Bout damn time
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
Unfortunately Oregon just proved decriminalization needs a functioning healthcare system to support it.
For weed I think we’d be fine.
How did they prove that? (genuinely asking, not being sarcastic)
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.
You’re a legend, thanks for taking the time to reply, i appreciate it.
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.
A prison sentence is a slave sentence, can’t give up that juicy juicy slave labor so easily.
:(
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?
I don’t even smoke weed and I think this is dumb.
It moves pot to Schedule III, alongside ketamine…
Cool. Does this mean the next time the cops tell the EMTs to sedate someone they will skip the ketamine and just give the poor guy a gummy? I hope so. It’d save lives.
I don’t know about weed for that purpose… sometimes makes people more anxious. It’d be better if they just stopped forcing drugs on people period without the oversight of an actual doctor.
It was predictable that this would get delayed to an election year… but at least fucking finally!!!
- “Americans will always do the right thing - after exhausting all other options” - Winston Churchill
“Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.”
Langworth has combed through millions of words written by and about Churchill and found no evidence that the former prime minister ever said that about America.
Well, just look at lemmy users around anything Biden related. No matter what, you’ll get people only talking about Gaza, and disregard all of the other good his administration has done for the 3.5 years they have been working.
This is why politicians wait for the popular, easy wins until its campaigning time. People have a short memory, and it’s always whatever the last big news story is that drives voters.
I’m so sorry that GENOCIDE is close to the worst thing to support/do.
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 a fucking win, dumbasses.
Under Nixon, yes THAT Nixon, Congress wanted to pass UBI, but Democrats voted it down thinking it didn’t offer enough cash…
Even though common sense would tell you that establishing a UBI and raising it would be easier than getting a good paying UBI out of the gate
Yeah celebrate your wins or you may find yourself getting fewer
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I’d argue the opposite in a lot of cases, but not all.
I’m more excited about the medical portion of re-classifying.
edit I thought you meant the effects not the effects, so I agree with you.
I thought you meant the effects not the effects
Not sure that edit is clearing anything up.
This would have been a baby step 10 years ago if we’re being generous. California’s medical marijuana program has been a legal gray area since 1996. So what we can expect federal legalization in another 20 years at this rate? If biden touts this on the campaign trail as an accomplishment I’m going to lose my god damn mind.
This is so long overdue it doesn’t deserve celebration, it deserves a “what took so long, this isnt even controversial”. If your partner/roommate has been telling you to do the dishes for 20 years and you finally wash some you don’t get to turn around and go “look at me, I did 20% of the dishes! aren’t I great!”
Well, if you want faster change, you should probably stop blaming the lack of progress on the people who are trying to make changes and start blaming the people who block the changes
That’s the problem, they’re not or barely trying. Descheduling cannabis was within reach of this administration, they chose not to.
It wasn’t within reach; republicans control the house; before midterms, the decisive vote in the senate was Manchin. Democrats introduce bills to legalize weed, but unless they get a big majority those are not passing, and a law from Congress is needed for legalization.
This is the best you can expect until more progressives are voted in.
The DEA has the authority to deschedule a drug without a legislative process.
I mean, that’s a pretty slippery slope of logic you’re on. We should have addressed anthropogenic climate change in the 70s, but I’m not gonna poo-poo the progress we’ve made.
I know it sucks that so many things change on a generational scale instead of a year scale, but I was also pretty damn happy about all that institutional inertia slowing down the hard-right turn we took during Trump’s 1st term.
Being happy with too little too late is exactly why climate change is going be as catastrophic as it will be so I really don’t get how that makes your case. If biden wanted to he could have pressured the dea to deschedule cannabis completely. He didn’t. The DNC hates to lose one of the carrots from their stick.
I’m gonna start working on a time machine, I’ll let you know when it works.
If it’s not already done, it’s too late to try or care.
…it’s a time machine. By its very nature, it’s never too late to try or care, just as long as you’ve built the damn thing.
Unless you were going for more of a vibe… in which case, yeah, totally possible.