This thread demonstrates the idealogical purism and lack of pragmatic political expectations from leftists and progressives. There is literally nothing the Biden admin can do that will ever be enough because it doesn’t match some rosy fucking dreamland that only lives in your heads. Descheduling is huge, and signals the end of 100 years of madness with cannabis laws. If you want more, then we need to have more legislative power to implement it.
This is dumb. You’ve got thousands of recreational dispensaries all over the country. States are pretty much operating in violation of federal law already because the federal law is so out of touch. Maybe change the law to be more in line with what states are actually doing?
Do we get to wait another 50 years before they make recreational marijuana legal?
Why do we even have a DEA? It’s like putting cops in charge of which medicine you should take. They aren’t the ones who should be making the calls here.
“We knew we couldn’t arrest people for being pro-civil rights or against the war, but by associating crack with black people and marijuana with hippies, we could disrupt their movements. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did!” - Paraphrasing of the Nixon Administration recounting the “Good ol’ days”
Why are we arresting addicts? If you want to arrest people for loitering or blocking the sidewalk, fine. But, arresting them for being an addict is asinine. How about we arrest people for having cancer while we are at it.
Probably nothing immediately. The biggest advantages of rescheduling are in regard to federal sentencing guidelines and, imo more importantly, federal funding for research. Schedule 1 drugs (which MJ is currently) are defined as having no medical value, so research funding is practically impossible.
Sounds like a half-assed fuck up, that’s still 6mo to 3y. For weed. still gonna go to jail, still get a record, still get your life ruined, still over fucking weed. The idea that jail is the appropriate punishment for drug addiction is utterly unjustifiable at this point, yet here we are, still pretending we’re something other than just wrong. Sunk cost fallacy I guess. Guess they felt they couldn’t just come out and do the right thing after having ruined tens(?) of thousands of lives for no reason
They effectively did one without the other. From what I’ve been able to gather Oregon is actually one of the worst states for mental health and addiction care. Now of course they realized this and tried to appropriate money to deal with that. But they didn’t get enough and there was no lead time. They decriminalized before the new infrastructure was in place. So all of the aid groups and government health agencies that did exist were playing catch up the entire time. Imagine the crunch with the entire state emergency hiring counselors, trying to buy new buildings for safe use centers, and new inpatient centers; all at the same time.
So the net effect was people watched a drug problem get worse (because COVID did that all over the world) with less tools to deal with it than before. Instead of what they wanted to see, which would have been different tools to deal with it. In the end shutting it down and going back to arrests and courts became an easy case for Conservatives.
The lesson aid groups and governments should take away is not that decriminalization is bad. Just that they must have enough health infrastructure to deal with the problem because there’s a lot of people who would be in the prison system that are going to suddenly be in the health system. And a pandemic is a horrible time to make sweeping policy changes on anything but getting through the pandemic.
I’m glad that you shared this, because it’s good to know the pitfalls when implementing changes in policy. I want a robust and easy access healthcare system anyway, but it’s good to know it’s a prerequisite for softening on drugs.
Reclassification at the international level requires support from the international community. Singapore is against reclassification of cannabis due to proximity with the opium poppy-laden region called Golden Triangle.
Methamphetamine (Desoxyn) and heroin (Diacetylmorphine) are scheduled II drugs. I don’t think they will at least to the same level as Marijuana since it was previously classified as scheduled I (no medical use)
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