• tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    So legalize it and put money into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn’t very hard.

    Of course. But look around you. Our governments won’t do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I’m more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.

    Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.

    I agree. But it’s not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle. Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.

    And alcohol’s effects aren’t?

    Alcohol’s effects are immediately visible. It’s hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.

        • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.

          I’ll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon’s drug guy:

          https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

          “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? 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.”

          Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.