Less entrepreneurship means less innovation and less jobs and less tax revenue, it's bad for society overall.
Humans do not exist as entities to serve businesses for the grand goal of entrepreneurship. I tend to believe people that think this way have their own work addictions that are just as harmful as addictions to substances.
Furthermore your 'decrease in entrepreneurship' should be suffixed with 'where I am'. And when you put 'where I am' suddenly you'll run into a bunch of much more likely culprits such as 'administrative burden and bureaucracy', 'IP and copyright laws/legal complications', 'successful large businesses paying knowledge workers and keeping them out of the self market', 'tax burdens for self employed workers'
Drugs is going to be so far down that list in most places that it's not a serious consideration.
The reasons I haven't tried entrepreneurship are much more about financial risks.
Rent is expensive. Homeownership is barely attainable anywhere near an economically active metro area even with a decent tech income.
Healthcare is expensive and unpredictable. Insurance is expensive without an employer subsidy and insurance pool.
I think a great argument for better social safety nets and decreased housing costs is a lower barrier to entrepreneurship. If the policy answer for every question on paying for living is "Just get a good job with a good salary and benefits from MegaCorp" that isn't really conducive to striking out on your own.
A larger business with access to financial capital markets doesn't need to out compete you on merit. They can bundle your service for free until you collapse then raise prices later.
Just look at how many 'killed by Google' projects seem to work like this.
My question is: what's the "ideal" amount of entrepreneurship? Why is it the amount you chose? It's very philosophical and there really isn't a right answer.
More to the point: if it weren't cannabis, alcohol, television, social media then it would be something else.
Most people don't _want_ their lives to be driven by work. They want a paycheck and to live their life. Some people develop proper addictions, but that's (in my uninformed opinion) due to the stress of their lives. It's a _lot_ of work to find a higher meaning in life, and many (most?) people instead choose to seek momentary pleasure/sedate themselves.
Those who have an addiction or rely on substances aren't any "better" than those who abstain. Everyone is doing their best while trying to get by.
No new ideas.
womp womp
It seems like most people tend to become more content with their current situation and happy to enjoy the moment. This seems make most people less motivated, maybe because they have less problem with how things are.
But there are outliers: I've met a few folks over the years who are voracious weed smokers, and have an outrageously productive output.
I'm not sure if it's because people are simply wired different, or if these latter camp just figured out how to use weed really well.
I never want to buy from any black-market dealer ever again, once these cannabis clubs are up and running.
Also growing it is super easy. If you can grow tomatoes then you are already overqualified.
I don't know where you live but where I grew up in Germany this was, and still is, decidedly not the status quo. Folks I know literally "import" from hundreds of kilometers away because that's the next place where they could find someone who fits your description. The rest of the market is exactly as sketchy as I'd expect.
So, I don’t know. I probably would pay the state premium over the guy who doesn’t have great quality control.
What would be the reason for not wanting to join a club? Seems like a pretty OK solution between "it's totally illegal" and "the state store sells it", with some safe guards but still let non-profits organize the work and community.
FWIW, we have "social clubs" here in Spain, where it's neither illegal/legal on a national level, and it seems to be working out OK as far as I know.
The clubs have to be registered and need a license. They need to keep a register of members. It is not in the law that they need to give this register to the authorities, but it is still a risk.
EDIT: I looked up the details. The clubs need to keep track of every sale, including data about the buyer. They have to report this to the authorities twice a year in anonymized form.
Also, these are not social clubs but growing clubs. You are not allowed to consume Cannabis in the club and 100 meters around it.
This being Germany, I expect to have to spend weeks joining the waiting lists of overbooked clubs, hoping that one of them has a free slot. Then more forms, sent by post because email is evil, then finally I can buy weed 3 months down the road.
If you live in Germany for a while, you learn that you never get anything without a fight here. It's always tedious.
Apparently it doesn't.
"Nach der Zustimmung des Bundestags kommt das Gesetz am 22. März abschließend in den Bundesrat. Zustimmungsbedürftig ist es dort nicht, die Länderkammer kann aber den Vermittlungsausschuss anrufen und die Legalisierung so verzögern."
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundestag-livestream-can...
They can't veto it, but they could delay it.
This does not sound like you have to "join a club", you just have to buy directly from a club.
(… reading actual text now to check …)
Nope, nevermind… §1 Abs. 13:
"Anbauvereinigungen: […] deren Zweck der gemeinschaftliche nichtgewerbliche Eigenanbau und die Weitergabe von Cannabis zum Eigenkonsum durch und an Mitglieder sowie die Weitergabe von Vermehrungsmaterial ist."
⇒ you either have to grow it yourself or be a member of an association that grows it; can't buy directly from a club if you're not a member.
The data maintenance stuff is a bit more concerning, but I imagine once cannabis is embedded in the country the reporting will disappear in a round of cuts to gov spending
Free translation: non-commercial clubs can grow cannabis and hand it out in small amounts to registered members
If dealers are making lot of money from cannabis, and the state removes that opportunity from them, then they may switch to more disturbing businesses.
does it though? canabis still cant be sold, legally. from a realistic perspective, this only made the black market more valueable, as the dealers no longer have to worry about prosecution as long as they're carrying <25 grams. The legislation is definitely a step in the right direction, but I dont think that it'll have a significant impact on the black market.
Out of curiosity, what other businesses you had in mind?
Let's say that drugs are illegal and get prosecuted, and are counted as crime in the statistics.
If you legalize them, your amount of crime in your statistics drops, but the actual acts are the same in real world.
So you can only get it by joining a club or grow it yourself, both are a hassle for most people so the black market will remain, but I expect there to be a lot more competition since not only organized crime is now able to partake but anyone who (legally) grows.
The black market now accounts for only about 60% of the cannabis sales. Hard drug use like crack and fentanyl has become rampant as dealers lace their product to compete on a kick level (the legal stuff is relatively mild).
There's currently a shakeout and consolidation in the legal cannabis industry going on due to overinvestment. The mom-and-pop storefronts that cropped up on seemingly every street corner during the pandemic are starting to disappear. Regulatory charges and overhead eat much of the profit. There is still trouble getting financing for the legal industry because of US legislation preventing banks that do business in that country from lending money to such businessess outside of the USA, legal or not. Black market dealers do not have any of these issues.
Is there less opioid problems where they didn't legalize?
Yeah, there are a million pot stores, and many closing but that's just a bubble for you.
from i've read cannabis is not a money making product for "dealers". cannabis is used to introduce customers to other much more profitable drugs.
As someone who used to deal some every now and then, I think I could count on one hand the amount of people I sold weed to, who would be OK with whatever drug, the rest were only purchasing cannabis and cannabis only.
They didn't reach out to me to "get high no matter what cost" but specifically to "get high by smoking cannabis". If I didn't have cannabis, there was no interest in getting anything.
I really want this to be true for a lot of drugs and even other criminal activities. Not because I necessarily support these things, but because we've seen that when we don't do this, prosecutors put far more of their time and energy into going after the users because they are much easier to go after. But if we do consider these things problems, we need to go after those distributing and manufacturing. It's like trying to put out a fire by removing all things that are flammable. Sure, it can work, but you're going to have a hard time doing this if you're in the woods. Main focus should be on the fire.
Much cannabis culture is not strongly commercial. People grow and share. Maybe there is something in that which software developers could learn from.
The main problem with most SW developers is that they never learn. That's why we have CADT, Windows 10 and 11, Android, Systemd, Wayland, UEFI etc.
Any other commercial crop that we grow at scale is sold in the dollars per ton range. Outside of a few special cultivars there is no practical reason said drug is expensive and easily shareable for nearly free.
(You obviously still need to manage VAT if your business exceeds 22'000€/50'000€ per year.)
The system set up by this law is extremely dumb, but at least small home grows are legal, and the government is still exploring a path to commercial sales that would be compliant with EU law.
TIL this is the polar opposite from the Dutch expression to rub your hands together which means "being happy about a success; being content; expressing happiness" (Ensie, translated by me)
Asking my german partner, they say it's a thing you'd do when plotting something evil, so more negative than positive I guess, but there is no expression to go with it like "hand wringing" or "in de handen wrijven" are common expressions. I would subscribe to it being a plotting thing in Dutch as well, but that also doesn't work with the US English definition and the way that you used it
Do people from the USA also use it this way in a physical sense, rubbing hands together when they are concerned or feeling guilty or is it just an artifact of history similar to "hanging up" a phone? In the Netherlands I've definitely seen rubbing hands for excitement
The actual act of wringing your hands is associated with generic Bond villains, though.
Language is weird.
There are still random police checks checks between Maastricht and Belgian cities on the other side.
Same with public transportation. Many times, when entering Belgium, cops get on the bus with a dog to see if you have weed on you.
And this is the same country that allows people to drink a beer while driving home from work.
hold up, what?
I knew various European countries had much less draconian liquor laws than the US, but...
while driving?
Drinking a beer in the car is just as legal here as drinking a pepsi. Personally I don't see the problem.
Source:
https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/service/gesetze-...
I've not looked into what exactly passed, but the proposal was joke. Even more so, it was joke regardless where you stand on this topic - and that's quite an achievement.
The proposal was constructed in a way that it technically legalized, but in a way that I'm sure will be of no practical relevance.
According to the proposal, to buy legally you had to be a member of a registered club, so no anonymity.
The club could only sell what it produces (three plants per member) and could only have a restricted number of members. The club can sell at most 50 g per month, it needs an addiction prevention officer, it cannot be near a kindergarden, and so on. Very bureaucratic, so these clubs will be exactly as popular as intended.
This is basically how it works in Barcelona, Spain as well. I don't think it's legal/illegal nationwide, but we have invite-only social clubs where you can only become a member if you know existing members. I think (but I'm not sure) there is a maximum number of members per club too.
And you don't "buy" weed there, but you contribute money to the organization, and you may withdraw this contribution in the future as weed.
Seems to work out just fine here.
Ownership is now legal for 25 grams if they are from your own plants or from the plants of another member of the club you are registered with.
At the same time, I'm about 30 days into quitting entirely after realizing that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with it. I'm experiencing intense anxiety, dark thoughts, and have struggled with the intensity of REM rebound. My resting heart rate immediately went up about 15BPM on average as my body starts the process of finding its new equilibrium.
I first started using it "medicinally" to cope with poor sleep and depression. It actually helped lower my anxiety (with the right strain). It suppresses REM sleep and dreams, which was beneficial since my dreams tended to be part of the reason I had such poor sleep. For a time, it was incredibly helpful, and it helped me establish some better habits and process some difficult things.
But over time, it crept into more and more parts of my life. I never went full "wake & bake", but found myself wanting to use it earlier and earlier each day. When I did use it recreationally, I started to feel the pull even stronger. It started to majorly impact my short term memory, and I started noticing myself forgetting important things while exploring a new relationship. I started to feel like it was no longer beneficial, and decided to quit. And that's when I realized how hard it was to quit. I tried and failed multiple times before finally building enough willpower to actually do it. And there's this part of me that still worries that I'll fall back into it when things get hard. For better or worse, I'm dealing with some really difficult situations in my life and I'm staying away from it anyway. This gives me optimism, but damn, I didn't think it would be this difficult.
In many ways, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far with legalization. This is not to imply I think it shouldn't be legal, but that the culture around it and the public messaging hasn't really caught up with the reality of the potential for harmful use. The public is well aware of the downsides of alcohol use, and there are well-established methods and institutions to help people deal with alcohol addiction and recovery. If someone is an alcoholic, the public understands the severity of this addiction, and recognizes the challenge that such a person faces in staying sober.
But people who are addicted to cannabis often have a hard time convincing people that this is a real issue. The fact that it's not physically addictive in the same ways as alcohol and other drugs has led to the misconception that the addiction potential is not real and that the difficulty of managing it is not real. The warnings that "using this can be habit forming" don't seem to convey the reality of what it feels like to form that habit, and how hard it can be to break it. Growing communities like /r/leaves and /r/Petioles tell this story over and over.
I think that the extremely high THC strains, and even higher THC concentrations in concentrates and cartridges has a lot to do with this. The stuff people are getting these days isn't your hippy uncle's weed, and while the public consciousness is calibrated on the relatively harmless stuff, the stuff that people are using all day looks nothing like that.
All of this to say: be careful. I have had some incredibly good experiences with it, and I think it helped me open my mind. It helped me through a tough time. It's also really enjoyable. But it has a much darker side than many people realize, and it took me far to long to accept that I might be one of the people who can't have a healthy relationship with it. And the fact that I'd had a "take it or leave it" feeling about it for years lulled me into a false sense of security. The slide towards maladaptive use happened gradually and took awhile to notice.
I hope that with the continued movements towards legalization, there is also an increase in public awareness and support for people who get themselves into trouble. More focus on the safety concerns of high THC strains and harmful use. More growers who focus on medicinally useful products vs. just chasing the highest THC.
First 3 to 6 months is always terrible. I also had issues with sleep because of dreams, and also used cannabis for that purpose. Getting back to sleeping without THC in the bloodstream is, well... an experience on it's own.
It's funny how all of the adults I've heard/read basically share the same experience of dropping it (REM rebound, heart rate and anxiety/strange thoughts). And, yeah, today's weed is far more potent than weed I initially started to smoke almost 2 decades ago.
I've done a significant amount of processing and have a good therapist now, which has helped me deal with the sleep somewhat. New tools and new habits make a big difference.
I don't think this argument makes sense. Alcohol could well be a net harm on society, while a ban is not realistic due to its established role in society. This doesn't imply cannabis should have been legalized.
The point more broadly is that if our society is willing to accept alcohol as a recreational substance with downsides, and more generally the idea that consuming recreational substances shouldn't be a criminal act, it makes no sense to send people to prison for consuming a substance that seems far less harmful in general.
> ...while a ban is not realistic due to its established role in society. This doesn't imply cannabis should have been legalized.
I disagree. Prior to legalization, cannabis already had an established role in society and saw widespread use. The primary difference between it and alcohol is that we sent people to prison for one, and didn't for the other, while also accepting the statistical reality that alcohol seems generally far more harmful. More harmful in terms of individual health outcomes and the downsides of becoming an addicted user, and more harmful to others around those who use it, e.g. deaths caused by drunk drivers, domestic abuse fueled by alcoholism, etc.
At least in the US (not sure about the climate in Germany), the reality was that cannabis use was already widespread, and that people's lives were routinely ruined for using it despite their use causing no harm to others. All while problematic use of alcohol routinely resulted in what are effectively slaps on the wrist, even when people routinely put other people at risk while driving under the influence.
It's against this backdrop that I'm comparing the two. Both were already pervasive. The difference in policy between the two made no sense.
And this is all before considering the clear upsides to cannabis. The medicinal applications are real, and have enabled people to live better lives without the downsides of the other widely prescribed pharmaceutical options.
Altering our mental states by consuming substances seems like a deeply human thing (in addition to be observed in other species), and is deeply embedded in us. I think there are very good reasons to ban some substances for the sake of public health. But I don't think a default stance against mind alteration is a good one either.
I don't care what weed smokers do as long as it doesn't negatively affect me. However quite often their stench does.
Yet another reason why I want to move to a supposedly eco-unfriendly single family home in the suburbs ASAP. Since weed became legalized, the stench in urban apartment buildings has been nauseating.
No, by a mile no.
Edit: ah, it's in 20/10426. "in range of sight", "sight is ≤ 100m".
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-bundestag-votes-for-cannabis-...
The guidelines don't say anything about language
Only thing which appears relatively safe is oral consumption over inhaling.
All the same, it’s really not THAT dangerous a drug and criminalization is senseless and a total farce. All the problems legalization causes combined pale in comparison to how dumb criminalization is.
With this law, Cannabis will be removed from the list of scheduled drugs and turned into a simple prescription drug. It will be a lot less complicated to prescribe medical Cannabis.
In Germany, the limit of THC in the blood while driving is almost zero, AFAIK
