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Justice Department formally moves to reclassify marijuana
- coldpie 2y agoBrought to you by the 2020 election. Remember this come November.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoYou can only hope people will be lining up to support candidates who will work to overturn more stupid regulations faster.
- TexanFeller 2y agoWhy do you think it was delayed until this year, an election year? One reason this is something I’m filing under scummy politicians trying to get votes rather than someone trying to right a horrible decades old wrong.
- datavirtue 2y agoDelayed? They have been working on this declassification for years now. It wasn't a secret. All the work to drag the bureaucratic sledge had to be done. Nvm...you are just trolling for another conspiracy until they finally nail Hunter.
- Uehreka 2y agoI don’t care at all why they do it. I don’t care if they hate that they’re doing it. If they do the things I want and don’t do the things I don’t want then, well, that’s pretty good. Also of note: Donald Trump could’ve done this to score some coolness points in his re-election year, and he didn’t.
- krapp 2y agoI guess pardoning Kodak Black and Lil' Wayne didn't make him cool enough...
- TexanFeller 2y ago> Donald Trump could’ve done this Let's not bring Trump into this, or anything at all, I certainly wasn't suggesting he's good because the current guy is bad. Personally I find both major party candidates are unacceptable and will vote against both of them third party.
- rayiner 2y agoDefinitely a factor in my not voting for Biden again. He campaigned as a moderate and governed (within the constraints of Congress) as a liberal.
- brandonr49 2y agoJust a heads up: reclassifying marijuana is the majority position and decidedly moderate in 2024.
- rayiner 2y agoReclassifying marijuana would make it legal for recreational use, and that only barely a majority position even in 2024: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/03/26/most-americans-favor-legalizing-marijuana-for-medical-recreational-use/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/03/26/most-america... (about 57%). More than a quarter of Biden’s own party still opposes such a move. I guess it depends on how you define “moderate.” I’d say it’s something the middle third of the public agrees with. Marijuana isn’t there yet.
- zelda420 2y agoLooking at those stats, only 11% fully oppose. The 57% is for recreation and medical, 32% for only medical. So it seems like your bending the truth for your argument, which doesn't surprise me since you're a lawyer.
- rayiner 2y agoI said that the 57% was for recreational use right in my original comment. I think it’s fair to say that what the weed legalization people really want is legalization for recreational use. And also that people who are only okay with legalizing for medical use are at odds with the weed legalization movement overall. Heck, even I don’t have a problem with marijuana being used as a treatment for glaucoma or a pain killer for cancer patients.
- cibyr 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoThis and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/health/menthol-cigarettes-ban-biden-fda.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/health/menthol-cigarettes... (no, not a racist Onion article)
- Ajay-p 2y agoI don't like when politicians only respond to overwhelming public discontent or desires in an election year. This reclassification is a good thing, absolutely, but it angers me that policymakers wait and treat us like baying kittens eager for a morsel of acknowledgement from our elected leaders.
- bairen 2y agoIt really is silly it was classified as more dangerous than cocaine. A drug that you can actually overdose on.
- droopyEyelids 2y agoIt wasn't silly, it was a deliberate choice to hurt politically undesirable demographics.
- tstrimple 2y ago“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
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- FloatArtifact 2y agoIt's a popular opinion that THC is harmless. For those that suffer from an addiction it is assuredly not despite pure sources. I'm glad for the reclassification but I am concerned for those that need help but don't know it yet.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoWhich is why this move is a no-brainer. It isn’t legalising. It isn’t even decriminalising. But it’s recognising that a lot of people smoke weed and do fine, which isn’t to say everyone does, but it’s sure of a hell a smaller fraction than people who try smoking crack.
- accrual 2y agoI think it's at least better to have real delta-9 THC (and real unadulterated flower) available for legal purchase instead of the endless poorly studied THC lookalikes that have flooded into the market.
- indigo0086 2y agoThis is just to make way for the new level of weed cronies like big tobacco and Anheuser Busch to push out their brain damage tier weed.
- accrual 2y agoIf anything, it should help push out the poorly understood non-delta-9 THC variants that currently only exist because they're not technically illegal. I want real cannabis available for legal purchase, not the lookalikes that come in vaporizer packages (delta-8, THC-P, HHC, etc).
- indigo0086 2y agoLookalikes were the market response, they fulfilled demands of people that want to get away from the industrial strength THC market. "Real cannabis" isn't what you think it is
- labrador 2y agoI smoke legal weed in California. Your statement rings false.
- boring-alterego 2y agoIf this were a serious long term fix congress would have put it in the omnibus bill that they paid their donors off with.
- _05hb 2y agoHere’s my opinion: 1. In the US, we tried to make alcohol illegal, and failed so abjectly that nobody wants to try that again. 2. There’s a decent argument to be made, that in a counterfactual world where alcohol hadn’t been discovered yet, that if we invented it today we would immediately label it so obviously harmful that it should be banned. But we don’t live in that world. 3. While it’s hard to discuss whether this or that individual psychoactive drug should be legal, it’s relatively easier to evaluate whether they’re more or less harmful than alcohol. For example, coffee: clearly less; heroin: clearly more. 4. Besides the fact that prohibition failed, everyone sort of likes freedom? Like, yes, there must be limits, but those limits should be so much on the far side of what ordinary people consider acceptable that they never even have to think, “will the government let me do this?” That seems like a good guiding principle. 5. So here is the Schelling point: everything less harmful than, up to and including alcohol, should be legal, and everything more harmful should be illegal. 6. Like most Schelling points, the results favored by this rule are arbitrary, but the reason we ought to stick to it is not that it’s a good rule per se, but rather that it’s a rule which is easier to find agreement on. So everything less harmful than alcohol should be legal, and everything more harmful should be banned. Thanks for reading. Have fun, everyone!