bullshiat. people have been researching it for centuries.

And the DEA is back to raiding legal dispensaries to boot.

Weaver95: dahmers love zombie:
Weaver95: Sometimes I wonder what's really behind the DEA's policy decisions. It can't be as simple as i think it is...

Marijuana is unpatentable. End of story.

it can't be that simple though.

Why not?

Weaver95: because that's beyond stupid. And I'd really like to at least try and give the DEA a little more credit than that.

The "War on Drugs" has spawned a giant bureaucracy that doesn't want to see itself die or be dismantled, like any other institutional bureaucracy out there. Legalize weed and you remove the lion's share of their workload (and thus justification for existence), never mind all that sweet, sweet cashflow going to the various law enforcement agencies that are allowed to profit from seized houses/boats/cars/whatever used in the drug trade, never mind all the incentive to buy fun tough-guy military toys with that money.

That's before you even think about patents.

Full disclosure: While I'm not into weed myself, I do think it should be legalized for recreational use with some age limits similar to booze. Combine that with real drug education (including alcohol on that list) and serious funding for rehab programs for those who want and need them (for people addicted to ANYTHING, from alcohol to food to gambling to weed to video games to whatever). An addictive personality is an addictive personality, and the true "gateway drug" is alcohol - it's the first thing most people eat/drink that changes their mood.

GreenAdder: You'd figure that Hostess, Frito-Lay, M&M/Mars, Hershey, Lay's, Pringles, etc. would be making a huge push for legalization. And you know how money talks in this country.

Heh. It actually reminds me of an editorial cartoon that came out when Canada was first relaxing their prosecution of people caught with single-serving amounts of weed.

It showed the "friendship bridge" from the US to Canada absolutely PACKED with trucks headed north, all labelled "Frito-Lay" "Hostess" etc yep :)

jaylectricity: Weaver95: dahmers love zombie:
Weaver95: Sometimes I wonder what's really behind the DEA's policy decisions. It can't be as simple as i think it is...

Marijuana is unpatentable. End of story.

it can't be that simple though.

FTA:

Pharmaceutical companies are more likely to develop individual compounds because they are easier to standardize and patent.

It is that simple.

Well, that's all I was coming to point out. Seems to be the only reason it's still illegal.

DEA: Pot is illegal because there isn't enough research.without the a boogyman, we have no jobs

fixed

I'm tired of having this argument, it's an insult to a person's intelligence. At some point, you just have to say go fark yourself and live your life. Vote, donate to NORML (new window), but at the end of the day you only have one life to live so stop obeying these people. Either fight or hide, whatever your conscience and nature dictates, but live your life.

itazurakko: GreenAdder: You'd figure that Hostess, Frito-Lay, M&M/Mars, Hershey, Lay's, Pringles, etc. would be making a huge push for legalization. And you know how money talks in this country.

Heh. It actually reminds me of an editorial cartoon that came out when Canada was first relaxing their prosecution of people caught with single-serving amounts of weed.

It showed the "friendship bridge" from the US to Canada absolutely PACKED with trucks headed north, all labelled "Frito-Lay" "Hostess" etc yep :)

The fact that enough people got the joke to make it worthy of publishing is a perfect example of how the drug war has failed.

Here is a rather long article, but an interesting story about how marijuana became illegal in the US. Thanks to a prior Fark poster:
Link (new window)

muck4doo: Weaver95: dahmers love zombie:
Weaver95: Sometimes I wonder what's really behind the DEA's policy decisions. It can't be as simple as i think it is...

Marijuana is unpatentable. End of story.

it can't be that simple though.

Why not?

Trust me, if pot became legal, the pharmaceutical companies would find a way to come out with their own proprietary brands of pot.

Sure marijuana itself can't be patented, but they could always whip up a GM version (twice the THC concentration!) or use special fertilizers and growing methods. Combined with already having big marketing budgets, the big companies will quickly consume 80%+ of the market share. Small independent growers will be treated a lot like craft brewers are now.

I'm thinking it's going to take a Republican President to legalize weed, for the same reasons it took a proven commie-hater like Nixon to open up China. A Democrat won't do it for fear of being labeled "soft on drugs".

Of course, I'd love to be proved wrong about 30 days after Mr. Obama is re-elected.

Does anyone really still believe that Pot Laws are based upon actual dangers of the substance?

Pot is the by far the largest physical underpinning of the very existence of the DEA.
If pot became legal, the DEA would end up a fraction of their current size and funding.

Pot will continue to be illegal and the legislators will continue to tell you it's because the drug is so harmful..despite all the evidence.

gilgigamesh: Mugato: nekom: I've asked many people this question: Who causes more problems at a rock concert everywhere: The potheads or the drunks?

No one has ever said the potheads.

Just tweaked that a bit.

Another good question: which causes more traffic-related fatalities?

Actually a really hard question to answer, since MADD and co have managed to screw the reporting system to the point where if you get in a fatal collision and you once looked at a billboard with a picture of a beer on it back n high school, it's classified as an "alcohol related accident" even by the authorities. Meanwhile there's not really a test for actual THC intoxication at the moment or even agreement on what constitutes a significant probability of impairment as there is for alcohol (the tests for marijuana exposure are designed around testing if you've had it at all and whether you're a chronic user, not if you're high right this second).

There's experimental scientific evidence that people do drive more slowly on average (3%ish) under the influence from at least one study, and it's speculated that since reduced speed tends to correlate to fewer and worse accidents that may reduce related fatalities, but that ignores other aspects of being on a drug. There's also that meta-analysis that got posted a few days back where it was found that failing a THC test increases your risk of accident about 50%, normalizing for other factors, but since, again, that includes habitual users as well as people actually high when tested it could easily be a side effect of people who have no problem taking up an illegal hobby having less respect for traffic laws designed to keep them safe as well.

Basically it's a good question, but good luck getting an answer. The studies on both alcohol and pot are too scarce and tied up in politics to really give a hard answer on that. I tend to think that staying on the side of caution and not allowing people to actually take the drug while driving (once it's made legal for use in general, obviously) is reasonable, though maybe more of a fineable offense like talking on a cell instead of the prison time you get with alcohol. I'm in the minority for FARK, though, I think.

//Drug war is ridiculous and counterproductive nonsense, but obviously drugs still have effects and those need to be accounted for in the law in a less retarded way.

Marcus Aurelius: There's a lot less research on GMO crops, and we ingest that shiat every day.

But nice try, though.

Humans have been eating GMO food for thousands of years.

Weaver95: fritton: Does anyone really still believe that Pot Laws are based upon actual dangers of the substance?

no, not really. Not even our most fanatical pro-drug war types here on fark think that cannabis is physically dangerous to the human body. they just change the subject when you pin them down on it.

http://www.marijuana-addiction.net/marijuana-side-effects.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_cannabis
http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/marijuana.html
http://science.howstuffworks.com/marijuana4.htm
http://www.marijuanapassion.com/Marijuana-Side-Effects.html
http://www.clearhavencenter.com/substance-abuse-treatment-resources/s i gns-of-Marijuana-use.php

Well shiat, there is plenty of research on the affects of alcohol and tobacco, so explain that one DEA...

People experiment with pot all the time. When I was in high school, I heard from the mother of a kid that lived down the road from me that he had experimented with pot and other drugs. I don't know what his hypothesis was or whether it was experimentally verified, but if pot leads kids to a rigorous understanding of the scientific method, more power to it.

jaylectricity: ManateeGag: The government is allowed to say no to that if they want.

Not if the people don't want the government to say no. Let's face it folks, it's not the evil government stopping this, it's the American people.

So much this. You can blame the man or big government or anything else day long, but the fact is that if you went door to door through any given neighborhood and asked the mothers and fathers throughout America what they thought, you'd get a hell of a lot of people saying it was terrible. Is this due to misinformation and ignorance? Yes, but its willful on the part of these people.

I've had the conversation with dozens of people. Generally I succeed in convincing them its less bad for the individual and society than alcohol, but they'll just fall back on "well, I don't see why we need any more bad things out there, even if worse things are legal" and put their foot down and thats the end of that.

Even the conspiracy theories that the jails and cops of America are controlling everything doesn't explain it away. Some of them lobby for it to be kept illegal, others push for it to become legal because they don't feel like getting shot over a bag of weed. They don't have the money to control the government to that extent, and if they did they wouldn't need weed to keep their jobs, as they already have that level of control and could use real crimes to keep themselves in charge. FYI, the average cop dislikes red light cameras too, and I don't see them capable of shutting those down.

Until those people who are stupid enough to be in favor of prohibition die out, politicians, regardless of their personal view, are not going to run with marijuana legalization on their platform. The government is the people. Whether that is people making good decisions or bad, or people willfully remaining ignorant to what the government they do control is up to, that fact doesn't change.

I wonder when their going to make religion a 'controlled substance'. It's certainly a f*ck of a lot more harmful than pot, and any benefits are based on shoddy research at best.

And the government certainly aint making any money off it, being tax exempt and all.

Just sayin.

I thought pot was illegal because too much money and too many current jobs would be lost if it was legalized.

apeiron242: http://www.marijuana-addiction.net/marijuana-side-effects.htm

Now compare those "side effects" to dozens of products that have been legal for decades. You don't even have to go for the low hanging fruit like Tobacco and Alcohol.

Compare them to the effects of pseudophedrine and OTC decongestants. Compare those side effects to popular vitamin supplements available everywhere. Compare the side effects to the dangers of a high fat diet even. Take a look at what the hysterical types say are side effects of PORN.

Even your most biased (Marijuana is terrible!) link really only warns about the dangers of *smoking* the drug which can cause lung cancer just like cigarettes. The worst side effect they can come up with besides that seems to be "loss of self esteem" (??). Now compare the *positive* effects of marijuana compared to all these other things that are already legal.

You can make a case that pretty much ANY product except for water (hell even that) has some negative effects if abused. That isn't a reason to declare prohibition and destroy thousands of lives with idiotic, draconian enforcement however.

Most of the side effects from your links can be attained from not getting a good nights sleep. That sure as hell isn't a reason to spend billions a year and thousands of lives destroyed with felony convictions to make it illegal.

Smackledorfer: jaylectricity: ManateeGag: The government is allowed to say no to that if they want.

Not if the people don't want the government to say no. Let's face it folks, it's not the evil government stopping this, it's the American people.

So much this. You can blame the man or big government or anything else day long, but the fact is that if you went door to door through any given neighborhood and asked the mothers and fathers throughout America what they thought, you'd get a hell of a lot of people saying it was terrible. Is this due to misinformation and ignorance? Yes, but its willful on the part of these people.

I've had the conversation with dozens of people. Generally I succeed in convincing them its less bad for the individual and society than alcohol, but they'll just fall back on "well, I don't see why we need any more bad things out there, even if worse things are legal" and put their foot down and thats the end of that.

Even the conspiracy theories that the jails and cops of America are controlling everything doesn't explain it away. Some of them lobby for it to be kept illegal, others push for it to become legal because they don't feel like getting shot over a bag of weed. They don't have the money to control the government to that extent, and if they did they wouldn't need weed to keep their jobs, as they already have that level of control and could use real crimes to keep themselves in charge. FYI, the average cop dislikes red light cameras too, and I don't see them capable of shutting those down.

Until those people who are stupid enough to be in favor of prohibition die out, politicians, regardless of their personal view, are not going to run with marijuana legalization on their platform. The government is the people. Whether that is people making good decisions or bad, or people willfully remaining ignorant to what the government they do control is up to, that fact doesn't change.

The American people do allow this to continue, but their views on the subject can be awfully well influenced by all the stories of people sent up the river for years for possession or distribution.

Most people don't work to become informed on every issue that doesn't really affect them. If they see the authorities are sending people to high security prisons for a certain drug and they are being constantly bombarded with sensationalist reports about potheads in school and drug dealers dealing to children then they just associate it with "pot is really, really bad" and won't vote to legalize it.

Yes, we need to become more informed, but when there are highly organized and extremely well funded campaigns to influence their perceptions of the drug then it's tough to fight that.

Pot is illegal because no righteous god-fearing patriot would smoke the wacky tobaccy. It's a gateway drug to all sorts of devilry, embraced by dirty hippies and queers.

Booze on the other hand... hell, even Jesus sat back with a fifth of Makers after a hard day of sermonatin'.