Rolling Cannabis Politics Thread

rec just passed the Senate Budget Committee in NJ . we getting there

Just did my first shopping trip in SF, and first TSA sneak at SFO. Good times!

going into a weed store for the first time is a trip

Stugots

xp

I thought it was pretty funny. These newfangled products, vape pens and whatnot, are pretty nuts. Taking some adjusting.

lol

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/california-marijuana-stink.html

i will take the smell of good weed over the extant garbage/dog shit/car exhaust aroma anyday

that said, folks gotta update residential zoning laws if the smell from a grower is genuinely that intense.
sounds suspiciously quid/agg tho; i grew up next to a tobacco farm and then, later, a cow farm and you get used to that shit, quite literally.

Shit is intense though - I remember walking by a block long grow operation in Portland and the smell was amazingly, overwhelmingly strong.

pfft just attach a huge cardboard tube with a huge dryer sheet stuffed in it to the grow operations, prob solved

Too much of my neighborhood smells like ginkgo trees, which are a bit like a cross between dog shit and vomit that someone ate and then threw up on a pile of dog shit, and then stepped in. Weed smell would be a marked improvement.

Speaking of which, my friend and I took one of those lil' Go Cars in Queens a couple of weeks ago, and the cupholder was essentially piled with pot ash. The car smelled like a college dorm room during a hologram Pink Floyd show.

Here's a line for you:

I asked Mark Kleiman, of the Marron Institute at New York University and one of the most sought-after experts on drug policy in the country, what the future looked like. He foresaw a world in which pot, legal in ever more states and eventually at the national level, will get cheaper and cheaper. The expected tax windfalls would become less likely, unless pot is taxed at the level of potency rather than sale price. The trend toward vaping means there will be greater demand for oil, and if you can melt everything down for oil, pot will be less expensive to produce, because at that point you can grow it like corn.

“You can produce all the intoxicant used in a year on 40,000 acres,’’ Mr. Kleiman said. “That’s 20 family farms in Iowa.” Eventually a joint could cost a nickel; Nabisco will take over edibles. “You will have pot grown in Iowa, processed by Cargill and sold by Amazon,” Mr. Kleiman said. “No one will make money except Jeff Bezos, who always makes money.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/nyregion/legalized-pot-isnt-going-to-save-us.html

that's like saying no one will buy craft beer because they can just down malt liquor

Legalizing marijuana will have advantages beyond just bringing in taxes. For example - it will help with the fentanyl/painkiller crisis. It will help with our prison crisis. It will resolve the hypocrisy of having alcohol, a far more addictive and dangerous drug, legal while cannabis, a far safer and naturally grown plant, is illegal. On that tip, they have found that in places with legalized marijuana DUIs have gone down, teenage drug use has gone down, and many other wonderful effects. Also the government should not be in the business of telling adults what plants they can and cannot grow.

^^ all resoundingly otm

that being said, oversupply is tough for growers, ounces are down to $28 here in Oregon (they were $40 a couple of months ago).

wow
really?

i am not questioning the numbers i am just shocked and should have left it at wow

I know, right?

https://archive.org/details/20181220EW/page/n27

No bud for oil!

I think I paid $40 for a quarter ounce in the mid 1980's.

yep, sounds about right

it will help with the fentanyl/painkiller crisis.

I think the health benefits of cannabis, understudied though they may be, are pretty overstated. I'm sure it helps suppress nausea and increase appetite, and probably alleviate some anxiety and stuff like that. And it's certainly healthier than alcohol. But cannabis as a serious alternative to opioids for pain suppression? I doubt it. Cannabis as a serious alternative to those addicted to opioids? I mean, it can't hurt, but can it really compete with something to that degree of addictiveness? Anyway, I remember hearing, early on, that one of the most highly touted attributes of cannabis was in treating patients with glaucoma, but my wife and I looked it up and in order to work as well as Rx medicines you'd basically have to smoke all the time. Just as an example.

Perhaps we'll learn more about cannabis when we start to properly study it, which is one of the most obvious benefits to legalization. Also reducing waste in the criminal justice system. And, yeah, on its face it's massively hypocritical to have alcohol legal and not pot.

Regarding money/taxes, did I unthread mention the conversation I had with someone on CA, about how she anecdotally saw the legalizing of cannabis as actually fostering the black market, since taxes boost the price so much people are turning to private growers and sellers, who, yeah, have an overabundance?

Josh I have been using marijuana to treat pain daily since I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 2005. Before I went on Humira it was often the only way I was able to leave the house.

When I was hospitalized in 2011 for a Crohn's flareup they gave me steroids and an opiate prescription. I threw away the prescription and used marijuana exclusively to treat the pain. (I still used the steroid regime.)

crohn's seems to be an area where it's helpful. never did anything for my chronic pain (i have a bad back and used to get high every day until start of this year, had no analgesic quality whatsoever for me)

documentation:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-10-cannabis-symptoms-crohn-disease-effect.html

iirc this was Israeli research and shows the benefits of being able to do lab research in a legalized environment, we really need to get cannabis off of Schedule 1.

JiC -- i think you are being unfairly dismissive wrt mental health benefits of mm
I'm sure it helps suppress nausea and increase appetite, and probably alleviate some anxiety and stuff like that

Not to mention there are very few medications available for appetite loss, which can be life threatening if you think about it.

I have Crohn's too, thankfully only ever had 1 flareup. I cannot imagine using only mj to treat the pain. Though really the only time I needed opioids was post-op. Oh and I guess codeine due to infection spreading & nerve damage to leg from botched interventional radiology session. But for nausea and lack-of-appetite, sure.

The only thing I wanted to eat during my flare-up was Arby's lol go figure

I was about to ask, is Crohn's one of the conditions, like glaucoma, where it has shown some demonstrated benefit?

Obviously if it works it works. I just can't imagine people with severe chronic pain and/or serious addictions to opiates finding comfort through cannabis. Now, about ten years ago I had a kidney stone, and it was the most painful thing ever. They gave me this huge jar of Vicodin, iirc, and though I only ended up using maybe three pills over the course of a week, I do recall it made me feel sort of hazy but not much more than that. Maybe it might work like that? (The urologist, incidentally, told me that were my stone not as large as it was he would have just prescribed a six-pack of beer.)

And I was not at all being dismissive of mental health benefits. I even say it probably helps!

that link doesn't specify which sx were alleviated

Again, I don't think cannabis is dangerous, and it clearly does have benefits for some people for some things. Future studies will likely bear that out. I just think it's being oversold as a miracle drug panacea is all.

xp how about this one:

https://www.tikunolam.com/article.php?id=1107

90% Significant Reduction of Crohn's Disease Symptoms with No Side Effects;

Verification of full Remission in 50%

I know people who take it for fibromyalgia as well and report [to me] amazing results.

I think the more studies the better.

i find marijuana to be effective pain and sleep medication following a year of severe neck issues. still haven't quite figured out how to vape properly but, in coordination with 800mg of ibuprofen, i can get through the night and keep my sanity.

Seen a couple of articles lately about how predicted economic benefits of cannabis have not quite panned out because the high prices and taxes have actually driven people to the black market.

Here's an admittedly early one about Canada:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/canada-legalized-pot-in-october-but-its-black-market-is-still-going-strong/2019/01/04/ca09a3b0-fe53-11e8-a17e-162b712e8fc2_story.html

But here's one about CA and how the state's massive surplus has been largely going elsewhere, and how sales have actually *dropped* since recreational legalization:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/buying-legal-weed-in-california.html

has usage gone down though too? isn't a longterm policy goal to curb recreational usage of this "dangerous" substance, like what's happened with cigarettes?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43ej5n/now-that-weed-is-legal-in-canada-we-asked-college-students-if-its-still-cool

Yeah, there's some funny stuff happening. Legalizing cannabis was intended, in part, to counter the black market. But the black market is thriving because of surplus (or shortages!) of high quality legal cannabis, and also because the high tax on legal cannabis is driving people to cheaper alternatives, which in turn means less tax revenue than predicted. But that would have happened anyway, since usage is dropping. So legalization, at least to some degree, is bolstering the black market even as the bottom drops out due to surplus driven by ... legalization. Which is or may be bringing in less taxes than predicted because some people would rather skip the tax-imposing middle man and just go straight to the source. Which means the only way to encourage or increase legal sales would be to ... stop the sale of pot on the black market, which brings us back to square one.

https://lcb.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/annual_report/2017-annual-report-final2-web.pdf

WA collected $315 million in sales tax (37% on retail) on weed in fiscal 2017, $113 million more than from liquor. Sales of $259 million in 2015, $786 million in 2016, $1.3B in 2017.

What a disaster for low-income health care.

Cannabis taxes are significantly higher than liquor taxes. Regardless, the more taxes/money made for the state the better.

So I wonder why sales are not as robust in CA as in WA? Or, flipped, why a state with a fraction of the population of CA would have numbers so high (relative to size)? Is it because CA is priced/taxed too high?

For a decade, cannabis had already been legal in CA if you were happy spending 10 minutes and $30 to get a licence. Prosecution/enforcement of illegal consumption had therefore dropped enormously. Licences for legal stores had not been adequately established by 1/1/2018, and stocks still ran out in the first week.

(Similarly, long-standing legal dispensaries in Vancouver are now illegal under national legalisation, but federal response is to shrug and guess it’ll get sorted out sometime, so leave them alone for now.)

A few months’ data from a state here and a territory there is not really representative of an overall market. WA has been legal for six years, with walk-in stores open for 4.5 years. Wait a bit before you draw any conclusions about markets that have opened since some ilxors changed their sheets.

Just seems weird that sales should *drop* in CA the first year of full legalization. You'd think they'd at least hold steady.

Sic otm

How does Washington deal with the banking problems? Like, one of the big issues in California is that because it is still illegal at the federal level, banks aren't willing to finance weed companies, and in many cases (idk) not even allow them to have bank accounts.

not sure how safe my thoughts are to begin with tbh

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/is-marijuana-as-safe-as-we-think?

Does it affect motivation and cognition? Hard to say, but probably.

i think it's safe to accept anecdotal evidence here

Is that the Malcolm Gladwell piece? Fuck that guy and his flimsy rhetorical questions.