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US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

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Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#91
post #75
post #56

One major effect of this is that weed stores will be able to use banks and payment processors legally once the regulators catch up.

THEREFORE they will be able to move CASH money out of their stores TO BANKS, resulting in fewer "smash and grab" incidents ... aka, "Hyundai meet storefront of weed shop." Looking forward to this, silly to see so many Kia "boys" being used for gross violence crimes when regulation changes could lessen it. > https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/seattle-pot-shop-cr... for example

Every dispo in my area (Metro Detroit) has concrete pillars surrounding the building, usually every two feet or so.

One of the first to open a few years back got hit early and everyone seems to have learned the lesson.

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#93
post #56

One major effect of this is that weed stores will be able to use banks and payment processors legally once the regulators catch up.

A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#94
however, the weed these days is much stronger, and not the one our grandfathers smoked.

if something could be done about the thc content -- that will be nice.

weed isn't exactly harmful -- but long term it will be interesting to see the consequences. now already a lot of people are paranoid due to weed use.

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#95
post #65

Weed being illegal on a federal level has had some interesting effects. Because of these laws, all legal weed has to be grown, processed, and retailed within a single state. So much industry and local employment has been created by the legal barriers in place. It’s probably still a net positive to release the federal restriction, but I hope all these small/mid sized businesses don’t get gulped up by big tobacco or ot…

Being gulped up big corporations is good. They will much more efficiently serve the market. SMBs are notoriously unproductive. Though maybe you want your drug dealers to be unproductive, for society's sake! I may take this back...

What SMB has the luxury of being notoriously unproductive? Economies of scale are very real and tend to make larger businesses more efficient, it's true, but you'll find that causes SMBs to be lean and mean to remain competitive.

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#97
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On it's surface it seems to have worked better than these experiments. Otherwise the experiments would not be getting rolled back... There's very few if any fans of what played out in Portland, for instance. Overt drug usage exploded and became a much worse problem. The exact opposite of what proponents had hoped. Some will say "but they didn't do it right" or similar - tired arguments we hear every time pet policies…

This is a very un-nuanced take on what happened in Portland, and lines up with what the uncritical and uninformed national reporting about Portland has been saying. It was not successful, but it was also never effectively funded, not implemented well, and rolled out in a rush.

Bad execution undermines otherwise good policy.

Ideas don’t execute themselves and when someone doesn’t deliver the goods, it is human nature to question their decision making ability in the first place.

Being defensive or arguing nuance is fine in theory, but in practice bad outcomes tend to reinforce biases.

I would prefer fully baked ideas that are rigorous and practical rather than purely utopian and just hoping for the best. One does not roll out underfunded programs that play with safety and health.

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#98
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moving to schedule III, though the new company it's in really highlights how it should be descheduled instead: > It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids Hopefully the first step but not the last.

At least according to one study, cannabis does slightly more harm than both of those, although that harm is still tiny compared to that done by alcohol. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285843262_Drug_harm...

They do score ketamine higher than cannabis in "harm to user", but cannabis has a much higher "harm to others" score.

Re: US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because while it may not have been successful at getting Americans to stop drinking, it was effective at reducing violent crimes caused by drinking, as well as the negative health effects such as liver cirrhosis. The anti drug control crowd has done a great job commandeering popular opinion on this topic. I found this (non-academic) article informative to this end. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/20…

Well, minus the whole organized crime thing, which is a pretty gigantic elephant in the room.

Yeah, it seems pretty disingenuous to call Prohibition a success because one stat went down.
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