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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

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Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#541

Post by lazide »

QuercusMax wrote: post #349
lazide wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out. Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that. So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening. Apps just…

You seem to have a very particular idea of how direct democracy might be implemented; there's no reason it has to be "show up at 11am on a Tuesday".

There is on average over 1 new bill a day that gets voted on in Congress. Those are the bills that get past committees.

Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.

If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.

What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#542

Post by lazide »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #352
lazide wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out. Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that. So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening. Apps just…

I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto. I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich…

Who gets to decide what is insignificant or not?

They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?

The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.

Why would they vote to be stomped on?

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#543

Post by lazide »

chimeracoder wrote: post #474
mothballed wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court. So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution i…

> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court. > So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constituti…

So you’re saying popular votes are not sufficient to avoid flip flops on contentious issues, and popular voting also can step on minority groups recognized rights on a whim?

What problem is it solving again?

And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.

The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.

The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.

There is no free lunch.

Notably, imagine direct democracy and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic]!

Without guardrails on the levers of power, a lot of people would have died. As it is, a lot of lives still got ruined.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#544

Post by lazide »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #331
petsfed wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues. I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become inform…

I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.

Sufficiently framed, the highly partisan crap is the day to day.

The gov’t shutdown was precisely using the day to day crap to get leverage!

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#545

Post by potato3732842 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #522
potato3732842 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential. It boggles the mind that you can say this with a straight face. What do you think vesting more power at the federal level will do if not…

I think people are far too cynical. A highly visible federal government is in many ways more defensible from monied interests than many many small scale decisionmakers.

What do we have if not a highly visible federal government? And yet here we are talking about a hemp ban snuck into a funding bill at the behest of other industries.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#546

Post by trymas »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #93
mullingitover wrote: post #10

[flagged]

This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible.…

IMHO - a step in right direction would be abolishing first-past-the-post voting system, together with electoral college. Finally USA could get a feel for multi-party system, instead of always voting for lesser evil. MAGA could be their own party, but they will need to deal with coalition instead of having total chokehold on all institutions of government.

Not sure how to break Senate and highly unequal representation it gives.

Though realistically I don't think this will ever be possible.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#547

Post by nobody9999 »

cthalupa wrote: post #529
nobody9999 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it. Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc. In most states with legalized cannabis, testing for a v…

> Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc. My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispe…

>My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.

I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.

I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market. Even though I live in a (now) legalized state, there's still a thriving black market, both for folks who have been growing for decades who maintain a positive reputation among distributors/wholesalers, and those who purchase out-of-state product (that's tested and sold legally in those other states) without tax or records, and can then undercut the legal dispensaries.

I'm not familiar enough with the "hemp" growers/sellers, but IIUC, since it's not supposed to be used as a mind-altering substance, the testing and purity regulations may not apply.

All that said, things are a mess WRT to cannabis in the US. Some states are doing it well, others are not. And the Federal government, while not irrelevant, has not made progress in this area -- and that includes the "hemp" loophole which (and I could be mistaken here) isn't regulated at all.

Hopefully sometime in the future the states and the federal governments will get it right. Which is often how these types of issues are addressed in the US -- study the issue carefully, choose the path that is least effective and most harmful, then iterate, trying less bad and less harmful "solutions" as you go along.

Presumably we'll get there eventually.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#548

Post by roody15 »

mothballed wrote: post #46

Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this. It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups. Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market,…

Exactly. This pattern I think accurately describes the state of the US economy in general over the last few decades. Wealthy extracting wealth from what’s left of the middle class and further extracting wealth from the already poor. The decline of the US is now openly visible and attempts to hide this through economic language / indicators / propaganda etc are now openly not reflecting reality and often come off as in a dark way comical. This applies to some other western nations like France, England and perhaps Germany.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#549

Post by gwbas1c »

giobox wrote: post #513
0xTJ wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together. While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sit…

> Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned) In CA, WA and CO, almost every single individual gummie is 10mg (up to 100mg in the pack, the state limit, so usually 10 gummies in a pack). I rarely see individual servings under 10mg ever, its not common. People in these states routinely consume more than 10mgs in a…

Think of it more like the store being forced to sell individual beers: At some point someone will figure out that they can sell them in a box of 6 in a way that complies with the law.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#550

Post by gwbas1c »

0xTJ wrote: post #455
gwbas1c wrote: post #209

All of this stuff is already built around loopholes. > But the provision that was inserted into the government funding bill makes illegal any hemp product that contains more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container. Now the online "hemp" industry will shift to selling gummies in "containers" that really equate to individually wrapped. You'll get bulk discounts for buying groups of 30 "containers", but what you get wi…

0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together. While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sit…

Uhm, you can take 2 or 3.

I usually eat 2 gummies (10mg) when I want to feel the effects, or a half gummy (2.5mg) when I want to microdose.

---

When my mom was in serious pain from cancer, I told her I use CBD for migraines. What I didn't realize was that she went to the dispensary in town, and they didn't have CBD-only products. She took a 5mg THC gummy and then called me up stoned out of her mind.

I wish I knew she planned on taking some, because I would have found the right kind for her.

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