There's no particular need to chastise politicians for doing the right thing, when you could have chastised them the whole time they weren't doing the right thing
When someone commits an evil act, they did it because they think it is justified somehow. Most bad people do not see themselves as bad at the moment of the act, only as someone who had a reason to do it and the reason was much more important.
A drug that you can actually overdose on.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
You have to realize countries will make things terrible crimes by framing something anti-colonialist.
Every year is an election year for someone in your electoral stack.
Imagine a company’s culture if they could only fire, promote or give people bonuses/raises once every four years.
This is like "40% of all sick days are on Monday or Friday" levels of cynicism.
That makes any national movement on marijuana risky for Biden. Biden cannot win reelection without winning a super majority of Hispanics, the majority of whom oppose recreational marijuana. Maybe Biden figures he’s cooked in Arizona and Nevada anyway, and this is his play for cross-pressured voters in whiter than average states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where abortion has been flipping many Obama-Trump voters back lately.
But zooming out, this phenomenon will exist in any representative democracy with political parties. A policy with 57% support that carries an overwhelming majority of one party has a much better chance than a policy with 57% split between the parties.
Quite possibly, but is there any sort of cross sectioning that to religious beliefs and/or existing political affiliations in the data set?
I say it that way because, the more devout Catholics may very well support abortion bans and keeping Marijuana completely illegal...
But let's remember the reality of this change; it is NOT legalization, it is simply moved to schedule 3 federally.
IMHO, if the population who decides that is 'past the line' or gets fooled to think it is full legalization gets in a tizzy and everything goes its up again...
Idk what to say at that point.
I agree there is risk but the bigger risk is long term blowback if it becomes a big pharma cash grab.
Biden won over 60% of Hispanics in 2020. Even if every one of the 45% who support recreational marijuana voted for him in 2020, he has to win over a quarter of those who oppose that policy.
Regardless, my main point is that it’s misleading to assert that this change was somehow delayed despite “overwhelming public support.” Even today this is not a risk-free move for Biden. That’s not a fault of the governmental system, that’s just how coalition politics works. Even at age 40, I wouldn’t confess to ever having tried marijuana (I tried an edible once in DC where it’s legal) to anyone in my family. But they’re the same immigrants who flipped Virginia blue.
Also of note: Donald Trump could’ve done this to score some coolness points in his re-election year, and he didn’t.
Let's not bring Trump into this, or anything at all, I certainly wasn't suggesting he's good because the current guy is bad. Personally I find both major party candidates are unacceptable and will vote against both of them third party.
Nvm...you are just trolling for another conspiracy until they finally nail Hunter.
I guess it depends on how you define “moderate.” I’d say it’s something the middle third of the public agrees with. Marijuana isn’t there yet.
1. In the US, we tried to make alcohol illegal, and failed so abjectly that nobody wants to try that again.
2. There’s a decent argument to be made, that in a counterfactual world where alcohol hadn’t been discovered yet, that if we invented it today we would immediately label it so obviously harmful that it should be banned. But we don’t live in that world.
3. While it’s hard to discuss whether this or that individual psychoactive drug should be legal, it’s relatively easier to evaluate whether they’re more or less harmful than alcohol. For example, coffee: clearly less; heroin: clearly more.
4. Besides the fact that prohibition failed, everyone sort of likes freedom? Like, yes, there must be limits, but those limits should be so much on the far side of what ordinary people consider acceptable that they never even have to think, “will the government let me do this?” That seems like a good guiding principle.
5. So here is the Schelling point: everything less harmful than, up to and including alcohol, should be legal, and everything more harmful should be illegal.
6. Like most Schelling points, the results favored by this rule are arbitrary, but the reason we ought to stick to it is not that it’s a good rule per se, but rather that it’s a rule which is easier to find agreement on.
So everything less harmful than alcohol should be legal, and everything more harmful should be banned. Thanks for reading. Have fun, everyone!
