I don't even smoke/eat pot and I'm happy this is going through. It's just a mire of confusion that tobacco and alcohol are legal, while a relatively harmless drug is federally illegal. You can't even do medical research on MJ as the laws stand. Mostly because of a backlash against a counter culture who didn't support a corrupt set of government officials and a textile industry that doesn't even produce in America, anymore. I'm (obviously) American, but this propping up of a legacy of corruption and convenient morality is just infuriating...... sorry. Rant =)
I don't smoke/consume either and I have to say it's working pretty well here in Oregon. More tax revenue for the state, fewer people in jail and so on.
For California Prop 64 of the $2,077,438 spent in opposition $1,364,000 (65.6%) came from Julie Schauer.
The only other major donor was Smart Approaches to Marijuana Action (SAM Action) which donated $489,150 (23.5%)
The California Teamsters Public Affairs Council donated $25,000 (1.2%) and the Peace Officers Research Association of Claifornia PIC donated $25,000 (1.2%).
In both cases the majority of support for the opposition came from a SINGLE WEALTHY INDIVIDUAL - not "private individuals."
I am not sure if the Teamsters directly represent police officers but they are a union and Peace Officers Research Association sounds police related so you are right that some vaguely "police" and "union" related groups did donate a relatively insignificant 2.4% to the opposition campaign, but that is it.
PORC is one of the largest police advocacy organizations in California state. SAM is funded largely by private individuals (yes, "individuals" not "individual", although its single donor is Julie Schauer). Notably absent is any "big pharma" or private prisons, in contrast to what the GP stated.
Although I know many individual cops who can't wait for legalisation. They're tired of wasting time on weed when heroin and opioids are destroying whole communities.
I would imagine that the reason why PDs tend to be against legalization, is because it provides them with a much broader list of targets for civil asset forfeiture, which goes into their budgets.
That's because Insys makes fentanyl. Fentanyl is abused, so everyone points to them and says "What are you doing to stop drug abuse?". So they write a fat check to stop "drug abuse". The fact it was marijuana legalization doesn't matter, it served it's purpose.
That should say: government prison lobbyists. See: how government police & prison lobby groups have fought against pot legalization for decades. They have far more money and influence than the private prison industry (and that was 10x more the case 10+ years ago, when the private prison industry was hardly more than a pebble).
Those with the most to lose from pot legalization in terms of money, are government employees. The extreme majority of all the people put in prison during the US prison boom, went into government prisons staffed by government employees, and were arrested by government employees.
The war on drugs was a government program, that benefited the government by dramatically increasing its power and scale in just about every possible way. The private prison industry was tiny before year ~2000 (and it's still a small minority of the racket, which still mostly benefits the government).
The government prison complex is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. All that profit extract goes into the pockets of the government employees (and to a lesser extent, government contractors that build prisons etc).
Show me the labor cost of all the government employees related to the prison system (including the unnecessary police/arresting-related employees) over the last 40 years, inflation adjusted. Here's a hint: it's over a trillion dollars and makes the private prison money look like a joke.
CoreCivic is worth $3 billion and does $1.8 billion in revenue. That's equivalent to the salary & benefits of about 20,000 cops. There are two million (that's 100x the size of CoreCivic) people directly or indirectly employed by the government prison system, including 1.2+ million that are employed by state & local law enforcement agencies.
The income & benefits for those two million workers that are feeding off the government prison complex, is worth at least $150+ billion per year.
Politicians also love the government prison complex. It supports their power by making sure taxes remain artificially high, which keeps their slush funds higher, and they can basically build jobs in their voting districts with government prisons.
>Politicians also love the government prison complex. It supports their power by making sure taxes remain artificially high, which keeps their slush funds higher, and they can basically build jobs in their voting districts with government prisons.
This doesn't make any sort of accounting sense. This doesn't keep taxes "artificially" high. That money is collected in taxes because there is a very expensive program that needs to be funded. There no greater opportunity for embezzlement in your scenario than out of your scenario.
Your argument is fine without this claim, though. LEO unions are profoundly fucked up institutions.
That's universally ignored on HN. Almost nobody on here ever wants to talk about the fact that ~97% of all the people that were put into prison under the war on drugs over the last 40 years, went into government prisons to benefit government agendas & employees. It's very, very, very aggressively ignored here, and the sole response you'll usually get if you do bring up the actual facts of the situation, is heavy downvoting (you won't get much discussion unfortunately).
Please don't make grandiose generalizations about the community as a rhetorical device. It's pompous and the generalizations are invariably wrong. Moreover, who cares? Let's keep to the topic, or at least something interesting.
I think for most young people it's obvious that cannabis should be legalized and regulated like other "vice" substances like tobacco and alcohol. I'd stop short of wanting to legalize "hard" drugs, but I would like to see a focus on addiction treatment rather than virtual criminalization of the addicts --I'd still be for criminalization and controlled distribution of drugs that can have immediate deleterious effects on people's health, wellbeing and functionality. Alcohol, while dangerous, unfortunately is well ingrained in society, so even though it qualifies as dangerous, it might have to remain an exception, given it would be hard to extirpate (see prohibition in the various countries and its lack of success).
Why should personal consumption, or possession with intent to consume personally, ever be criminalized? No matter how harmful the substance is to the person, the basic principle of bodily autonomy (you know, the same one that dictates abortions to be legal) applies here.
The only reasonable exception I can see is substances that alter behavior in a way that's likely to endanger other people (e.g. those that induce aggression). Ironically, though, alcohol would be relatively high on that list compared to most everything else.
I'll play Devil's advocate here. Suppose you want to consume a drug that is currently criminalized, you need to think past the toll on only your body. You need to consider the toll to society. The retail price you pay includes the salaries of gangsters who commit murders and help perpetuate a culture of violence. It encourages other unrelated crime, because it helps set up infrastructure required by criminals, like easy access to guns. It includes the bribes that are given to law enforcement and other public officials who then subvert some of the rules and laws that are the basis of our society. To a lesser extent, since your transaction won't be taxed, there's a small hit to society compared to if you chose a legal high instead.
None of these points would apply if those hard drugs are legalised and regulated, of course. At that point, I'm less certain about the right thing to do. Should the government sell clean versions of ecstacy, heroin or any of the other million synthetics available? I honestly don't know.
I've always thought this would be a great use of the blockchain. If you want to party with dangerous drugs you take your pharmacy card to the pharmacists and get a recreational prescription. This gets written to the blockchain. Next time you do it they see your full history. If your usage is showing patterns of abuse then they can refuse your request and sign you up for legally binding treatment program.
With the inevitable trend toward public healthcare, I just hope that we're able to tax these kinds of products. I don't want to pay higher taxes just so we can provide extra medical treatment to people with alcohol/red meat/tobacco/marijuana habits.
