We've had electronic voting machines (NJ) for as long as I've been able to vote (2000). Write-ins are typed in (using a non-QWERTY keyboard), so I'd imagine that they are tallied electronically. Even if they're not tallied, I'd hope they're at least counted as "non Republican/Democrat" -- otherwise, how is that not fraud? Honestly, I don't know much about how voting works behind the scenes. Is there a way for me to learn more about how votes are actually counted?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Nobody claimed that Hearst and the rest actually knew what they were talking about, merely that they feared something and sought to criminalize it via dubious methods by lying to the public and invoking 'the children'.
As much as old people want the country controlled by republicans they also want to be as high as a kite during the erosion of their rights....
Floridians overwhelmingly voted for passage of Amendment 2, 58% yes to 42% no, but for some reason it required a 60% majority to actually "pass" the voting. So even though the supporters outnumbered the doubters by almost 50% of the voters, there will be no smokers in the Sunshine State any time soon. The other states with similar amendments passed theirs, all with a closer voting margins.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Nobody claimed that Hearst and the rest actually knew what they were talking about, merely that they feared something and sought to criminalize it via dubious methods by lying to the public and invoking 'the children'.
Hanlon's Razor. That I can buy.
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That's not the way I have ever seen it work. Usually as part of the hiring/on-boarding process they will instruct you to go (usually immediately) and get a test. I have never heard of them waiting 30 days from any point to test you. The whole point is the element of surprise from what I have seen.
I actually know someone who had a job offer rescinded because they misunderstood and waited a couple days before going to take the test.
Drug testing is another one of those things that has been perverted by lawyers and insurance companies. Most employers could care less what you do in your off time.
And I am aroused by the fantasy that all those republican victories were a negative response to the NSA and is going to revive the civil rights movement.
except that democratic senator Mark Udall of Colorado just lost his seat, and he was one of a grand total of 2 people in the senate who have been trying to excercise their duty to oversee what the NSA is doing since before the snowden leaks (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/nsa-critic-udall-is-sent-packing-as-republicans-grab-senate/)
And I am aroused by the fantasy that all those republican victories were a negative response to the NSA and is going to revive the civil rights movement.
except that democratic senator Mark Udall of Colorado just lost his seat, and he was one of a grand total of 2 people in the senate who have been trying to excercise their duty to oversee what the NSA is doing since before the snowden leaks (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/nsa-critic-udall-is-sent-packing-as-republicans-grab-senate/)
did slashdot ever hear of making URLs I type in into those magical clicky-clicky link things that I teleport me to other websites?
If the federal government really wanted to stop the spread of or even regress the legalization of marijuana at the state level, all they have to do is cut federal funding for various things until the state in question made laws making it illegal again, similar to what they did with the National Minimum Drinking Age Act back in the '80s.
Alaska is the most socialist state in the United States. They tax the oil and distribute the proceeds to their citizens. Everybody likes free money.
But the claim is that it (paper) would be threatened.
No, that was not the claim.
It was Maxo-Texas' claim. (S)he wrote:
This is true. Hearst demonized marijuana because hemp fiber threatened his tree based paper products.
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IIRC there was a man in the US who owned a business whose market niche(s) were potentially threatened by hemp. (Whether the threat was real or perceived, I'm not sure.) Being one of the "job creators" with connections, he was influential in getting the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 passed which marked the beginning of marijuana prohibition. So, even if the industry has advanced past the interest in hemp over 80 years - it's still correct to list industrial opposition along with racism and moral panic as forces that catalyzed prohibition.
more openly, I could see that.
More often I would have thought comes down to economics rather than legality. If it gets a lot cheaper though, how will the "one dispensary per 13000 people" business model work in my town. I can't see there being enough "connoisseur" demand to keep the dispensaries open once every mini-mart starts selling it.
Nullius in verba
To be blunt, my answer to "mind if I smoke?" has always been "wouldn't care if you burned". As long as he's doing it where I don't have to suffer from it, it's all right. It's ok if done in public where I can easily move away and where it dissipates quickly, it's ok where there is explicitly a "smoking area", where I, as a non-smoker, simply don't WANT to go to, and of course it is ok in any place owned by the person (and not designated as an area where people without a personal connection to the person will congregate, e.g. in a restaurant belonging to the smoker), since I do insist that in the privacy of somebody's home anything he wants to do is a-ok as long as he does not force any other person to suffer it.
Anyone's liberty stops where it infringes on the liberty of someone else. And I do think that the same that applies to tobacco smoke should apply to marijuana smoke: Do it where nobody else is bothered by it, and especially do NOT do it where people eat, sleep or where kids are about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Umm ... It doesn't really work that way. We (here in Oregon) now move from the realm of criminal law to regulatory law.
Then by definition, you haven't fully legalized marijuana, you've just partially done so.
Truly legalizing it means there are no laws about it. That means no laws setting how much you can have, what you can do with it, etc, just like anything else that somebody considers legal to have, like fried chicken.
Of course chicken, at least the chicken that is sold commercially is regulated too for quality and food safety reasons. By your definition there is practically nothing that is fully legalized.
Of course the real threat is to cotton. Some years ago I bought some hemp jeans, they outlasted cotton ones by a factor of ten. Far superior tough fabric, was a real threat to DuPonts upcoming nylon products.
Actually your state doesn't really do anything in that regard; the federal government does via the FDA and USDA. What little your state does probably doesn't change much with regard whether it's chicken or some other kind of fowl. So no, your counterpoint doesn't work here because there aren't any laws specific to *just* chicken.
It's like how I often hear some derps claim that prostitution is legal in Nevada, and occasionally you hear about some derp picking up a street walker on the Vegas Strip and then wondering why he goes to jail.
But either way I'm still going to go back to the first point: There no longer needs to be any kind of strict enforcement mechanism along with personnel and spending that goes into it, so yes, it's still smaller government no matter how you slice it.
As I said, however... the smell of marijuana does not seem to dissipate very quickly indoors, and I know there are people in my building that smoke it, from the occasional odors that waft through the hallways every so often. If it becomes legal here, my concern is that those who smoke it may use less care in keeping the smell from getting outside of their own unit, since there would be no further reason for them to try and be discrete about their practice, and the odor will linger outside their unit for much longer, possibly even getting into nearby units, since the unit doors are just plain old fire-resistant doors, and certainly not hermetically sealed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When you say "small government", what measurement indicates size?
That still doesn't explain why it isn't used elsewhere. Not everything is sold to the US.
Well, history is funny that way. I'm not well read on Hearst and hemp, but it is a plausible scenario given that economic factors are not fixed but varies.
Say that you have two competing technologies that could potentially come to dominate the market. Even if they're not that different, say one is 10% "better" than the other, that doesn't mean that the better one will dominate the market, or that they will take market share according to their relative "goodness", or even that the "better" one will win. There are many other externalities as play, such as did one get a head start? Does it have a lot of backing? Etc. Look at the many format wars for entertainment over the years (VHS/Betamax, "HD-DVD/Blueray, etc. etc.) the first to market, with some small advantage will typically, due to network effects, come to completely dominate the market over time. So if I were Hearst, and I had just bet a pretty penny on wood pulp based paper I would certainly try to put as many obstacles in the way of the competition as I could. If I could just pull ahead a bit, I'd have time on my side to eventually guarantee complete market domination.
So why don't we make industrial hemp based paper even where we have industrial hemp? Because there isn't enough of it in places where access to wood pulp based paper is difficult enough. The wood pulp train continues on its own momentum, and derailing/dethroning that, at this time, with something that's only maybe 10% (or 20% or 50%) better isn't going to happen. There's simply not enough money in it to make the switch and write off the sunk cost (not just plants and distribution facilities, but all the knowledge, training/teaching etc. etc. that we have of the wood pulp based process). If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor you have to be 10 times as good, not 10% better.
Of course, there are a lot of "ifs" and "buts" when it comes to any specific market, but the overall economic theme is difficult to get away from. As soon as society starts to do something one way, it takes a lot of effort to change that. The rewards have to be substantial for it even to be considered. Which relegates hemp to the status of "also ran" when it comes to paper.
Stefan Axelsson
Marijuana Legalized In Oregon, Alaska, and Washington DC
United my ass :P
Have to wonder how this will play out. Will this be Cigarettes take two? Get people hooked and now it's harmful to our health. Then the lawsuits. Any big corporation would be nuts to take it on.
Then of course we'll have the dumbasses smoking and driving, and so on.
Hemp isn't a threat today any more than buggy whips are a threat to automobile makers. Or mechanical calculators are to electronic calculators.
Man... read some history.
Here's the wiki. The source materials are referenced below [21] to [25].
In 1937 Hearst used his papers to push for the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Hearst was commended by a conference of judges, lawyers and politicians for "pioneering the national fight against dope" for the anti-marijuana editorials and articles in his papers.[21] In later years, however, Hearst's "pioneering" has been widely viewed as mere pandering to the corporate interests of DuPont, as well as protecting his own substantial forest products interests against the industrial use of hemp.[23][24] Hearst's editorial efforts with respect to the ban on hemp coincide with the court-ordered reorganization of the Hearst corporation's non-publishing assets, mainly mining and forest products, in 1937.[25]
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Today, it's not a threat. In 1937 it was a threat. Today, it could be a competitor.
A hemp plant can produce fiber and oil in large quantities on crappy soil under comparatively arid conditions. You don't have to cut down huge numbers of trees and watch all the soil wash away next heavy rain.
It's a potential competitor for cotton fiber and wood fiber. It's a potential competitor for corn for ethanol and diesel.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In 1937, Hearst (who owned a chain of newspapers AND a company that made wood based paper) felt marijuana was a threat. He ran a series of "Yellow Journalism" articles demonizing marijuana as the "killer weed" associated with mexicans and backed laws to ensure that hemp was made illegal. There are many credible books on this subject. It's well known.
Until recently, the US had a huge portion of the entire world market and if you wanted to trade with them, you couldn't risk hemp products.
Given a high income for 80 years and 80 years of research, paper products have had many improvements and a lot of paper mills are paid off and have resultant low costs.
Given a small market and no economies of scale, hemp paper is currently ridiculously expensive. However, hemp fabric is comparably priced to cotton fabric so as soon as you had a large hemp paper plant, it's reasonable it would have similar cost to wood pulp paper.
As far as hemp vs cotton-- today's cotton isn't equal to even 20 year's ago cotton. It is very fragile compared to what used to be sold as cotton.
Don't get me wrong tho. I agree with your underlying point that some hemp supporters may exaggerate it's qualities.
But it's a pretty good product if we can remove the legal and image burdens.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Don't forget meth.
Meth is a schedule II drug that has some medical uses, even over the counter in its Levorotary form.
Yup, the DEA has deemed pot to be more dangerous than meth.
Florida requires 60% for an initiative to pass. Thank Jeb Bush.
I demand more intelligent trolls! Why does /. only have stupid trolls?
Once they attain a moderate level of intelligence they run for public office and are then too busy to come back and visit us.
Or they might be getting baked and looking at LOLcats...
Like this guy: Internet Troll
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office