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What's your opinion on alcohol? I don't have a strong opinion on the legality of either marijuana or alcohol (though personally, I avoid both and find their users unpleasant), but I have a hard time seeing why they should be treated differently. The most compelling argument I've heard for regulating marijuana more harshly is that apparently it impairs driving ability for a much longer time after use, but otherwise they seem broadly similar in the damage they cause to individuals and society. I suppose, theoretically, Chesterton's Fence should apply here; alcohol has always been an important part of Western society, while marijuana is fairly new. But the failed attempt to prohibit alcohol seems like a clear object lesson in the failure modes of that kind of substance ban.
Ancient Greeks and Romans had cannabis. Banning it is the brand new thing here.
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I replied upthread but yes, I think alcohol is worst than cannabis, all things considered.
The thing is that cannabis was already banned and that was mostly fine. Sure there were some shady drug dealers, but there wasn't massive gang violence like there was during Prohibition. And, let's not forget that Prohibition wasn't a complete failure either. It really did reduce alcohol consumption by a lot with all the attendant benefits such as lower domestic violence and higher productivity. It's just that the benefits accrued mostly to the lower classes.
So yeah, if someone invented alcohol tomorrow, it should be banned absolutely. But once Pandora's Box is open, it's hard to shut. Which is another reason we should have never legalized weed. Now that it's legal, making it illegal again will be near-to-impossible.
Going forward, I think we need to squeeze a little harder.
Option 1) Increase taxes and regulation until the profit dries up. Consumption will go down and cannabis will be treated as a rare treat instead of a daily habit. We'll know its working if some street dealers start appearing again. Tolerate this to some extent as long as there is no violence.
Option 2) State run marijuana stores. Beige buildings run by bureacrats. Open 9-5 Monday-Friday. Inconveniently located and with no advertising whatsoever. Turn the pot industry into the DMV.
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I think ubiquitous intoxicant use is bad for society, and if I reluctantly think that we could suppress alcohol or marijuana we should. I could use either drug responsibly but I can see the damage caused by irresponsible use all around me, and the net cost to society dramatically exceeds the benefit. Empirically the easiest way to destroy public trust in the law is to selectively enforce drug laws against the outgroup, even if this actually targets problem users, so if you care about Rule of Law the choice is between ubiquitous use or a Singapore style serious crackdown.
The best argument for distinguishing marijuana and alcohol is a practical one about enforceability. Alcohol is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by a sufficiently large number of respectable otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to drinkers (see Prohibition). Marijuana hasn't got there yet except in a few places like Colorado, and it is important to make sure it doesn't.
FWIW I don't buy this. I think that marijuana is sufficiently easy to produce and sufficiently built into Blue Tribe culture via the hippy-to-liberal-elite pipeline that the battle is lost and a serious attempt to enforce marijuana laws would turn into another Prohibition.
I believe its legal now in half the US states, plus all of Canada. I would hardly call that "a few places"
It is not. It requires a great deal of upfront capital, real estate, permitting, and marketing. Products have to be registered with the state, tested for potency, mold, and hazardous chemicals.
What kind of people do you think consume cannabis?
Mass producing marijuana in order to sell it isn’t something your average Joe can manage, but it’s fairly trivial to grow enough for yourself and your family/friends. If you have a spare closet, a couple of lightbulbs, and some potting soil, you’re 90% of the way there, and if it’s all done indoors, it’s pretty much undetectable. Thanks to LEDs, police couldn’t even detect an increase in energy usage if they tried.
And thanks to LEDs, even if they could it's not even close to probable cause. CNet, a few days ago, reviewed "The 8 Best Indoor Smart Gardens for 2024". My wife got one for us last year. They're never going to be remotely price-competitive with farmland, but they're now cheap enough to be a fun yuppie hobby, and that means that even if the cops get subpoenas for hydroponics supply sales they're likely to find far more literal herbs than metaphorical herb.
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Mere legality isn't what @MadMomzer was talking about. They were referring to a norm where marijuana "is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by sufficiently large number of respectable, otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges, etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to [users]." Do you think legalization is necessarily equivalent to that?
No, I don't think it's equivalent to that, but more people that you think use cannabis. The people I've seen in dispensaries appear to be no different than the people you see in package stores. They're average, working adults.
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My impression was that alcohol is much less reliable in inducing that soma-like state of sedation and contentedness that people take weed for, and the margin between when alcohol makes you a happy zombie and when it makes you feel violently sick it quite narrow in comparison. This puts weed closer to the wireheading attractor (sacrifice qualities that give humans moral value in their own eyes to maximise feeling of pleasure).
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Different things are different, and different prohibitions are different. There are all sorts of substances that various societies ban, with a variety of success rates. Some factors include the source materials, manufacturing requirements, size/volume at critical stages, detectability, availability of substitutes, accountability of gatekeepers, etc. The silly example here is that the US banned Chinese drywall. Basically nobody is out there hunting for black market Chinese drywall. There are available alternatives, and the supply chain is relatively legible. No one makes completely context-free analogies between marijuana and Chinese drywall... they only make completely context-free analogies between marijuana and alcohol.
Marijuana and alcohol have some similarities, some differences. They're both pretty concealable, but at least in its final form, marijuana is probably a bit more so. Use of marijuana is a bit more detectable by smell. Cultivation of quantities of marijuana is likely more detectable. Possibly the biggest real difference is the source materials. Alcohol can be sourced by literally just leaving the food you bought at the grocery store in the cabinet too long (or, if you really want, from the toilet paper you stocked up too much for COVID). Marijuana requires a particular, identifiable species of plant. One could go on, but the primary point is that depending on the factors involved, one might be able to determine a lot or only a very little by analogy to other prohibitions. I don't think anyone would say that the world's experiments with nuclear (anti)-proliferation says much about possible handgun bans or vice versa.
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