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Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

whitehouse.gov

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Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#331

Post by theptip »

scoofy wrote: post #299
mmcwilliams wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But recreational use of those drugs isn't legalized and the highest death toll from opiate use comes from people who move from the pharmaceutical-grade drugs to unregulated street drugs.

You can call for both legalization and high regulation… that’s literally what prescription drugs are.

Legalization & certification of quality is a good endpoint, if you can buy cheap heroin of good purity and stable dosage, no need for underground sources laced with fentanyl of variable purity.

I’m here for the FDA regulating what is on the label matching what is in the pill. But there is so an argument for optional certification; it might end up that the steady state cost for FDA compliance leaves room at the bottom end of the market for Mexican underground labs, and I’d rather have US above-ground labs filling that niche (because there are other recourses for egregious behavior like lacing oxy pills with Fentanyl if your supplier is in the US, which are not available against cartel labs in Mexico). It’s an empirical hypothesis though, you might not see prices high enough to matter with FDA compliant labs.

Another temptation to resist is taxing the drugs to pay for social services, “sin tax” in this case would again leave the door open for illegal labs. Again you can tune the parameters when you have evidence from the market.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#332

Post by bryanrasmussen »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #142
didgeoridoo wrote: post #83

For reference, as of January 2022 there were ZERO people in federal custody solely for simple possession of marijuana[0]. As a gesture, this seems fine. But the continued presence of cannabis on Schedule I makes an absolute mockery out of our entire code of laws. [0]: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/weighing-impa...

But the pardon can allow those with convictions on their record to live a normal life. Edit: major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to. It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually, and there are a whole lot of them, they operate under the radar, and it’s hard to contact them. Finally it’s…

>major caveat, all the data harvesting and background check firms generally do not proactively purge their data sets as they’re supposed to.

if they 'are supposed to' then it sounds like a potential civil liability if they have not done what they were supposed to do.

>It’s your obligation to follow up with every single one of them individually

or a lawyer could find some firms that did not do as they were supposed to, and some people that would have standing to sue, and ka-ching? This of course depends if my understand of "are supposed to" is correct.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#333

Post by theptip »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #272
theptip wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Criminalization does more harm than benefit. For the vast majority of drug users that are not addicted, this is obvious. And for the addicts, criminalization is the last thing they need. Deterrence might prevent a few people from getting addicted, but not many. A lot of drug addiction is downstream of homelessness and mental health issues meaning the illegality is a very weak deterrent for the most vulnerable. If…

> If we pushed even half of the money spent policing the war on drugs into homelessness support, mental health services, and addiction counseling and harm minimization like needle exchanges, we’d see a huge reduction in harm. This point seems plausible, are there any sources that might prove it? Also your point about racial discrimination might be a good utilitarian argument for it's better to let those racially disc…

The go-to example is Portugal, where drugs were decriminalized, and death rates went down. Not without challenges though, as they are now seeing issues with public drug taking and associated crime (which could be more about pandemic homelessness since we see that in US cities too). I think the harm reduction results are clear here but you also need to do the part where you invest more broadly in social programs (and with sufficient funding for homelessness services, taking a zero tolerance approach to public intoxication seems perfectly acceptable to me). See https://www.cato.org/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-port... on harm.

There is lots of evidence supporting needle exchanges as good for harm reduction. See Scotland, Netherlands, and many other EU countries.

Another one to watch is Oregon, where they did the decriminalization bit, but I think without the shift in funding to social services. Haven’t dug much here. (I think “reduce policing, increase social services” is the most sympathetic interpretation of what the moderate Democrats were thinking when they initially supported the “defund the police” slogan, which is now associated with more radical policies that are toxic to the center.)

There is a risk of “no true Scotsman” in the following point, but this is really an extremely radical policy proposal, at least it looked so until a couple years ago; there aren’t actually good examples end-to-end. So I think we need to employ epistemic humility and do local iterative experiments to prove it out (the advantage of the federal model in the US is a federal decriminalization would result in 50 natural experiments as states passed their own laws.) I don’t want to concede too much uncertainty though, the harms of criminalization are objectively very high, so you’d need to measure very high costs from the proposed new policy which I’m very skeptical that you’d see.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#334

Post by xenophonf »

smegger001 wrote: post #281
ensignavenger wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DEA is part of the "Biden Administration". One part of the administration- HHS, has made a recomendation to another part, the DEA.

Yeah I mean if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order and have it rescheduled tomorrow whether the DEA wanted to or not. this is just a performative act. He is the chief executive ultimately its his decision to leave it as is of to reschedule it. if he doesn't then it means he doesn't care and anything less is just a performance for votes

> if Biden actually cared about it he could issue an executive order

The guy is President, not king. He's supposed to delegate those sorts of policy decisions to experts. Ruling by consensus, not fiat, is a _good thing_. It's like having a change advisory board or code review process vet changes before they get deployed in production.

The bit about performing for votes is a circular argument with no way to refute it. You could say the same thing about any elected official.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#335

Post by astrange »

dessimus wrote: post #317
Levitz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really? Do people really think "Ah but of course the military needs more money, it's given a good use, since the police get it afterwards"?

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell... 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.…

> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell...

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.)

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#336

Post by therealdrag0 »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #322
sakopov wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just over 300 people — or 0.5% of the total prison population — are behind bars for any sort of drug possession. [1] If anything it'll help some folks to have a their records cleaned up. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/bidens-marijuana-pardons-won...

I think most libertarians argue holds water that weed and dealing weed is a victimless crime. Now redo that with "how many people are in for dealing weed (and only weed) and other drugs" and that number goes way up. Obviously people found with guns and doing violence while selling drugs is another thing, no longer victimless. The War on Drugs is multidecade failure

Iirc the data is pretty crap and it’s hard to separate out specific flavors of what you think does or doesn’t deserve jail regarding drugs.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#337

Post by justinclift »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #329
justinclift wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally it’s impossible to verify they actually did. Sounds like an opportunity for someone to set up a service which does. Do the verification I mean. :)

Well you see, in the business of verifying someone's background it's really common to break the law and get way with it. The Verifiers are criminals themselves.

Hmmm, it's not really immediately obvious why that would be the case.

Are there some examples of this happening that you can point to? :)

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#338

Post by tptacek »

cm2187 wrote: post #310
tptacek wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#339

Post by dessimus »

astrange wrote: post #335
dessimus wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell... 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.…

> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell... 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.)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/02/california-s...

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.

Re: Granting pardon for the offense of simple possession of or use of marijuana

#340

Post by mmcwilliams »

scoofy wrote: post #299
mmcwilliams wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But recreational use of those drugs isn't legalized and the highest death toll from opiate use comes from people who move from the pharmaceutical-grade drugs to unregulated street drugs.

You can call for both legalization and high regulation… that’s literally what prescription drugs are.

I agree with you but there are pathways for decriminalization and legalization ala cannabis in states that have fully legalized it. There is still a difference between the "medicinal" products which require something resembling a prescription and recreational ones which are sold to anyone of age. Those recreational products still undergo testing and regulation.
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