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The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

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Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#231

Post by ensignavenger »

shados wrote: post #208
crdb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false equivalence. Pot smoking is victimless (at most, your landlord will need to get rid of the smell for the next non-smoking tenant). Murder has, by definition, serious consequences for someone else. In a legal system whose premise is that one should be free to do anything so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others, it it consistent to legalise pot and keep murder illegal.

"at most, your landlord will need to get rid of the smell for the next non-smoking tenant" And while you're there, will need to find a way to get rid of the smell for everyone in a 500 feet radius (im exaggerating, of course). While I'm absolutely ok with it being legal, and it certainly should not be a criminal offense...it at least should follow rules similar to tobacco with a twist. That shit can seriously ruin th…

It is my opinion that it should definitely be illegal to smoke (anything) on public property. Landlords should be able to choose (via terms in a lease) whether or not it is okay to smoke on their property.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#232

Post by sverige »

neonscribe wrote: post #68
sverige wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

J. Edgar Hoover worked hard to demonize it and to make it a federal crime in the '30s with the aid of such laughable propaganda as Reefer Madness. It helped him justify the growth in power and scope of the FBI. (I hope it's not yet a crime to publicly say that the federal government or any of its agencies would use propaganda to promote their agenda....)

You may be thinking of Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He was mainly responsible for the racially motivated propaganda campaign against marijuana in the 1930's.

I think you're right. This reminded me of the classic Wild Man Fischer song, "I'm Working for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obn3mb_wQjs

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#233

Post by CWuestefeld »

AstralStorm wrote: post #142
CWuestefeld wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming that regulation exists to help the little guy, and all deregulation is the work of oppressors? Consider the work of the Libertarian Party to, for example, free people to braid hair without requiring a year of training to get a license. Or consider that big corporations love regulations as a way to put barriers in the way of competitors. That's the whole point of the economic idea of "rent seeking", a…

Ha, economists agree is the best troll I have ever heard. There are enough different schools that many economists disagree about anything. Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government against everyone else via all sorts of lobbying and economical pressure. Regulation now, that is a good thing, which happens when credible issues are de…

Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government

No. You do not understand the concept. Regulatory capture can happen even with the purest of intentions.

The problem is that for effective regulation, you need experts. Where are you going to get experts, if not people who have experience in the industry? The problem with this is not that they may try to corrupt the process, favoring their former employer or whatever (although that is also a potential problem, but that's outright corruption, not "regulatory capture").

The thing about people from the industry is that they have a set way of looking at things - they're going to have a hard time "thinking outside the box", and because of the very fact that they spent so much time gathering their expertise, they're going to have a world view in which that area is more important than it probably is to the rest of us. With people that are used to thinking about the system in a set way, and who think it's more important relatively than other things, the flavor of the output regulations is going to tend to be to reinforce the way the industry does things, you'll rarely get something that really pulls the industry out of problematic ruts.

From what I've read, the Navy actually recognizes this problem in their nuclear fleet, and so refuses to use nuclear experts from the power generation industry. Being the Navy, they can afford to train their own experts, but this obviously can't scale to every place in our lives where regulation shows its face.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#234

Post by dragonwriter »

icantdrive55 wrote: post #181
dragonwriter wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done almost all of those things before (general maintenance rather than construction, and I've never driven a cab) -- including retail sales at an electronics chain (Radio Shack before Best Buy was the thing) -- and would again if I didn't have better prospects elsewhere (with my experience and expectations of the future labor market, I don't expect to need to do any of those things again, but that's a different…

I have a feeling you are more like the average person here. When the economy goes into a recession, or our current line of work is down sized; we take a chit job. Only the elite can wait around until something palatable opens up. My problem with people so desperate for money, is they come here illegailly, or just happen to somehow get some bogus paperwork by the federal government, and will do practically any job. A…

> My problem with people so desperate for money, is they come here illegailly, or just happen to somehow get some bogus paperwork by the federal government, and will do practically any job.

Why have a problem with those people? To me, that makes about as much sense having a problem with the relative economic success of the United States, which is why the US has been (until the recent economic crisis) an attractive place for such people to seek to go.

Why not, instead, have a problem with the features of the system in the US that fail to address (or actively make worse) the social costs of such desperation, including, but not limited to:

(1) a legal immigration system with, in most immigrant visa categories, hard per-country numerical limits which are not aligned with demand, creating the incentive for illegal immigration (simply eliminating per country limits in most visa categories and assigning available slots from one global pool would vastly reduce illegal immigration; removing hard numerical limits and charging fees to mitigate the social costs of excess immigration beyond existing caps would reduce it even further and allow surplus immigration demand to be a source of public revenue rather than a cost hole.)

(2) poor enforcement of labor rules, both where it comes to enforcing who-can-legally-work requirements, but also wage, hour, tax, and benefit rules (without poor enforcement on both sides of this equation, the effect of illegal immigration on wages and working conditions would be far less, and the draw for illegal immigrants would be far less.)

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#235

Post by M_Grey »

redwood wrote: post #196
gcb0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you failed to read the one paragraph conclusion. both pro and cons arguments were wrong. absolutely nothing relevant has changed. crime didnt go up nor down. neither did taxes. etc. nada. also, ted is only relevant to rich pot heads ;)

That's partially because it has not been legalized in a non-nearly-exclusively-caucasian state yet. Meaning it hasn't been legalized in a state where there are many marijuana arrests. I'm not exageratting... I've never met a caucasian person who's been arrested for marijuana posession. Never . And yet here in NYC alone, on the order of 50,000 people (almost exclusively of color) are arrested every year for marijuana…

In my twenties my friends and I were into it, and without exception all of us who were white, or just light-skinned, were never so much as asked a question about anything related to pot, by a police officer. I was pulled over once and my friend had just smoked in the car, and it stank... cop didn't even blink.

Now at the time two of my friends were black, and one was Sikh, and they stopped smoking first out of all of us, because if they so much as smelled vaguely of pot, they'd get hassled. When we all get together now over dinner or drinks, we still go back to the old joke my Sikh friend came up with, "Being white is like a superpower in this country."

It's not that simple of course, and the factors which determine whether the police will bother you are also based on socioeconomic status, and if you have a criminal record or not. In terms of actually catching the eye of the police though, my white friends and I just never did, while any of my friends who couldn't have passed the infamous "paper bag test" always seemed to have to explain themselves a lot more.

Note: NorthEast US, I cannot speak for the rest of it.

Sidenote: My Sikh friend normally has a decent time of it, but after 9/11? He and his family who had moved to Georgia, ended up moving back East.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#236

Post by JamesBarney »

icc97 wrote: post #164
betenoire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the fact that nothing changed is literally proof that it is bad law. If prohibiting something doesn't help anything, even if it doesn't hurt anything, then we shouldn't prohibit it. I would like to hear an counter example, I can't think of one.

I agree, the law just makes things worse by increasing the number of people we call criminals. However as a counter example, even if the murder rate didn't change by de-criminalizing murder, I'd still argue that there should be a law against it.

We spend lots of money investigating and prosecuting murders. We have a non-perfect system that sometimes throws innocent people in jail.

And if banning murder did not lower the murder rate than banning murder would be a piece of legislation with no benefits and only costs. Not sure why we want to pass legislation that puts innocent people in jail and sets money on fire for no benefit.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#237

Post by imagist »

Kadin wrote: post #118
zkhalique wrote: post #78

I would express the same sentiment about illegal immigrants. This is to all the people who support Donald Trump's rhetoric about deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. These people fled the drug gangs and violence that our war on drugs helped create (think fleeing ISIS) and came to work jobs no one else would take and make a better life for their family. Yes technically they broke a law. If you're going to…

> came to work jobs no one else would take This is a particular piece of rhetoric I find distasteful. If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take, that job should not exist in that form or at that pay rate. Full stop. So the fact that jobs that "no one else would take" exist and are being taken by ille…

> This is a particular piece of rhetoric I find distasteful. If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take, that job should not exist in that form or at that pay rate. Full stop.

Agreed. There was a pretty good article on this in N+1 magazine a few months back that I found insightful enough to copy down:

> Both American and Mexican labor are cheaper for being divided, and there is no obvious reason to believe that more labor laws, like raising the minimum wage, will change the fact if there remains a surplus of undocumented workers to whom these laws technically apply, though in practice they are unenforced. The real wage, calculated as the average rate paid to documented and undocumented workers alike, explains Trump's rise more than his virulent racism does. Racism is a side effect of a regime that keeps labor laws on the books only to look the other way when millions of brown people are subjected to conditions far beneath these standards.

> The wall isn't racist; the border is racist. The wall is an effort to force a broader recognition of the privileges the border grants to professionals, who are the primary beneficiaries of American immigration and trade policy, and to redistribute some of its racist benefits downward. The only solution to this problem is to raise the price of labor power in Mexico, and then everywhere else. But given the limited political horizon of the professional left, for whom a higher minimum wage for American citizens is the best that can be hoped for, perhaps the unemployed people of Indiana can be forgiven for thinking that the wall is more realistic.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#238

Post by SamBam »

aorth wrote: post #154

Interesting! I'm from California but haven't lived there in ten years and I thought marijuana was already legal there. Turns out that it's only medicinal use of marijuana that is legal (2010), but there is a ballot proposition for wider legalization on the upcoming November, 2016 elections. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_64,_Marijuana...

Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada all have ballot questions for fully-legal recreational marijuana this year:

http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/07/14/definitive-guide-us-st...

Four more states have medical marijuana on the ballots.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#239

Post by Mathnerd314 »

mda wrote: post #170
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #167

A contrasting report: http://www.rmhidta.org/html/2016%20FINAL%20Legalization%20of... There are indeed significant changes in some marijuana-related statistics. The Cato institute report has selected indicators that are relatively stable and do not show these effects. It does not discuss the limitations of the data, discuss data sources that were considered but not used, or include illustrative anecdotes. It can be s…

Looks like this report deliberately chosen negative stats and use of non zero y axis in some graphs made me cringe as well.

Right, they clearly set out to prove that marijuana should not have been legalized. But from my perspective, the lack of convincing statistics is more convincing than the Cato report's lack of any effect at all.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#240

Post by Grishnakh »

random_upvoter wrote: post #197
AstralStorm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means more money to invest in the country fixing issues, hopefully, instead of being wasted on mansions for corrupt politicians or spent recklessly. For example, issues that cause crime. Wouldn't that be nice? Or at least advancement of science and engineering. Someone gets to fund the space program.

OTOH once marijuana is legal it is just another crop and I would expect to price to drop to near zero. Combined with the fact that you hardly need kilograms of it, I wouldn't get too excited about future tax revenue.

I wouldn't. MJ in a lot of places has gotten like "craft beer": there's an endless number of varieties and strains, growers put a lot of effort into creating new strains and growing them as optimally as possible (like using hydroponics), different varieties are claimed to have different effects, etc. You don't need kilograms of it, but there is every indication that a lot of it will be very valuable, just like many fine wines are very, very expensive per bottle and many fine imported cheeses are extremely expensive.
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