Bout damn time
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.
You’re not really in a position to be criticizing people for lack of evidence, Jesus.
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.
all the downvotes this comment is getting is making me wonder if all or most of the genocides in the past were allowed to happen because it was politically easier to ignore them during their time for some other higher priority goal.
if that’s true, it speaks volumes that we no longer remember what that other goal is but continue to perpetuate genocides while simultaneously abhorring it and that it feels a lot like other bizarre social practices like war or prejudices were we also perpetuate them while also simultaneously abhor them.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Our federal government always moves slowly and almost always is decades behind popular opinion, that’s not news. What is news is that someone did something, and that person is Joe Biden. Even if it’s long overdue, and even if it could be better, he acted on the opportunity to make it happen and that deserves credit.
That not how any of this works. Politics requires these kind of changes to move gradually. The states went first and showed that it can work, albeit with severe hampering from the federal government.
Now there seems to be a public support for the next step and this is to gear up to allow dispensaries to become federally legal, have bank accounts and such. The government can then also regulate it in therma of quality and safety.
We all see the damaging nature of alcohol so that comparison is always a bit strange imho.
So we agree this is overdue, we disagree how much of a milestone this step is.
The biggest thing this does imo is unlock the ability for federal research dollars to study marijuana. There’s some other good thing sure that’ll pay dividends later on as steps towards more harm reduction, but getting off Schedule I IS a big step, if not a complete step to righting the wrongs of the war on (some) drugs.
Agreed, Trump almost managed a coup, loaded the Supreme Court, and would fire random officials every other week… Then the democrats pretend the position of the president is powerless.
The establishment left are a joke.
Yeah, I’m really angry that the president didn’t “violate the law” to push through marijuana changes faster.
What were you hoping to see them do that they didn’t?
That roommate analogy hit me right in the feels. Was just thinking yesterday if my roommate even decided to do the trash or any cleaning once soon, i wouldn’t even be happy bc it hasn’t been done in 3+ years and there’s much to make up for. But positive reinforcement and all right? It took long, but we should probably celebrate if it does happen to keep encouraging the process and stoke that flame. Firmly stating “good job so far, but the job’s not done yet.”
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.
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.
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.
Seriously. The recent story of just how many people have died from the cops ‘giving them something to calm them down’ is insane. If you’re not my doctor, you don’t get to dose me with anything.
Cops job isn’t to protect you or I. It’s to protect the people who pay them and their interests. It’s just a government sanctioned gang and anyone who believes otherwise either isn’t paying attention or is one of the people who pay them.
Ken Paxton about to sue the feds in 3…2…1
