The status quo, by definition, is not designed at all. The status quo is also not the law. Are we talking about changing the law or the status quo? You continually conflate status quo, law, and societal norms. All three are significantly different.
Also, remember that marijuana being illegal already causes massive harm to society: innocent users are jailed, massive amounts of money are wasted, and a lucrative criminal endeavour incentivised.
poshniallo on
I figure I could take a bear.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
what you will tend to find is that punitive approaches are ultimately worthless. you have to try and do something much harder; change social opinions. exactly as weve done with smoking, and it has been very effective overall in reducing smoking - and it is continuing to reduce rates
There's always the sex tourism, though legal prostitutes are a lot easier to find in europe than legal weed.
Yeah. London is full of those free weeklies that double as prostitute catalogs, the skeevy as hell prostitute hotels are a block away from the train station in Frankfurt and the prostitutes find and harass you in Paris. It's hard to get a drink in a hotel bar in Europe without getting propositioned.
There's not exactly a shortage of prostitutes in Europe. Amsterdam's "thing" is the pot.
We are a culture where celebrities can smoke pot on TV, make funny pot movies, sing songs about how great it is and generally make it look like the coolest thing ever, while their audience goes to prison for following the example. The status quo is retarded.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The status quo, by definition, is not designed at all. The status quo is also not the law. Are we talking about changing the law or the status quo? You continually conflate status quo, law, and societal norms. All three are significantly different.
Also, remember that marijuana being illegal already causes massive harm to society: innocent users are jailed, massive amounts of money are wasted, and a lucrative criminal endeavour incentivised.
The status quonis whatever the current state it. It incorporates current laws and norms. What is the point you are trying to make?
I hope you realize how biased you just made yourself look by saying "innocent users are jailed." You are just assuming your conclusion that these people, who actually violate the law are "innocent."
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
pretty clearly signifying "innocent of serious crimes"
The status quonis whatever the current state it. It incorporates current laws and norms. What is the point you are trying to make?
I hope you realize how biased you just made yourself look by saying "innocent users are jailed." You are just assuming your conclusion that these people, who actually violate the law are "innocent."
One of the constant themes in all of your posts is a strong tendency toward totalitarian policies. Instead of lecturing others about the law - which most of us realize is a creation of politicians and lawyers like yourself and not some holy writ buried deep in the bones of the universe - maybe you should examine why all your independent evaluations of the issues come down to restricting, controlling and banning the actions of your fellow man, usually to the benefit of your wealthy paymasters.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
skfm:
think of it this way
the best of all worlds is the one where people who want to take drugs in a recreational and safe way can, and those who have a predisposition to harm can find out without having to risk harm, and the drugs that are genuinely basically without merit like crack and tobacco are frowned against socially and dealt with the same way we deal with normal "bad behaviour"
the ultimate end point for a more authoritarian approach is just less good, in both actual and human cost
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
pretty clearly signifying "innocent of serious crimes"
morally innocent if you will
I remember discussing drug law in my criminal law class and having someone say "all the real activists and freedom fighters are in jail now because of the war on drugs. There are your modern MLk Jrs." I just have no patience for bullshit like this, to be blunt (and neither did the professor or the rest of the class. We changed the subject, moved on, and never let that idiot answer a question again).
Well the City of Amsterdam is doing it's best to postpone the measures, partially due to the economic impact and partially because Amsterdam is a left-liberal (european definition) city while we have a christian-conservative-populist national cabinet at the moment (ugh), but it doesn't look like they'll be able to postpone it until the next national election, so unless the government falls in the meantime they'll have to comply. Drug issues aren't the focus in any major election for the last decade at least though.
Amsterdam itself mainly has the issue of the first street you see after Central Station (Damrak) being pretty terrible, incredibly crowded and selling tourist junk (including many pro-weed stuff) and filled with fastfood restaurants. That first 10 minutes of walking into Amsterdam sucks. But yeah, it could easily fall to say the tourist attraction of say Copenhagen, though Schiphol is still a top 5 EU airport and at the high-end Amsterdam has a lot to offer.
I'd support liberalisation of xtc too, there are again some risks but most of those come from the unreliability of the dosage/contamination (though you can OD and overuse is linked to some mental issues).
The main problem with weed legalisation is that while you could perhaps get a small majority to support it, just about noone is going to make it a priority. In the US it's political poison on a national level, and over here people care a lot more about (socio-)economic issues, futureproofing society, crime, immigration. Who is going to make this a campaign issue? I seem to recall that in the youtube 'ask the President a question' thing all the weed related questions where removed (by youtube, though it could well be on the campaigns request). Noone wants to score negative points with independents who are opposed.
Amsterdam itself mainly has the issue of the first street you see after Central Station (Damrak) being pretty terrible, incredibly crowded and selling tourist junk (including many pro-weed stuff) and filled with fastfood restaurants. That first 10 minutes of walking into Amsterdam sucks. But yeah, it could easily fall to say the tourist attraction of say Copenhagen, though Schiphol is still a top 5 EU airport and at the high-end Amsterdam has a lot to offer.
Yeah. Amsterdam really improves once you get past that district. It's a gorgeous city - the canals are awesome - but that cluster of avenues around the train station are a horrific tourist trap.
Schliphol's also a fair distance from the city center. You can't walk from it to anywhere worth seeing. Unless you have a long layover, I doubt many passengers spend much time in the city beyond the airport. Can't see the airport being a major factor in bringing tourists to the city. You probably get more casual traffic from the train station.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
yes, that is how the discussion would go in a criminal law class
The status quo, by definition again, incorporates every single thing that is happening. We cannot change it directly. We can change laws directly. We design laws to have positive effects on society.
Societal norms vary widely across society, time and cultural subgroup. They are no more significantly related to the status quo than any other aspect of existence, and much more importantly, are not monolithic.
You conflate these three things, while ignoring the pluralistic nature of cultural norms, in order to make rhetorical, rather than dialectical, points.
Additionally, having an opinion other than yours as to the morality of marijuana consumption does not show any intrinsic bias. Is your position always to assume bias on the part of those disagreeing with you in order to more easily dismiss their arguments? This has been rhetorically effective for right-wingers lacking in scruple, e.g. 'liberal media bias'. I can understand why you would want to adopt a similar tactic, but that does not excuse it.
Do you deny the possibility of innocence in law-breakers? Because if so, we will end up at reductio ad holocaustum very very quickly.
yes, that is how the discussion would go in a criminal law class
Sometimes I wonder if we're the victims of an elaborate spoof with this guy.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited February 2012
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
Additionally, having an opinion other than yours as to the morality of marijuana consumption does not show any intrinsic bias. Is your position always to assume bias on the part of those disagreeing with you in order to more easily dismiss their arguments? This has been rhetorically effective for right-wingers lacking in scruple, e.g. 'liberal media bias'. I can understand why you would want to adopt a similar tactic, but that does not excuse it.
Nor can you deny that a strong bias toward the status quo - and more particularly intense and unquestioning deference to the leaders of the status quo - is not only a bias in itself, but historically it's been a far more dangerous bias than one toward nonconformity and personal freedom.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
or, you could just have restrictions on smoking indoors, as we do in the uk, and marijuana users will move to hash brownies and vaporisers and you wont be bothered by their naughty weed fumes
and double benefit! the rate of lung cancer in marijuana users goes down because theyre using safer and alternative forms of use
there is no benefit to keeping it illegal and i find your conception of the problem very interesting
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Like I said, strong totalitarian tendencies.
I do like the fact that this invalidates his own point. His neighbor had the societal position to afford this place. He was most likely one of the millions of working professionals who use pot to relax in the same way that millions of others use alcohol. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded to live there. Literally, the existence of his neighbor in that apartment invalidates his entire position in multiple ways.
Instead of being a decent human being and asking his neighbor politely to control the smell, this dude calls the police on his neighbor and feels like he did the right thing - because pot is illegal. He felt smugly superior not only bringing legal sanction on a person for offending him with a bad smell - which he felt too entitled to smell - but he's bragging about it in public as a moral act. He actively harmed a fellow human being who had done him no harm, because "he paid too much" to deal with an unpleasant odor.
Dude's bad news.
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Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
The main problem with weed legalisation is that while you could perhaps get a small majority to support it, just about noone is going to make it a priority. In the US it's political poison on a national level, and over here people care a lot more about (socio-)economic issues, futureproofing society, crime, immigration. Who is going to make this a campaign issue? I seem to recall that in the youtube 'ask the President a question' thing all the weed related questions where removed (by youtube, though it could well be on the campaigns request). Noone wants to score negative points with independents who are opposed.
Having a dedicated minority in favor of something while the majority is indifferent is usually enough to affect policy. It's a big reason why we don't raise taxes on the wealthy, and have such a pro-Israel slant in foreign affairs. Unfortunately, the "legalize it" demographic (younger, poorer) is also the least likely to vote. I think we're headed in that direction anyway, though. More and more the mainstream reaction to pot legalization seems to be, "Eh, why not?".
Ain't no particular sign I'm more compatible with
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Like I said, strong totalitarian tendencies.
I do like the fact that this invalidates his own point. His neighbor had the societal position to afford this place. He was most likely one of the millions of working professionals who use pot to relax in the same way that millions of others use alcohol. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded to live there. Literally, the existence of his neighbor in that apartment invalidates his entire position in multiple ways.
Instead of being a decent human being and asking his neighbor politely to control the smell, this dude calls the police on his neighbor and feels like he did the right thing - because pot is illegal. He felt smugly superior not only bringing legal sanction on a person for offending him with a bad smell - which he felt too entitled to smell - but he's bragging about it in public as a moral act. He actively harmed a fellow human being who had done him no harm, because "he paid too much" to deal with an unpleasant odor.
Dude's bad news.
Good point.
I figure I could take a bear.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
there are also a large number of illegal drugs which have application in the treatment of mental illness
examples would be recent results with low dose lsd in the treatment of schizophrenia, oddly, ketamine helping depression and marijuana for symptomatic relief of some degenerative conditions and insomnia
but doing this research is nightmarishly hard in the current framework
there are also a large number of illegal drugs which have application in the treatment of mental illness
examples would be recent results with low dose lsd in the treatment of schizophrenia, oddly, ketamine helping depression and marijuana for symptomatic relief of some degenerative conditions and insomnia
but doing this research is nightmarishly hard in the current framework
One of the major issues with this research is that the federal government controls the supply for researchers, and it is notorious for only approving research projects that advance the claims of the DEA. There is a lack of good quality research on marijuana because researchers cannot get the clearance to research it.
One amusing trend is that universities in states with local decriminalization have been saying "Fuck you" to the feds recently and started doing studies anyway. The next decade will bring a lot of good data about the drugs to the conversation.
you make weed totally legal, american agricultural giants will start to produce it. Mexican drug cartels opperating illegally can't really compete with that, so they lose a biggish chunk of their income.
I'm pretty sure once we get around to legalizing it, it will fairly rapidly grow into an industry with enough lobbyists that we will start putting pressure to legalize on other nations. The ability to export weed, something we'd have a huge comparative advantage producing, would bring a lot of money into The States would probably go a fair way to correcting trade imbalances. It would be a genuinely profitable thing for farmers to grow, so we could end some farm subsidies. Without subsidies, HFCS becomes more expensive and maybe doesn't get added to everything, decreasing sugar intake, which is for national health. With something more profitable to grow, fewer farmers are going to participate in the boondoggle that is corn based ethanol.
There's all this really pretty good synergistic stuff that can happen once we make weed legal.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The status quo, by definition again, incorporates every single thing that is happening. We cannot change it directly. We can change laws directly. We design laws to have positive effects on society.
Societal norms vary widely across society, time and cultural subgroup. They are no more significantly related to the status quo than any other aspect of existence, and much more importantly, are not monolithic.
You conflate these three things, while ignoring the pluralistic nature of cultural norms, in order to make rhetorical, rather than dialectical, points.
Additionally, having an opinion other than yours as to the morality of marijuana consumption does not show any intrinsic bias. Is your position always to assume bias on the part of those disagreeing with you in order to more easily dismiss their arguments? This has been rhetorically effective for right-wingers lacking in scruple, e.g. 'liberal media bias'. I can understand why you would want to adopt a similar tactic, but that does not excuse it.
Do you deny the possibility of innocence in law-breakers? Because if so, we will end up at reductio ad holocaustum very very quickly.
It depends on what you mean by innocence. I think a better choice of words would have been "morally blameless" since it seems strange to call someone who is literally guilty of breaking the law an innocent, without providing further clarification.
The pluralistic nature of cultural norms is a big issue which seems to be too big to discuss in this topic. Suffice to say that (as shocking as this will no doubt be) I'm not really that comfortable descending into a position of strong cultural relativism. There are lots of problems with the strong conception of either position, and I think that in practice we need to balance the ability of the mainstream to impose hard requirements with the need to be able to have norms, standards and rules we can point to that have universal applicability.
It depends on what you mean by innocence. I think a better choice of words would have been "morally blameless" since it seems strange to call someone who is literally guilty of breaking the law an innocent, without providing further clarification.
The pluralistic nature of cultural norms is a big issue which seems to be too big to discuss in this topic. Suffice to say that (as shocking as this will no doubt be) I'm not really that comfortable descending into a position of strong cultural relativism. There are lots of problems with the strong conception of either position, and I think that in practice we need to balance the ability of the mainstream to impose hard requirements with the need to be able to have norms, standards and rules we can point to that have universal applicability.
I could Godwin this post so hard.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
youre really just shifting the standard of evidence but not providing the necessary argument to support the new position
why should we define our norms through the criminal justice system? we have a strong social norm against being rude, but not a criminal one
if somebody uses a word in a way that cannot be literally true, it takes a particular kind of mind to respond with "assuming that you meant it in a stupid way, that is stupid" - you can take the small mental leap required to give the person you are trying to have a discussion with the benefit of the doubt
you make weed totally legal, american agricultural giants will start to produce it. Mexican drug cartels opperating illegally can't really compete with that, so they lose a biggish chunk of their income.
I'm pretty sure once we get around to legalizing it, it will fairly rapidly grow into an industry with enough lobbyists that we will start putting pressure to legalize on other nations. The ability to export weed, something we'd have a huge comparative advantage producing, would bring a lot of money into The States would probably go a fair way to correcting trade imbalances. It would be a genuinely profitable thing for farmers to grow, so we could end some farm subsidies. Without subsidies, HFCS becomes more expensive and maybe doesn't get added to everything, decreasing sugar intake, which is for national health. With something more profitable to grow, fewer farmers are going to participate in the boondoggle that is corn based ethanol.
There's all this really pretty good synergistic stuff that can happen once we make weed legal.
That's actually one of the reasons that California's growing industry worked hard to keep marijuana illegal. At the moment, the nation has a massive marijuana industry that enjoys incredible profits. From Northern California to Western North Carolina, there are regions where as much as half of the local economy comes from marijuana production.
Once you start looking at the numbers - use, amount produced, dollars - you realize that marijuana is already a massive industry in the United States. From a broad historical perspective, I can't help but think that there's actually a very worrying aspect to this. Despite dude's banging on the table about "OBEY", it's clear that the state and national governments have lost the ability to convince the public or police a major industry.
That's what happens when the law drifts too far from cultural norms. People simply stop obeying the law.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
you make weed totally legal, american agricultural giants will start to produce it. Mexican drug cartels opperating illegally can't really compete with that, so they lose a biggish chunk of their income.
I'm pretty sure once we get around to legalizing it, it will fairly rapidly grow into an industry with enough lobbyists that we will start putting pressure to legalize on other nations. The ability to export weed, something we'd have a huge comparative advantage producing, would bring a lot of money into The States would probably go a fair way to correcting trade imbalances. It would be a genuinely profitable thing for farmers to grow, so we could end some farm subsidies. Without subsidies, HFCS becomes more expensive and maybe doesn't get added to everything, decreasing sugar intake, which is for national health. With something more profitable to grow, fewer farmers are going to participate in the boondoggle that is corn based ethanol.
There's all this really pretty good synergistic stuff that can happen once we make weed legal.
It's such a stupid issue if for no other reasons than the results of current drug enforcement mandates are so counter to the rest of most proponents' platform.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Like I said, strong totalitarian tendencies.
I do like the fact that this invalidates his own point. His neighbor had the societal position to afford this place. He was most likely one of the millions of working professionals who use pot to relax in the same way that millions of others use alcohol. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded to live there. Literally, the existence of his neighbor in that apartment invalidates his entire position in multiple ways.
Instead of being a decent human being and asking his neighbor politely to control the smell, this dude calls the police on his neighbor and feels like he did the right thing - because pot is illegal. He felt smugly superior not only bringing legal sanction on a person for offending him with a bad smell - which he felt too entitled to smell - but he's bragging about it in public as a moral act. He actively harmed a fellow human being who had done him no harm, because "he paid too much" to deal with an unpleasant odor.
Dude's bad news.
What point did it invalidate? I never made the "pot makes you lazy" argument or anything like that. My argument has been the risk of DUI. So some guy who was doing pretty well bought and smoked pot all the time. How does this impact my argument at all?
And there is a lot more that goes into the story. Everyone on the floor complained about it for months. People called building security on the guy many times, and they would tell him about the complaints. He still kept doing it. Finally, once it reached a breaking point, I made the call to the cops, who just talked to him, and said "we are going to be very unhappy with you if we get another call about this." That put a stop to it. In a world where pot was legal, yes we would all have had to put up with it, but we're not in that world. If your neighbor cooks smelly food that stinks up the hall everyday, then you can deal with it or move. But while we have the option of stopping someone from stinking up the hall without moving, why not use it? I mean, ultimately this is a story of poor management of the property, since the building should have dealt with the large number of weekly complaints better, but I honestly don't see what was wrong with calling the police because someone was engaging in a disruptive, illegal activity. It's really no different than calling when someone has a loud party at 2 am.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
you need to establish several things though, skfm
a) marijuana-related dui harm would go up after legalisation
b) if harm did go up, the change in harm (deltaharm lol) would be greater than the reduction in harm from the legalisation
i think you will find that the evidence is nowhere near your court on this one
youre really just shifting the standard of evidence but not providing the necessary argument to support the new position
why should we define our norms through the criminal justice system? we have a strong social norm against being rude, but not a criminal one
if somebody uses a word in a way that cannot be literally true, it takes a particular kind of mind to respond with "assuming that you meant it in a stupid way, that is stupid" - you can take the small mental leap required to give the person you are trying to have a discussion with the benefit of the doubt
Every argument made by this poster - and he starts a lot of threads - is devoid of evidence and heavy on anecdote, appeal to authority and references to his personal status, position and wealth. He ignores - and often seems to be unable to understand or counter - evidence-based argumentation. He honestly seems to think his salary and ability to purchase luxury goods is an indicator of his moral authority.
The topics he brings up are actually interesting ones, which is why I usually end up commenting despite myself, but he comes at them from a position that mostly seems a celebration of banality and authority. If he really is a high-powered attorney and representative of the skills and views of his profession, he make a sad case for the state of the legal profession.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Also, just to say it, you can end the activist war on drugs without legalization. Keep pot illegal, impose big fines, keep dedicated units working on major drug traffickers, but otherwise, treat pot like most other illegal activities. As long as I can call the police and have the guy across the hall sanctioned for smoking pot all day, I'm good (this really happened when we lived in our last apartment building, and was part of why we bought a house when we did. We hated walking into the hall and smelling it. It made us feel like we lived in a dorm or housing project, and we were paying too much in rent to feel like that).
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Like I said, strong totalitarian tendencies.
I do like the fact that this invalidates his own point. His neighbor had the societal position to afford this place. He was most likely one of the millions of working professionals who use pot to relax in the same way that millions of others use alcohol. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded to live there. Literally, the existence of his neighbor in that apartment invalidates his entire position in multiple ways.
Instead of being a decent human being and asking his neighbor politely to control the smell, this dude calls the police on his neighbor and feels like he did the right thing - because pot is illegal. He felt smugly superior not only bringing legal sanction on a person for offending him with a bad smell - which he felt too entitled to smell - but he's bragging about it in public as a moral act. He actively harmed a fellow human being who had done him no harm, because "he paid too much" to deal with an unpleasant odor.
Dude's bad news.
What point did it invalidate? I never made the "pot makes you lazy" argument or anything like that. My argument has been the risk of DUI. So some guy who was doing pretty well bought and smoked pot all the time. How does this impact my argument at all?
And there is a lot more that goes into the story. Everyone on the floor complained about it for months. People called building security on the guy many times, and they would tell him about the complaints. He still kept doing it. Finally, once it reached a breaking point, I made the call to the cops, who just talked to him, and said "we are going to be very unhappy with you if we get another call about this." That put a stop to it. In a world where pot was legal, yes we would all have had to put up with it, but we're not in that world. If your neighbor cooks smelly food that stinks up the hall everyday, then you can deal with it or move. But while we have the option of stopping someone from stinking up the hall without moving, why not use it? I mean, ultimately this is a story of poor management of the property, since the building should have dealt with the large number of weekly complaints better, but I honestly don't see what was wrong with calling the police because someone was engaging in a disruptive, illegal activity. It's really no different than calling when someone has a loud party at 2 am.
If I'm not mistaken, calling the police and saying "my neighbor smells like pot" isn't really any evidence and certainly not enough to get any kind of warrant.
I'll be fucked if I want to live in a world where it is.
Totes should've bootstrapped this one with the magic of talking to people.
I would love some actual evidence and not rampant "Hey guys there's this time where..." anecdotal evidence. I'm already more sympathetic to the "keep it illegal or at the most decriminalize it" argument, but you're not supporting your argument here. It completely relies on your assumptions about the world and this does not a legal case make.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
youre really just shifting the standard of evidence but not providing the necessary argument to support the new position
why should we define our norms through the criminal justice system? we have a strong social norm against being rude, but not a criminal one
if somebody uses a word in a way that cannot be literally true, it takes a particular kind of mind to respond with "assuming that you meant it in a stupid way, that is stupid" - you can take the small mental leap required to give the person you are trying to have a discussion with the benefit of the doubt
I'm not saying we should enforce our norms through law. Please see the ettiquite thread, where I wrote a lot on this subject, and on the value of having different kinds of rules.
I also have not said a word about the morality of smoking pot. I actually don't think smoking it is an immoral act at all, other than because doing it is breaking a law, and breaking laws can contribute to a weakening of the legal system's ability to control behavior (but so can having unenforceable or "wrong" laws that people disagree with). My argument has simply been that legalization would increase use and thereby increase the number of people driving high who are a danger to innocent (in both senses) people.
I agree that was a knee jerk reaction on my part. Flashbacks to criminal law in law school. I should have recognized that Posh was not claiming the people in jail for marijuana use were innocent of having committed a crime because the law is morally invalid or anything like that. I apologize for reacting as I did.
And there is a lot more that goes into the story. Everyone on the floor complained about it for months. People called building security on the guy many times, and they would tell him about the complaints. He still kept doing it. Finally, once it reached a breaking point, I made the call to the cops, who just talked to him, and said "we are going to be very unhappy with you if we get another call about this." That put a stop to it. In a world where pot was legal, yes we would all have had to put up with it, but we're not in that world. If your neighbor cooks smelly food that stinks up the hall everyday, then you can deal with it or move. But while we have the option of stopping someone from stinking up the hall without moving, why not use it? I mean, ultimately this is a story of poor management of the property, since the building should have dealt with the large number of weekly complaints better, but I honestly don't see what was wrong with calling the police because someone was engaging in a disruptive, illegal activity. It's really no different than calling when someone has a loud party at 2 am.
But that's not the story you told. The important thing is this story, as you related here, is that you had bad neighbor relations that weren't resolved by management. As you yourself said here, the same situation could have arisen with barking dogs, loud parties, smelly food or crying children. There was no reason other than an inability to argue outside of personal anecdote for relating the story in this thread.
It, quite literally, has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of drug legalization. It doesn't answer the concerns of the other posters or make a relevant point toward how to move forward. It just says that, at one point in time, you had a bad neighbor and felt that you paid too much money to deal with such a petty concern.
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
I'm confused about the point of the smelly hallway story now. If the guy had been stinking the place up with his tobacco-filled hookah then you'd have the exact same story but no reason to call the police.
The whole point of debating marijuana legalization is whether or not the law lines up with good public policy; if you're just going to say the equivalent of "well it's illegal, therefore it's bad per se," then what is the point of the discussion? Going off that rationale there's no reason to change any laws ever.
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
d/w skfm, i assumed you meant criminal because your requirement was that you would be able to call the police to stop your pot smoking dudes smoking pot.
so now we have a statement we can start to apply tests to:
My argument has simply been that legalization would increase use and thereby increase the number of people driving high who are a danger to innocent (in both senses) people.
so now you need to apply the calculus of overall harm and harm reduction!
also youll notice that youve literally just endorsed what ive been saying - control of drug harm through social norms...!
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I certainty don't think think skfm would call that harmless to society.
Also, remember that marijuana being illegal already causes massive harm to society: innocent users are jailed, massive amounts of money are wasted, and a lucrative criminal endeavour incentivised.
a combination of taxation and public awareness
Yeah. London is full of those free weeklies that double as prostitute catalogs, the skeevy as hell prostitute hotels are a block away from the train station in Frankfurt and the prostitutes find and harass you in Paris. It's hard to get a drink in a hotel bar in Europe without getting propositioned.
There's not exactly a shortage of prostitutes in Europe. Amsterdam's "thing" is the pot.
The status quonis whatever the current state it. It incorporates current laws and norms. What is the point you are trying to make?
I hope you realize how biased you just made yourself look by saying "innocent users are jailed." You are just assuming your conclusion that these people, who actually violate the law are "innocent."
morally innocent if you will
One of the constant themes in all of your posts is a strong tendency toward totalitarian policies. Instead of lecturing others about the law - which most of us realize is a creation of politicians and lawyers like yourself and not some holy writ buried deep in the bones of the universe - maybe you should examine why all your independent evaluations of the issues come down to restricting, controlling and banning the actions of your fellow man, usually to the benefit of your wealthy paymasters.
think of it this way
the best of all worlds is the one where people who want to take drugs in a recreational and safe way can, and those who have a predisposition to harm can find out without having to risk harm, and the drugs that are genuinely basically without merit like crack and tobacco are frowned against socially and dealt with the same way we deal with normal "bad behaviour"
the ultimate end point for a more authoritarian approach is just less good, in both actual and human cost
I remember discussing drug law in my criminal law class and having someone say "all the real activists and freedom fighters are in jail now because of the war on drugs. There are your modern MLk Jrs." I just have no patience for bullshit like this, to be blunt (and neither did the professor or the rest of the class. We changed the subject, moved on, and never let that idiot answer a question again).
Amsterdam itself mainly has the issue of the first street you see after Central Station (Damrak) being pretty terrible, incredibly crowded and selling tourist junk (including many pro-weed stuff) and filled with fastfood restaurants. That first 10 minutes of walking into Amsterdam sucks. But yeah, it could easily fall to say the tourist attraction of say Copenhagen, though Schiphol is still a top 5 EU airport and at the high-end Amsterdam has a lot to offer.
I'd support liberalisation of xtc too, there are again some risks but most of those come from the unreliability of the dosage/contamination (though you can OD and overuse is linked to some mental issues).
The main problem with weed legalisation is that while you could perhaps get a small majority to support it, just about noone is going to make it a priority. In the US it's political poison on a national level, and over here people care a lot more about (socio-)economic issues, futureproofing society, crime, immigration. Who is going to make this a campaign issue? I seem to recall that in the youtube 'ask the President a question' thing all the weed related questions where removed (by youtube, though it could well be on the campaigns request). Noone wants to score negative points with independents who are opposed.
Yeah. Amsterdam really improves once you get past that district. It's a gorgeous city - the canals are awesome - but that cluster of avenues around the train station are a horrific tourist trap.
Schliphol's also a fair distance from the city center. You can't walk from it to anywhere worth seeing. Unless you have a long layover, I doubt many passengers spend much time in the city beyond the airport. Can't see the airport being a major factor in bringing tourists to the city. You probably get more casual traffic from the train station.
Societal norms vary widely across society, time and cultural subgroup. They are no more significantly related to the status quo than any other aspect of existence, and much more importantly, are not monolithic.
You conflate these three things, while ignoring the pluralistic nature of cultural norms, in order to make rhetorical, rather than dialectical, points.
Additionally, having an opinion other than yours as to the morality of marijuana consumption does not show any intrinsic bias. Is your position always to assume bias on the part of those disagreeing with you in order to more easily dismiss their arguments? This has been rhetorically effective for right-wingers lacking in scruple, e.g. 'liberal media bias'. I can understand why you would want to adopt a similar tactic, but that does not excuse it.
Do you deny the possibility of innocence in law-breakers? Because if so, we will end up at reductio ad holocaustum very very quickly.
Sometimes I wonder if we're the victims of an elaborate spoof with this guy.
Nor can you deny that a strong bias toward the status quo - and more particularly intense and unquestioning deference to the leaders of the status quo - is not only a bias in itself, but historically it's been a far more dangerous bias than one toward nonconformity and personal freedom.
and double benefit! the rate of lung cancer in marijuana users goes down because theyre using safer and alternative forms of use
there is no benefit to keeping it illegal and i find your conception of the problem very interesting
This post makes me feel embarrassed to have engaged with you.
Now how would say Sheriff Joe in Arizona handle that, or your average southern police force?
Like I said, strong totalitarian tendencies.
I do like the fact that this invalidates his own point. His neighbor had the societal position to afford this place. He was most likely one of the millions of working professionals who use pot to relax in the same way that millions of others use alcohol. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded to live there. Literally, the existence of his neighbor in that apartment invalidates his entire position in multiple ways.
Instead of being a decent human being and asking his neighbor politely to control the smell, this dude calls the police on his neighbor and feels like he did the right thing - because pot is illegal. He felt smugly superior not only bringing legal sanction on a person for offending him with a bad smell - which he felt too entitled to smell - but he's bragging about it in public as a moral act. He actively harmed a fellow human being who had done him no harm, because "he paid too much" to deal with an unpleasant odor.
Dude's bad news.
Having a dedicated minority in favor of something while the majority is indifferent is usually enough to affect policy. It's a big reason why we don't raise taxes on the wealthy, and have such a pro-Israel slant in foreign affairs. Unfortunately, the "legalize it" demographic (younger, poorer) is also the least likely to vote. I think we're headed in that direction anyway, though. More and more the mainstream reaction to pot legalization seems to be, "Eh, why not?".
Heck that pretty much happens the way things are now.
Or NY cops just go whole-hog and plant marijuana on inconvenient minorities.
Good point.
examples would be recent results with low dose lsd in the treatment of schizophrenia, oddly, ketamine helping depression and marijuana for symptomatic relief of some degenerative conditions and insomnia
but doing this research is nightmarishly hard in the current framework
One of the major issues with this research is that the federal government controls the supply for researchers, and it is notorious for only approving research projects that advance the claims of the DEA. There is a lack of good quality research on marijuana because researchers cannot get the clearance to research it.
One amusing trend is that universities in states with local decriminalization have been saying "Fuck you" to the feds recently and started doing studies anyway. The next decade will bring a lot of good data about the drugs to the conversation.
I'm pretty sure once we get around to legalizing it, it will fairly rapidly grow into an industry with enough lobbyists that we will start putting pressure to legalize on other nations. The ability to export weed, something we'd have a huge comparative advantage producing, would bring a lot of money into The States would probably go a fair way to correcting trade imbalances. It would be a genuinely profitable thing for farmers to grow, so we could end some farm subsidies. Without subsidies, HFCS becomes more expensive and maybe doesn't get added to everything, decreasing sugar intake, which is for national health. With something more profitable to grow, fewer farmers are going to participate in the boondoggle that is corn based ethanol.
There's all this really pretty good synergistic stuff that can happen once we make weed legal.
It depends on what you mean by innocence. I think a better choice of words would have been "morally blameless" since it seems strange to call someone who is literally guilty of breaking the law an innocent, without providing further clarification.
The pluralistic nature of cultural norms is a big issue which seems to be too big to discuss in this topic. Suffice to say that (as shocking as this will no doubt be) I'm not really that comfortable descending into a position of strong cultural relativism. There are lots of problems with the strong conception of either position, and I think that in practice we need to balance the ability of the mainstream to impose hard requirements with the need to be able to have norms, standards and rules we can point to that have universal applicability.
I could Godwin this post so hard.
why should we define our norms through the criminal justice system? we have a strong social norm against being rude, but not a criminal one
if somebody uses a word in a way that cannot be literally true, it takes a particular kind of mind to respond with "assuming that you meant it in a stupid way, that is stupid" - you can take the small mental leap required to give the person you are trying to have a discussion with the benefit of the doubt
That's actually one of the reasons that California's growing industry worked hard to keep marijuana illegal. At the moment, the nation has a massive marijuana industry that enjoys incredible profits. From Northern California to Western North Carolina, there are regions where as much as half of the local economy comes from marijuana production.
Once you start looking at the numbers - use, amount produced, dollars - you realize that marijuana is already a massive industry in the United States. From a broad historical perspective, I can't help but think that there's actually a very worrying aspect to this. Despite dude's banging on the table about "OBEY", it's clear that the state and national governments have lost the ability to convince the public or police a major industry.
That's what happens when the law drifts too far from cultural norms. People simply stop obeying the law.
It's such a stupid issue if for no other reasons than the results of current drug enforcement mandates are so counter to the rest of most proponents' platform.
What point did it invalidate? I never made the "pot makes you lazy" argument or anything like that. My argument has been the risk of DUI. So some guy who was doing pretty well bought and smoked pot all the time. How does this impact my argument at all?
And there is a lot more that goes into the story. Everyone on the floor complained about it for months. People called building security on the guy many times, and they would tell him about the complaints. He still kept doing it. Finally, once it reached a breaking point, I made the call to the cops, who just talked to him, and said "we are going to be very unhappy with you if we get another call about this." That put a stop to it. In a world where pot was legal, yes we would all have had to put up with it, but we're not in that world. If your neighbor cooks smelly food that stinks up the hall everyday, then you can deal with it or move. But while we have the option of stopping someone from stinking up the hall without moving, why not use it? I mean, ultimately this is a story of poor management of the property, since the building should have dealt with the large number of weekly complaints better, but I honestly don't see what was wrong with calling the police because someone was engaging in a disruptive, illegal activity. It's really no different than calling when someone has a loud party at 2 am.
a) marijuana-related dui harm would go up after legalisation
b) if harm did go up, the change in harm (deltaharm lol) would be greater than the reduction in harm from the legalisation
i think you will find that the evidence is nowhere near your court on this one
Every argument made by this poster - and he starts a lot of threads - is devoid of evidence and heavy on anecdote, appeal to authority and references to his personal status, position and wealth. He ignores - and often seems to be unable to understand or counter - evidence-based argumentation. He honestly seems to think his salary and ability to purchase luxury goods is an indicator of his moral authority.
The topics he brings up are actually interesting ones, which is why I usually end up commenting despite myself, but he comes at them from a position that mostly seems a celebration of banality and authority. If he really is a high-powered attorney and representative of the skills and views of his profession, he make a sad case for the state of the legal profession.
If I'm not mistaken, calling the police and saying "my neighbor smells like pot" isn't really any evidence and certainly not enough to get any kind of warrant.
I'll be fucked if I want to live in a world where it is.
Totes should've bootstrapped this one with the magic of talking to people.
I would love some actual evidence and not rampant "Hey guys there's this time where..." anecdotal evidence. I'm already more sympathetic to the "keep it illegal or at the most decriminalize it" argument, but you're not supporting your argument here. It completely relies on your assumptions about the world and this does not a legal case make.
I'm not saying we should enforce our norms through law. Please see the ettiquite thread, where I wrote a lot on this subject, and on the value of having different kinds of rules.
I also have not said a word about the morality of smoking pot. I actually don't think smoking it is an immoral act at all, other than because doing it is breaking a law, and breaking laws can contribute to a weakening of the legal system's ability to control behavior (but so can having unenforceable or "wrong" laws that people disagree with). My argument has simply been that legalization would increase use and thereby increase the number of people driving high who are a danger to innocent (in both senses) people.
I agree that was a knee jerk reaction on my part. Flashbacks to criminal law in law school. I should have recognized that Posh was not claiming the people in jail for marijuana use were innocent of having committed a crime because the law is morally invalid or anything like that. I apologize for reacting as I did.
But that's not the story you told. The important thing is this story, as you related here, is that you had bad neighbor relations that weren't resolved by management. As you yourself said here, the same situation could have arisen with barking dogs, loud parties, smelly food or crying children. There was no reason other than an inability to argue outside of personal anecdote for relating the story in this thread.
It, quite literally, has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of drug legalization. It doesn't answer the concerns of the other posters or make a relevant point toward how to move forward. It just says that, at one point in time, you had a bad neighbor and felt that you paid too much money to deal with such a petty concern.
The whole point of debating marijuana legalization is whether or not the law lines up with good public policy; if you're just going to say the equivalent of "well it's illegal, therefore it's bad per se," then what is the point of the discussion? Going off that rationale there's no reason to change any laws ever.
so now we have a statement we can start to apply tests to:
so now you need to apply the calculus of overall harm and harm reduction!
also youll notice that youve literally just endorsed what ive been saying - control of drug harm through social norms...!