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Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#141

Post by neilwilson »

foolfoolz wrote: post #138
toomanybeersies wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on your philosophy of government and society. If you live in a social democracy with universal healthcare, drugs policy should probably be based around harm reduction. This is why helmets are required on bicycles (in some countries, for better or worse) and you need to wear a seatbelt in the car. It's your body, but the public has to pick up the tab when you break it. I don't think that you should…

I think this is a slippery slope. Drug legalization shouldn't be about reducing harm to optimize cost effective economics of keeping people alive. If that were true then you would have the power to outlaw anything that isn't healthy in the name of saving public tax dollars. Cigarettes. Soda. Deep fried foods. Watching too much TV. Sky diving. etc. Drug legalization is about using public funds on other issues besides…

Drug legalisation is about corporations making a lot of money providing yet another thing to keep a good section of the population docile and in their worker pens.

Why do you need prisons when people will voluntarily imprison themselves?

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#142

Post by mmt »

One of the topics that hasn't yet been mentioned (which surprises me, especially for HN), which I believe I saw originally when this legalization was still merely being proposed was how it would affect medical/pharmaceutical research.

With such national legalization, an entire developed nation (with relatively diverse genetic backgrounds, even) will be open to clinical trials.

Besides finally providing ammunition to topple the "no possible medical uses" classification in the US (and presumably other countries), it may lead to discoveries of properties of the lesser known chemicals in cannabis.

It may not, but the possibility is still likely to bring something of an additional boost to Canada's biotech sector.

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#143

Post by alacombe »

gschier wrote: post #51
toastermoster wrote: post #49

I'm visiting Toronto and nobody here at the bar had heard this yet.

It's essentially "legal" in Canada already so no one really cares about it that much.

Bullshit, the RCMP has been pretty active here in BC to close illegal "dispensaries". By all likelyhood, this won't stop after this bill, as I trust the liberals to have properly secured weed's distribution. "Depenalization" would have been 10x better than this "legalization".

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#145

Post by zachrose »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #73

Meanwhile in Britain, the former leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, spoke out and claimed that the war on cannabis had been "irreversibly lost". He was quickly shut down by Theresa May, who categorically ruled out legalisation or even decriminalisation [1]. I don't understand how politicians can stand up and claim that legalisation would have substantial negatives, when every experiment with legalisatio…

> Drug prohibition has been a categorical failure in every outcome it was intended to achieve.

The following flavor of comment has been made many times on HN, but since I’m halfway through Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow I’m in the mood for making it again here:

The drug war has been “successful”, because its goal was to incarcerate, disenfranchise, extort, terrorize, and break apart the families of minorities so that America could retain a racial hierarchy after the civil rights movement. This hierarchy is advantageous to the ruling class because they can continue to exploit poor whites economically, keep them off the bottom of the hierarchy, and retain their political support.

When Reagan declared a War on Drugs in 1982, less than 2% of Americans viewed drug use as the most important issue facing the nation. In 1989 that number was at 64%, all without a significant increase in drug usage. (Rates for drug crimes did increase, because criminality was the effect of the War on Drugs, not its cause.)

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#146

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

foolfoolz wrote: post #140
y4mi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its way easier to overdose on hard drugs than alcohol. with alcohol, its a slow progress. you keep drinkng and most people pass out / lose their will to drink after they've had enough. hard drugs are generally a single portion and once its in your blood, its too late. you cant say 'hey, i've got enough for today' once you feel it hitting you. You're already doomed if you've chosen the wrong dosage from the start. > T…

I think a lot of this can be attributed to these drugs being used in a completely ad hoc manner. There's no usage guidelines on a bag of cocaine. There's no 'Active Ingredient' percentage listed. You dont know what it is. You can't compare it to another until you've had it. Any pill that's an upper is called 'molly' Somehow the vast majority of people who take legal hard drugs such as vicodin or dilaudid, don't overd…

As a (former? never say never) injecting drug user of Heroin, methamphetamine, and quite a few other water soluble substances, I fully agree with the parent comment.

I never bothered getting addicted to Heroin. You have to stick to the rules: never use more than two days in a row and don’t use it consistently, if in doubt half your dose, and never use alone but always with at least one other who knows how to administer breathing assistance until paramedics arrive. Don’t take your dose at the same time as your buddy, wait to see if the first user has trouble staying conscious, 15 to 20 minutes should do it.

Edit: fixed a word

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#147

Post by Consultant32452 »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #73

Meanwhile in Britain, the former leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, spoke out and claimed that the war on cannabis had been "irreversibly lost". He was quickly shut down by Theresa May, who categorically ruled out legalisation or even decriminalisation [1]. I don't understand how politicians can stand up and claim that legalisation would have substantial negatives, when every experiment with legalisatio…

I think this has to do with the psychology of disgust sensitivity. Conservatives tend to have stronger senses of disgust than liberals and especially libertarians. "Smoking weed is stinky/gross/icky, therefore we gotta ban it."

Here's just one article on the link between disgust and political leanings: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/caveman-politics/201...

As a personal anecdote about this, I support decriminalization/legalization for all drugs in all cases, not just pot. I not going to debate that here, but only share that to provide context for the following. Last year I visited Los Angeles. The entire time I was there I couldn't get over how bad everything reeked of marijuana. The AirBnB I stayed at was fine, but as soon as I walked outside and as I toured around the city I simply could not escape the smell of weed. It reminded me of the 80s when there was cigarette smoke everywhere, and it was highly unpleasant. I still support legalization, but I would be lying if I didn't admit that experience had me wavering.

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#148

Post by saulrh »

y4mi wrote: post #137
foolfoolz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously we want to restrict access as much as possible to particular drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, which are so harmful and addictive that nobody should be using them, or GHB, where the potential for fatal overdose is so high. I dont understand this part. The potential for overdose on alcohol is high as well. I can go buy a plastic handle for $10 and if i drink the whole thing tonight i'll probably di…

its way easier to overdose on hard drugs than alcohol. with alcohol, its a slow progress. you keep drinkng and most people pass out / lose their will to drink after they've had enough. hard drugs are generally a single portion and once its in your blood, its too late. you cant say 'hey, i've got enough for today' once you feel it hitting you. You're already doomed if you've chosen the wrong dosage from the start. > T…

Tylenol aka paracetamol. Take one every six hours, as directed, and you'll be fine. Take two every six hours and you die painfully over the course of the next month. 500 deaths a year in the US alone... despite basically every house in the developed world having a bottle of it in a drawer. And it doesn't even have huge black warning labels with skulls and poison symbols! Street-quality Tylenol would kill people the way street-quality fentanyl does. Probably more.

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#149

Post by mmt »

foolfoolz wrote: post #135
toomanybeersies wrote: post #73

Meanwhile in Britain, the former leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, spoke out and claimed that the war on cannabis had been "irreversibly lost". He was quickly shut down by Theresa May, who categorically ruled out legalisation or even decriminalisation [1]. I don't understand how politicians can stand up and claim that legalisation would have substantial negatives, when every experiment with legalisatio…

> Obviously we want to restrict access as much as possible to particular drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine, which are so harmful and addictive that nobody should be using them, or GHB, where the potential for fatal overdose is so high. I dont understand this part. The potential for overdose on alcohol is high as well. I can go buy a plastic handle for $10 and if i drink the whole thing tonight i'll probably di…

> I dont understand this part. The potential for overdose on alcohol is high as well.

I think that the point about GHB that most people miss is the concept of therapeutic index, a term borrowed from the medical world (I've also seen it called "safety ratio" in the context of recreational drugs, especially since they're not being used therapeutically).

That is, the amount of GHB required to get the desired effect is very close to the amount necessary for an overdose.

> I can go buy a plastic handle for $10 and if i drink the whole thing tonight i'll probably die

Merely being easy to obtain doesn't make it easy to overdose, though. That "if I drink the whole thing" is an important part.

You do not, for example, need to drink 90% of that bottle just to get "buzzed". I suspect that the average person would feel sufficiently drugged well before making it halfway through (as even a fifth, even spread over an evening, is a lot of booze).

With drugs like GHB or ketamine, one needs to do the equivalent of drinking the vast majority of that overdose-quantity-bottle just to get high enough, so it's very easy to go too far accidentally. What's worse, what that amount is, and what that overdose amount is, are weight-dependent, and they can vary at different rates.

That's not to say there's no way of alleviating that risk, or at least reducing the possible harm (like maybe only allowing them in clubs adjacent to hospitals), but simply ignoring the legitimate increased accidental OD risk is unlikely to help.

Re: Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

#150

Post by sdruskat »

Clutch predicted this in 2004: "Everybody move to Canada, smoke lots of pot, everybody move to Canada right now!" (Clutch, "The Mob Goes Wild", Blast Tyrant. DRT: 2004) https://youtu.be/XDCNJtK6XkE

And seriously, there is obviously a massive commercial interest in legalized marijuana, hence we'll see more and more moves in that direction. The correlation with de-demonization (and de-criminalization!) of 'organic' drugs and widening of personal liberties is a side-effect, albeit a welcome one.

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