The bizarre situation regarding marijuana legalization.

Cognisseur

This country appears to be moving in two very different directions, and it's really weird to watch.

I'm stumbling online, and I come across this nice chart:

According to this article, marijuana arrests broke their all-time high, yet again, for the 4th year in a row.

To me, this paints a dark picture of marijuana legalization. If I knew nothing else, I'd think society was quickly turning against marijuana. After all, that would explain why we're arresting more and more people for it, right? It's taboo!

Well... kind of taboo apparently. It's taboo if poor people do it I guess. Apparently, it's okay when Michael Phelps smokes, and despite photographic evidence, he doesn't get charged with anything.

So now I'm a bit confused, if we're arresting more and more people for marijuana, why are we letting this guy go?

Moving on, I go watch TV. I turn on MSNBC, and what do I see? A full story about marijuana farmers. It's not some anti-drug scary story about the evils of growing this terrifying drug. No, it's a friendly reporter and a friendly stoner just chatting next to a ridiculous amount of marijauna. No one seems to be suggesting anything negative about it. If I didn't know it was weed, this could've been any vegetable garden.

So this is just getting weird now. The same drug that we see commercials trying to scare us away from daily? the drug that 800,000 people get arrested for in a year? The drug whose arrests keep growing? What the hell is this lady doing standing so close to it? It's dangerous, right?

And here's the final straw, what made me write this thread: Feds decided to stop raiding California marijuana farms entirely (link). Essentially, the feds said "fuck it, go ahead, smoke as much as you want in California, we don't care anymore". Really? Really? No one in their department can generalize this conclusion outside of California?

It just boggles my mind. The feds don't care who smokes in California, and now it (along with a couple other states) are free havens for marijuana smoking. People openly smoke, talk about smoking, grow marijuana. Hell, you can even get reporters to come chat with you about it in an innocent way.
But somehow, the second you cross the border out of California, IT ROTS YOUR BRAIN AWAY. We have to arrest 800,000 people because, outside of California, it's eeevvviiilllll. We need to make terrible misleading commercials on every major channel, to warn people away from the evil (provided they don't live in states where the government, media, and society are a-okay with it).

I'm not making this thread to discuss whether marijuana is harmful or fun or addictive or anything like that. This is a thread about marijuana legalization. About how arrests go up, yet so does legalization. This is a thread about the opposing forces at work and the bizarre direction it takes this country.

What do you think? Has anyone here visited both extremes of the drug-war recently? Perhaps can comment on the attitudes about marijuana in something like Texas vs California?

Hexmage-PA

I know comic books now have ads that claim that marijuana contains 4 times more tar than a cigarette. I don't know if that's true, but if it was I think I'd hear more about it.

Zek

Err, maybe it's because there are far more marijuana users now than there were 50 years ago?

Trus

Zek wrote: »

Err, maybe it's because there are far more marijuana users now than there were 50 years ago?

And there wasn't a retarded "war on drugs"

Cognisseur

Trus wrote: »

Zek wrote: »

Err, maybe it's because there are far more marijuana users now than there were 50 years ago?

And there wasn't a retarded "war on drugs"

Right, but it's bizarre to see a war on drugs expanding at the same time that legalization is occurring, you know? If one held the spotlight and then the other, it would make sense. But the two together is just mind-boggling.

Thanatos

Cognisseur wrote: »

Moving on, I go watch TV. I turn on MSNBC, and what do I see? A full story about marijuana farmers.

So, #1, this is my hometown. #2, the guy they're interviewing, Eric Sligh? I went to high school with him. Not only that, but I went to France with him, for a month, on an exchange with my French class. #3, the idea that the local authorities are "also hampered by conflicting state, federal and county laws governing marijuana" is fucking ridiculous. What they're hampered by is the fact that the DA and Sheriff are elected by people who get two-thirds of their revenue from marijuana. #4, "increasingly violent" isn't really a fair description; the violence has actually fallen considerably since the 90s, when, at one point, there were groups of mercenaries coming into the county with fully automatic weaponry to take people's pot plants. The cops finally agreed not to prosecute growers who reported getting ripped off by these guys in order to discourage it.

Thanatos

Hexmage-PA wrote: »

I know comic books now have ads that claim that marijuana contains 4 times more tar than a cigarette. I don't know if that's true, but if it was I think I'd hear more about it.

It is, in fact, true.

Of course, marijuana doesn't contain arsenic, cyanide, nicotine, or any of the other many, many carcinogens that cigarettes do. It also seems to fight lung cancer in cigarette smokers. A marijuana smoker also doesn't smoke anywhere near as much marijuana as a cigarette smoker does cigarettes.

Elki

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=84549

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=84487





Love this comic.

Tycho wrote:

One day we will learn the trick of making our bullets intersect with enemy models - at least, that's the hope - as apparently emptying a submchinegun at point-blank range is not up to the task. In the meantime, we can ponder Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow's deep mysteries.

For example, why does it look so mediocre? This is the most powerful hardware on the market, and it feels like the system is actually choking on the game. I'm not expecting it to look like the PC version, which is my primary experience with the series - I'm expecting it to conform a bit more to the visual pedigree Xbox gamers have come to know, and the prowess its contemporaries have shown. Since it is essentially a full-priced mission pack, it had been my hope that they had (perhaps via a mysterious ritual!) discerned some new technique for getting the most out of the technology. I don't really see any evidence of that. Every now and then they tease you with Splinter Cell-esque fidelity, and they flip right back to their usual pragmatism. In anything but broad daylight, the muddy green texture and the muddy tan texture used to distinguish the teams don't have a lot of utility. When your tough military guy texture looks exactly like a naked man smeared with guacamole, it's time to think hard about where you might have gone wrong.

Of course, at least part of the blame for any lag must go to Live, for making players host listen servers on their vile consumer level connections. Beyond that, the game can still run a bit rough, even when you take this into account and keep the games down to an eight player maximum. Eight players is about where I like it, actually - that's not even the issue. They know what they're getting into, putting a game in the Live environment - if they've made any special effort to accommodate it, then you fooled me.

They introduce a great new gametype in Black Arrow, a couple actually, but our current favorite is Retrieval - it's similar to One Flag CTF, each team must grab a cannister that spawns and then drop it in their own bin. The only trouble is that the Goddamn cannister spawns underground once every few games, below the earth, turning the cool goal-oriented game mode they just made up into instant Deathmatch. This happens whenever you play Retrieval for any length of time. I think it's fair to ask why.

That it manages to be fun despite these things is beyond me. These issues, arrayed like an obstacle course, obscuring amusement, have the effect of amplifying each personal success. When you do hit somebody, perhaps because it doesn't happen a lot, you start to believe unrealistic things about yourself - you might imagine, for example, that you could fuck a hole in a tank. And it's nice to see the Live 3.0 stuff in there, creating Clans (they call them "Squads") that persist on the service. What I don't understand is having a sure thing, and then not executing it.

(CW)TB

you've got to love everybody