And still to this day if you get caught with weed in Belgium they put you in front of a judge who is going to berate you for smoking a joint once per week.
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.
Oh that's much more reasonable. I always thought the US laws were weird because open container is a really weird thing to do anything more than be some suspicion (I think you should need more. Like someone is acting drunk, but hard to prove). Why can't my friends drink in the car? Why can't I have a trashbag full of empty cans that I'm bringing back from a camping trip? I gotta put those in my trunk? Not all vehicles have trunks. I can bring a bottle of wine or whisky to a friends, we don't drink all of it, and I gotta hide it or wrap it in duct tape to drive it home? The point of the law is about the danger posed to you, others, and property. Just focus on that.
> I had to look this up but apparently the UK doesn't either.
There are a few city-wide regulations in Scotland that prohibit it, possibly in other parts of the UK as well, but there's indeed no such national law.
In Poland, drinking in public space (with some exceptions) is forbidden. Sometimes police will issue fines even for “intention to drink” if they see a person with an unopened bottle of beer.
To my knowledge, in Spain you're not allowed to drink in public(?) Whether or not people/the police care seems to be an entirely different matter, though, and also depend on the city/region.
Yup. This is the case in the UK too. You're not allowed to be drunk and drive, but you're absolutely allowed to have a can of beer while driving. This surprised me when going to the States - there's nothing stopping you from downing a can then getting in the car, but it's illegal to even have an open container of alcohol in the car (even if held by a passenger and you're teetotal)
The groups of armed military personnel stomping through train stations in Brussels was definitely a culture shock for me. Not even the US is like that.
So it becomes technically legal, but they put so many obstacles in your way that buying illegally will hardly lose attraction. Cannabis dealers won't go out of work any time soon.
Biggest thing is that you can now at least legally possess it. They never cared where it came from before either. Smoking it isn't illegal, just somehow buying it and having it. Truly an insane situation. Now at least you can own a reasonable amount of weed without being in this absurd limbo.
> Biggest thing is that you can now at least legally possess it.
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.
but manufacturer and distribution is just filling a need the market. without the demand for the product, it won't sell, so what's really needed are better social services so addicts can get off their addictions. jobs, housing, counseling, hope.
saying it should be legal to have it and then go after the manufacturer instead is also treating the symptom, sucking out the smoke without addressing the fire.
Sure, I took Econ 101 too. But the problem is that that's 101. Once you get to a more advanced level you find more complexity. It is completely possible to generate demand. In some sense this should be obvious as there was no demand for smartphones 50 years ago. You might say some of the ideas were there and thus that's demand, so that could be fair. But certainly not if we go back 500 where even many of these concepts did not exist and the demand would be for easier communication, a much more abstract idea. I mean in Econ 101 you learn about the Efficient Market Hypothesis too, but no economist actually believes it to be true.
With drugs I think this is a bit more apparent because there is addiction. It is well known that a common strategy is getting users hooked. Either by offering some initially for free or at a reduced price, or by increasing the addictive qualities of the product. In fact, we even see similar phenomena in the white market. Starbucks coffee has about twice as much caffeine as a standard cup[0] and this certainly creates a higher demand for their coffee. But I don't think many are aware of this.
Also consider there are different ways of "legal." Some places have "decriminalized" drugs, which would be in line with this idea. For example, the state of Oregon in the US did this. Many people portray this as legality, but it isn't. If you are found with drugs there they will still be confiscated AND you pay a $100 fine and the court will give you information about addiction treatment centers. So not really legal, but not a major criminal offense. That seems like a fair way to put pressure towards manufacturing and distribution if you don't want to just legalize possession (which would always be limited in quantities).
I also just don't buy your analogy in any way. We reduce things that have demand all the time through market regulations. Anything that is illegal to sell or produce is something that there is demand for somewhere. There's a HUGE demand for slave labor, but we've regulated that away (demand is for cheap labor, and slave labor is towards the cheapest one can get if not THE cheapest). The reason to go after manufacturers and distributors is because network effects. When you cut off a dealer you cut off all the people who got their drugs through them. Of course another dealer can take their place, but the effect is still real and far more disruptive than going after tree nodes. You are cutting off branches and the new dealer is like trying to reorganize those orphaned nodes. It's harder. The manufacturers are nodes much closer to the root and so have much greater disruption downstream. You're right that there are orphaned nodes, but it isn't uncommon for people to get off drugs after their supply runs dry. You've essentially forced them.
Possession has been tolerated for a long time now. You can’t walk through a city and not smell weed. AFAIK the tolerable limit was 5g, a person should seek help if they need more than that on them.
That very much depends on the Bundesland where that city is located. Good luck doing that in Munich. Personally I got prosecuted for (ordering!) 3g of weed, although later that got folded. Still trouble, though. Also I can still get problems with my driving license for that same amount (even though that alleged possession was in no way connected with driving any vehicle).
That's a few joints as best, are we really declaring people as hopeless addicts for having more than a handful of joints on them? This seems similar to saying someone should never be allowed to have more than an 1/8th of alcohol on them at any time. Seems silly when put in perspective of what drugs are quantities are already legal.
I guess my point is we allow people to buy handles of alcohol (a much more problematic and harmful drug) at a time, even though consumption at that rate is also problematic. So why should we treat marijuana differently?
an ounce is about 14 grams. 5 is slightly more than an eighth. if you don’t live near the dispensary and want some for a month or a few months an eighth is not really that much. i don’t think seeking help is an appropriate response here.
yeah i see ads for 14g all the time and for some reason that stuck in my head as an ounce but 3.5 grams is an eighth of an ounce so 5 is slightly more than that. either way more than 5g is a reasonable amount to have on you if you are going to buy it for a longer timeframe.
An ounce is 28 grams, 5g isn’t that much flower at all in the grand scheme of things.
I presume it’s an attempt at stopping dealing, maybe to minors? But it feels asinine to have such a limit. Like another poster says, should this extend to a single crate of beer? One bottle of spirits? One pouch of tobacco?
Having a 5g limit just means I’m going to make more frequent trips to the shop to purchase more cannabis, just let me buy a pound and leave me to it.
True, as much as that’s not quite what I’d do because I like to just maintain a high, I’m sure a lot of folks would. Hell, on the weekend I’d switch it up to the higher %s to be fair.
NL has this same rule of no more than around 5g, I’m not 100% how much the exact limit is but it’s nearby 5g.
Likely true, and reminds me of an amusing and revealing story. There was a craft brewery that started to become popular and had to hire a relatively large number of employees to run the operation. Word got out that nearly everyone who worked there used cannabis, so police got an investigator to spy by getting hired to work in the brewery. They repeatedly asked other employees if they could buy cannabis from them, but every time the employees responded by freely sharing cannabis.
Much cannabis culture is not strongly commercial. People grow and share. Maybe there is something in that which software developers could learn from.
I mean even a small operation can grow more than one person can ever smoke in their lifetime in short order.
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.
In the end this is more of a compromise that was still politically feasible. Depending on who governs in the future this will likely be either expanded or rolled back. Parts of this also depend on some EU regulations that might have to be changed for full legalization to be possible.
The EU regulation was the central obstacle. It does not allow for commercial legalization of Cannabis beyond small trial projects. Originally, commercial legalization was the core of the German proposal, but it had to be revamped to only private and non-profit legalization because of legal concerns connected with EU law.
I am not a legal expert but I read that the case of the Netherlands proves this to be at least partially wrong. Retail sale is legal. Some municipalities have legalized supply chains.
Possession is not illegal anymore. My understanding is, that police now cannot use mere possession as a pretense for searches of your car or home. If true, this is great progress from a civil liberties perspective.
It's a big step and still a compromise. Let's see how this whole non-commercial approach works out. I know some people who don't want to get into growing and don't want to join a club.
Exactly, this is what I don't buy in the "black market will get extremely unattractive" argument. The status quo is to buy illegally (but with very low risk for the buyer, and usually excellent anonymity) from established dealers, often people with a lot of knowledge in growing/processing. The new legal approach would be to either grow yourself, or join a club [0]. I don't consume cannabis, but if I would have to choose between joining a state-registered alcohol club, brewing my own beer, growing my own grapes, or just buying a bottle of wine illegally now and then from someone who has expertise in making it (and with nearly all risk on the seller side), I would definitely opt for the latter.
The big advantage is that you can be sure that the cannabis you are buying is actually of a good quality. Especially in Baden-Württemberg (cannot find the source anymore), more cannabis that has been confiscated by the police was impure than pure. And you never know whether you get indica, sativa, 10% THC, 25% THC, CBD that is spiked with HHC, just CBD, or cannabis that is spiked with something else. If you find a good dealer that you can trust has good quality weed, than that is fine. But I have been buying from a lot of different dealers over the past few years (not random people on the street, people I know through other people), and the quality is always all over the place.
I never want to buy from any black-market dealer ever again, once these cannabis clubs are up and running.
This. Buying weed in Berlin is nothing like buying in pre-legalization North America. If you buy without a solid connection, you will more often than not get a laced product. It took me a few years to get a reliable supplier and people frequently reach out to me on Reddit because I brought it up years ago.
> Also growing it is super easy. If you can grow tomatoes then you are already overqualified.
That's a little overstated. It's easy to grow very low quality weed. Growing something capable of being on a shelf to be sold is very much a skill that takes time, even for someone with a green thumb; the girls get too stressed very easily, and attract pests like you wouldn't believe.
Pretty sure tomatoes attract more pests. Also people grow these in the forest on small sunny patches and they do just fine. It's literally a "weed", it grows like crazy. But yes, it won't be premium quality, just some average weed.
No, it's extremely easy to grow high quality weed too. It cannot be overstated how easy of a crop it is. The (mildly) difficult and labor-intensive part is the post-processing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39482755
B) I was a small grower who worked contributed a small bit to the regulatory infrastructure for Colorado's legalization and communicated with many growers of many crop sizes.
It's not extremely easy.
Additionally trimming isn't difficult in that it takes skill, it's difficult in that it's a lot of mind numbing work. Consistently growing is difficult as a skill.
The whole discussion kind of reminds me of the beer brewing industry, where techies think because they had a couple garage brews that went well (and don't consider the ones that didn't), they think they are a replacement for a brewery. And weed is even worse; you're looking at an hour a day for a small batch, and you can't miss a day. And the girls are way worse at telling you what went wrong, whereas you can generally tell exactly what went wrong with beer from the off flavors.
Stress is good for canabis plant, however, I agree with you that growing quality pest free weed requires daily attention.
I have grown extremely strong weed before the Canadian legalization and the method I used to maximize thc production consists of constantly stressing the plant. It was a combination of topping¹, super-cropping² and stem splitting³.
1- During the vegetative phase cut the top of the plant, wait a few weeks and repeat.
It really just depends on your seeds. Yes there is fancy shit you can do, but good seeds + light + water is literally all you need to grow perfectly fine weed.
The trickier stuff is in curing it, but even that is pretty straightforward.
That may be true, but it is still much more convenient and anonymous to just give someone you trust some money, especially if you live in an apartment, or have small children. I would be extremely hesitant to grow cannabis on our balcony. I am 100% sure neither my landlord, nor my neighbors would approve.
> I would be extremely hesitant to grow cannabis on our balcony.
Why is that? Just buy a small body, auto flowering seed, some fresh soil and water it every couple days and wait. You won't have a gigantic harvest but that's basically all you have to do and you will have more weed than you know what to do with. When grown, cut it, hang it upside down and wait until it's dry.
Anonymity. My neighbors, my parents, my wife's parents, the parents of children that visit my child, everybody passing our balcony on the street, and essentially every visitor to our apartment would assume that we consume drugs regularly. This is something I could not have cared less about when I was in my early twenties and living in a building full of students. But it is not something you want to be associated with if you have children in kindergarten or school and if you have to face other parents or teachers from your neighborhood on a daily basis. If I would start to consume cannabis, I would prefer to do it in private.
Common misconception. You generally want to grow cannabis in a "grow box" of some kind, because you need decent control over the light the plant receives (there's distinct vegetative/flowering phases for cannabis plants). In that case your enclosed box can ventilate through a carbon filter, which by most reports (see the countless threads on r/microgrowery for example) cuts the odors down to nothing, even late in the flowering phase.
You can do it outside as well, but typically a box is the best with regulated lighting, temperature and humidity.
I’m not sure I believe the carbon filter reduces the smell to nothing, in my experience it still stinks while running through an internal AND external carbon filter.
The smoking also produces strong odors, which (as a neighbor) I do not approve of, so I'm not sure if adding the odors from growing and processing to that will make the situation much worse?
Many are switching to vaping these days, which produces far less odour, and what little there is dissipates quickly. Vapour also doesn't stick to fabrics, walls etc like smoke does - it's just superior to smoking in every way.
> [Vaping is] just superior to smoking in every way.
Is there higher risk of infection transmission? I'm sure those reports a few years ago of serious lung infections from tainted vape oils are biasing my thinking here, but it also makes some sense that a high-temperature flame on a dry medium wouldn't transmit nearly as many microorganisms as a lower temperature vaporization of a wet medium.
That usually came from some additive for the desired viscosity of the vaping liquid, leading to popcorn lungs. Only black market things, didn't happen to legally aqquired stuff where it was legal at the times.
If someone smokes a joint near your window, that smell will probably be gone in half an hour. If there is a plant that's just sitting there, it'll be more subtle, but it's not going anywhere.
That said – many people like the smell of Hopfentee (Hop tea), which is pretty similar.
Right, it does have a strong odor. But if you have a balcony then it's easy even in an apartment. Without a balcony it is a kinda difficult as you need some carbon filtering set up.
Weed can easily be adulterated (e.g. by spraying with synthetic cannabinoids), but generally it's trivial to find a supplier who doesn't do that. But also true of MDMA and ketamine.
> from established dealers, often people with a lot of knowledge in growing/processing
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.
In some countries legal alcohol is expensive so they buy cheap stuff from “moonshiners” or whatever they’re called in those places, every once in a while you hear about poisonings affecting hundreds of people.
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.
Anonymity! Do you want to be a state registered drug user?
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.
> 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.
I very much recall how long the promise of "Covid Guest Lists are not used by the police" lasted.
The anonymized form is only for the "automatic" reports without anyone asking. The authority can request — §26(2) — the data (= non-anonymized) at any point based on without any requirement for a specific reason.
That said, "the authority" is not necessarily the police or public prosecutor; the determination who does this is left to the federal state (who might make it the police/prosecutor, or not…) — presumably if they're not "the authority" themselves, they would have to ask "the authority" to forward it.
The law contains extensive book-keeping requirements for the clubs. Users don't want to be on a list. Especially with the CDU/CSU saying that they plan to re-criminalize if they win the next election. With the rise of the AfD and personal negative interactions with the state that these people had, I
can understand that they are cautious.
Also, these are not social clubs but growing clubs. You are not allowed to consume Cannabis in the club and 100 meters around it.
I just want to walk into a store, buy weed and walk out. Same as alcohol or cigarettes.
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.
This is actually a smaller step, as it needs to be approved by the Bundesrat before being effective. This could take month and it’s not guaranteed to pass.
"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."
Do you think these 180 000 people will be able or willing to join a club? With a mandatory membership fee and legally mandated minimum membership period of three months?
As these clubs are not allowed to hire people and are also forbidden to allow non-members to act on club duties, a membership will mean some work too. How many of the 180 000 are willing to put in that effort.
> "die kontrollierte Weitergabe von Cannabis durch Anbauvereinigungen"
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.
In Spain this amounts to paying 10EUR to join a club then you can buy at your leisure. Seems like a fairly low barrier.
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
The German law tries to prevent this several ways:
- charging individually for sales is prohibited by §25(2) and §24; the only allowed thing is to have consumption-dependent but standardized ("Pauschale") membership costs. (This is, honestly, worded a bit weird and might need a lawyer to interpret "properly".) [Edit: this got changed in the final version — and is now more restrictive, only membership fees are allowed.]
- you are only permitted to be a member of one association, §16(2)
- associations are only permitted to have 500 members, §16(2)
- there is a minimum membership duration of 3 months, §16(5)
The biggest hurdle for clubs will be that they need dedicated property that fulfills the necessary security requirements. Running a club partly or wholly from a private residence is explicitly forbidden.
The German clubs are not allowed to sell or gift. Members pay a membership fee and are in return allowed to share the crop of their three allowed plants with other members.
This is basically how it works in Spain as well, you don't use the words "buy" or "sell", but you contribute financially to the club treasury and you may withdraw that deposit in suitable amount of weed. You don't hand over cash to the person behind the counter, as an example.
You're not there to "purchase", but the effect is the same.
I feel that's where the rubber meets the road on automatic translation.
Even on HN we're seeing it as non practical or reliable enough to let users deal with their own needs directly.
That's one of the reason I'm so tired of seeing translation as one of the bullet point repeated over and over for AI use. At the end of the day it will never be more than a niche if people don't trust the result (for the record, I agree they're not great)
There's a nuance to this that I haven't seen mentioned so far:
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.
I've read so much hand-wringing German coverage of this issue, and while sometimes comparisons are made to other countries, it's almost never mentioned that cannabis has been legal for half of the US population for years now, and the sky hasn't fallen.
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.
As far as I know the Netherlands only legalized consumption and sale, but not production? Which just lead to higher demand for products what were still largely supplied by criminal groups.
Possession is still technically illegal, tho it hasn't been enforced since the 1970s.
That said, since December 2023 there has been fully legally-produced cannabis on the Dutch market. While media tends to call it "state weed" ("staatswiet"), it's not nationalized, it's just licensed production. Currently it's only available in a number of cities, chiefly in the South of the country, but more cities should be onboarded onto the system this year.
And airports and other places that are nominally under federal control. That said, airports generally care more about bombs and hard drugs, but the risk is higher than a bottle of bourbon.
It's also still a disqualifier for federal employment.
A cursory google search shows that as a result of that stipulation there are in fact financing packages or lenders that acknowledge the risk and seek to meet that demand.
Comment made little sense to me so I looked it up: "hand-wringing: an overwrought expression of concern or guilt" (Merriam Webster)
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
There is the expression in English, rubbing your/their hands with glee. All context dependent as for the physicality. Someone holding their hands tightly and rubbing them might be nervous for example. Someone fast moving them but not cold could be more joyous.
A slight addendum from another German: we have the adjective "händeringend", which is the verbatim translation of "hand wringing-ly". It's usually not used in a negative, scheming connotation, though - if you look/search for something "händeringend", your are desperately looking for that something.
The actual act of wringing your hands is associated with generic Bond villains, though.
As legalization goes underway we’re now aware of how smoking and vaporizing seem to be linked to endothelial cell damage and heartattacks, probably not great for potency either. Marijuana is not a safe drug nor the panacea it’s marketed as. We also seem to be seeing higher rates of addiction to marijauna, despite it being nominally non-addictive.
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.
"fun fact": if someone is for whatever reason opposed to an association growing cannabis somewhere near where they have any kind of "influence" — they'd just have to get something resembling a public playground or public sports installation there. I'm willing to bet that this is gonna be how conservative local authorities force out cannabis growing.
I think that on balance, legalization is a good thing. Certainly it should not be illegal when alcohol is legal.
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.
Hey, good luck with dropping it, 30 days is already a milestone!
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.
Thank you! 30 days has indeed felt like an accomplishment, and I'm looking forward to getting through the rest of this.
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.
> Certainly it should not be illegal when alcohol is legal.
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.
There's a lot implied in that quoted sentence that I didn't expand on.
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.
In Germany (and not just Germany probably) the use of cannabis, and other drugs apart from alcohol and nicotine, is significantly less widespread and normalized than in the US. It's definitely far from being as normalized as alcohol. (Although cannabis obviously became more pervasive in the past few decades. Perhaps not least due to exported US American TV shows normalizing it.)
Legalizing cannabis in such an environment seems to me like legalizing alcohol in a country where alcohol use isn't already normalized -- like in Iran. A very questionable idea. One would need strong arguments on why the expected benefits are larger than the expected harms.
> 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.
Yes, but using cannabis (THC, presumably) as a specialized medication is very different from legalizing it altogether. It would be no different from other drugs that need approval from a government agency with regards to efficacy and safety, before being available only with a prescription.
(Being available with prescription only makes sense if there is a significant chance of abuse. Which is the case if the substance is addictive. Which suggests non-addictive substances like, perhaps, LSD and psilocybin, could be freely available. Though I'm not an expert on these drugs.)
> 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 would argue that a lot of the harm comes from a substance a) being addictive, and b) being significantly unhealthy. To the point where the net harm probably outweighs the net benefit. Caffeine is pretty much the only substance I know that is addictive while being quite harmless. But actually banning things has to consider the real chance of being successful with such a ban. The more people are already addicted or otherwise accustomed to a drug (e.g. to cigarettes or alcohol) the less realistic is a ban being successful and enforceable.
Can I ask where you're from? I'm just curious about worldview based on geographic factors and how that might influence perspective.
> I would argue that a lot of the harm comes from a substance a) being addictive, and b) being significantly unhealthy. To the point where the net harm probably outweighs the net benefit.
I think it's important to point out that cannabis is a plant, and has a drastically different risk profile than alcohol. You keep grouping the two as if they're similar, but they're not. I say this as someone who has clearly experienced the downsides, but who still doesn't think banning it makes any sense, especially if there are criminal penalties involved.
Historically, the bans have been predicated on lies, and associating it with harder drugs that are a clear and obvious danger to public health. The issue I have with your argument is that it presupposes that these are plants to be legalized (vs. legal by default). The burden of proof should lie on why we think they are harmful, and why they shouldn't be legal by default, IMO. And when looked at through that lens, existing policies have clearly not been aligned with reality.
I'd support common sense regulations and requirements around public education, maybe even limits on strength. But there's a wide spectrum of possibility between banning something and making sure that people use it safely.
If we want to focus on banning substances that are addictive and a net harm to society, there is a lot more low hanging fruit across the food industry. Let's start with sugar.
FYI: the German discrimination was/is so strong that you will lose your driver license when they catch you with weed nearly independent of the amount and location (Saturday park big city)/no car in sight
Curious to know what impact it will have on criminality.
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.
> and the state removes that opportunity from them
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.
True, I didn't think about that, it actually makes their job easier and maybe... increase competition (though for them, it seems more beneficial than harming their business)
You mean the stealing for money for high priced black market drugs?
You mean the shootouts/high speed chases where people run from the cops because they have a bag on them?
Or do you mean lighting up a joint?
The thing is, it's very easy to look at the statistics of violent crimes before and after. Also the vast majority of law enforcement agencies classify their crimes so you get detailed statistics of what kinds of crimes occur on a monthly/yearly basis.
They still can make money from it since it's not available for sale commercially (EU laws prohibit this).
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.
I could see that being an effect in the short term, but I don't think there's a fixed amount of criminality in a given society. I'd bet there's a significant linear correlation with the size of the black market in society (in terms of annual revenue) and the amount of criminality. Reduce the amount of revenue, reduce the amount of criminality. Source: Nothing.
Cannabis sales and possession has been legal in Canada for, what, 6 years or so. You only need to be of a certain minimum age and pay the excise duty (and find a way to dispose of the extreme packaging).
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.
I’ve seen it legalized around these parts and pot dealers didn’t turn to murder for hire or extortion rackets, they just shrugged their shoulders and found another regular job. We did however waste a lot less time prosecuting imaginary crimes.
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 don't use cannabis, but I wonder how much cannabis, alcohol, television, social media, etc sap energy and drive from people in general. At a societal level, is that partially responsible for the decrease in entrepreneurship? How could we tell?
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.
Then Google it, there is plenty of research, otherwise you're JAQing off users that are pre-biased against drugs. Not a single serious study I see in the list (and these are across multiple countries) has hedonism anywhere on list of the most pertinent problems.
The Congressional Budget Office writes plenty about this and throws out statements like the following
>Some economists are becoming concerned about diminished competition among firms—especially those firms involved in Internet-based commerce—and its harm to entrepreneurship, and about the impact of noncompete clauses
Information technology has drastically changed the business landscape in such a way that it no longer looks or acts like the pre-internet world. Furthermore global marketplaces like Amazon allow entrepreneurs to exist outside of the countries doing the counting.
Harmless doesn't exist and you can never reach it. If you want harmless have AI lock you in a bubble and feed you pulp and happy thoughts in your own bubble universe.
What you're looking for is the principle of least harm. Time and time again we've proven that banning drugs is not the least harmful option. It turns out that humans really love vice which causes even more harmful black markets. We have lots of articles and information about drugs and their effects on society, you were attempting to link it to entrepreneurship of which from what can be seen is a very tenuous link at best.
I agree with you, as you would notice if you saw my other comments in this thread. But I'm wondering about the harms to society that we don't fully understand yet, and how we can mitigate them.
Legalizing alcohol was for the best, because it eliminated the organized crime aspect. But it came with serious harms to society that we really haven't done a good job of mitigating. Alochol destroys so many lives and kills so many people each year.
I'm asking, how we can not make that mistake again. To be clear, whatever the harms of normalized cannabis use in society, it will be far less than alcohol.
I don't partake in cannabis, or much alcohol (ie one social drink once a week).
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.
Also, in the West (most likely the US you're talking about), businesses can and do quickly respond if your business plan starts working and either swallow your customer base whole, or regulate you out of existence.
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.
Is there a limit when there's enough taxes/revenue/jobs? I would like one, i would like to live life for life not for job. Job is a mean to live not a reason for it. Because if there is no limit jobs will always expand to fill the all the time a person has.
You're getting a lot of flak. You never said that everyone should always work, or that everyone should be an entrepreneur.
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.
I don't partake either, but you'd have to offset the loss in tax revenue to the gains for people with PTSD or chronic pain who get better quality of life and may be able to work more and need less healthcare services.
Working at maximum stress levels all the time is also suboptimal. Moderation is the key.
I'm not saying everybody should be an entrepreneur, far from it, but a decrease in entrepreneurship at a societal level hurts everyone. You can see that too, right?
Anecdata: I've noticed a huge range in the way people are affected by chronic weed smoking.
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.
What about discouraging wealth inequality and the lack of social support for the population in general? This would be a horrifying interference of the state in the dynamic of society, right?
But somehow for some people the state legislating about the behaviour of the average Joe to make sure he continues to be a well behaved cog is absolutely appropriate.
Maybe instead of taxing it to reduce its use, we can try making life better all around so people aren't incentivized to use it? Making other things more fun/accessible would decrease the time/availability for that behavior.
In South Park, the real danger of cannabis is well explained: it may turn you into a couch potato, causing you to miss out on life instead of engaging in productive activities.
And South Park is the most realistic depiction of the clown world we are living in.
It's forbidden in the US too. However I've noticed the intensity of weed smell makes it noticeable even where tobacco smell would not be.
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.
Had we as a society been pursuing coexistence instead of crushing people with laws then we might have made progress with this by now. Controlling odors is an engineering problem with several solutions that are not widely applied.
It is also important to note that the spread and lingering of smoke smells in apartment buildings is just one symptom of a general problem of poor indoor air circulation and air quality. Addressing those issues effectively will help with quality of life and health and should be done regardless.
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.
> According to the proposal, to use legally you had to be a member of s club, so no anonymity. The club could only sell what it produces and could only have a couple of members.
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.
That’s wrong. You don’t have to be a member of a club to consume legally. Consumption has always been legal. Ownership was banned and is now legal for up to 50 grams.
My opinion: The law is constructed such that the parties that promised it (and are now in the government) can keep face (especially in the light of the upcoming elections), but that it will not have any practical relevance.
> Also, how do you tell a illegal from a legal migrant?
Believe it or not but when you gang rape people in the middle of a public park you usually get arrested and prosecuted, then your identity and status are given to the public.
> The fable of linking illegal migrants to rape and drug trafficking when number show no such thing at scale.
Again, every country releasing data about it proves the contrary, take france, every single crime category has an over representation of foreigners:
And it's not even descendant of legal migrants &c. it's just people who don't have the nationality. In big cities it's even worse, in Paris public transports 65% of sexual assaults are committed by foreigners, 93% of thefts too.
I'm all for discussing the various causes but if your ideology is so strong you can't accept official stats I think it's pointless, continue to live in your imagined world and we'll continue to avoid our local park at night because we're racist.
Since when is Berlin in France? Also, not all foreigners are equal, if you get the drift. Also, you, like a lot of people, ignore the connection between crime, poverty, economic stability and ethnicity. And your conclusion is, well, racist.
it's just an example because I know where to get these sources. Feel free to discuss the content though ;)
> Also, you, like a lot of people, ignore the connection between crime, poverty, economic stability and ethnicity. And your conclusion is, well, racist.
The poorest regions in France and Germany are the lowest in crime, rural areas are by far poorer and aren't plagued by neither rapes nor drug dealing.
Even with all the causes listed I can't get past the fact that people get gang raped and stabbed 500 meters from my flat, and it doesn't change the fact that people avoid the place and that it's the biggest local drug dealing spot.
Keep moving the goal post, hopefully one day you'll face the facts, and once the facts are accepted we can discuss the causes all day long and attempt to find solutions, of course if the facts can't be discussed neutrally finding a solution is impossible
Since this this whole shit shownof a thread started with a claim about drugs and rapes in a Berlin park, this statement of yours, re: statics for France, is interesting:
>> it's just an example because I know where to get these sources. Feel free to discuss the content though ;)
I take it you are not based in Germany, and certainly not Berlin, then.
The French problem with banlieues is an intersting one. One that can be discussed under a relevant submission.
Nice so, of moving the goal post, litterally, from Berlin to France. Not that I expected anything else.
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.