What happens when two problems overlap. And the nature of the two (and the efforts to oppose them) are different. It's relatively easy to chip away at the reactionary authoritarianism (and its attendant racism and classism) that has driven the War on Drug-users; addressing all the various reasons that drive people to abuse drugs is a far more complex and open-ended problem. Doesn't help that many people conflate "what makes me personally uncomfortable" with "what should be banned/illegal."
True. Addressing addiction itself is an incredibly hard problem. But distinguishing private legality from public use — as in, we won't arrest you if you get high at home, but we will if you do it on the subway — is rather straightforward, and is in my opinion necessary not merely for the social fabric, but to prevent a backlash that rolls back progress.
Smoking itself is less and less acceptable, which I think is why that's annoying people the most. And I don't think as many pot users smoke; at least from my experience, people prefer to vape or use edibles. How you'd expand public intoxication to account for different drugs without giving the carceral state more excuses to lock people up, I'm not certain. Different drugs have different effects - and some do make the user a threat. The law is notoriously resistant to subtlety, though...unless you have a good lawyer.
While I will leave untouched the opinion about laws regulating the use of marijuana, I will note that while less harmful than opioids, cannabis use is not without mental and physical health risks. For example, use during adolescence can interfere with myelination and pruning of the pre-frontal cortex, which in the worse case scenarios can be associated with psychosis and loss of potential IQ and the combusted byproducts of bud and flower contain some of the same carcinogens and oxidative species as tobacco smoke. We just have not studied cannabis, especially the long term hazards, much as it took years to definitively link cigarettes to COPD and lung cancer and alcohol to breast cancer and coronary artery disease. User beware, and believe the evidence based research and not the claims of the lcoal bubista.
Sure, the people who always opposed legalization will complain about pot smoke, but we know by the numbers it's more than that. If 68% of people support legalization, but 51% say pot smoke in public is a problem, then we know at least 17% of people both support legalization but find pot smoke in public a problem. And that pot smoke poll was from 2019 (not a frequently polled question), I suspect it may be higher now. My point ultimately is that if we just let this issue fester and don't address it, it might end up being the best thing that ever happened to drug warriors in 30 years.
You raise an important point with some landlords disallowing renters to smoke in their apartments, and something will have to give on that front. Some combination of pot bars, better indoor ventilation systems, restrictions on what landlords can ban, and maybe incentivizing more people to get their THC though other methods aside from smoking it could help with that.
It’s the same story with tobacco. You can hardly smoke that anywhere. I don’t smoke it, but it seems a little absurd that a little whiff of a cigarette outdoors is going to really bother someone. Of course, most of my liberal friends support the tobacco bans but love the pot legalization, so that seems a bit hypocritical.
What happens when two problems overlap. And the nature of the two (and the efforts to oppose them) are different. It's relatively easy to chip away at the reactionary authoritarianism (and its attendant racism and classism) that has driven the War on Drug-users; addressing all the various reasons that drive people to abuse drugs is a far more complex and open-ended problem. Doesn't help that many people conflate "what makes me personally uncomfortable" with "what should be banned/illegal."
True. Addressing addiction itself is an incredibly hard problem. But distinguishing private legality from public use — as in, we won't arrest you if you get high at home, but we will if you do it on the subway — is rather straightforward, and is in my opinion necessary not merely for the social fabric, but to prevent a backlash that rolls back progress.
Smoking itself is less and less acceptable, which I think is why that's annoying people the most. And I don't think as many pot users smoke; at least from my experience, people prefer to vape or use edibles. How you'd expand public intoxication to account for different drugs without giving the carceral state more excuses to lock people up, I'm not certain. Different drugs have different effects - and some do make the user a threat. The law is notoriously resistant to subtlety, though...unless you have a good lawyer.
While I will leave untouched the opinion about laws regulating the use of marijuana, I will note that while less harmful than opioids, cannabis use is not without mental and physical health risks. For example, use during adolescence can interfere with myelination and pruning of the pre-frontal cortex, which in the worse case scenarios can be associated with psychosis and loss of potential IQ and the combusted byproducts of bud and flower contain some of the same carcinogens and oxidative species as tobacco smoke. We just have not studied cannabis, especially the long term hazards, much as it took years to definitively link cigarettes to COPD and lung cancer and alcohol to breast cancer and coronary artery disease. User beware, and believe the evidence based research and not the claims of the lcoal bubista.
Sure, the people who always opposed legalization will complain about pot smoke, but we know by the numbers it's more than that. If 68% of people support legalization, but 51% say pot smoke in public is a problem, then we know at least 17% of people both support legalization but find pot smoke in public a problem. And that pot smoke poll was from 2019 (not a frequently polled question), I suspect it may be higher now. My point ultimately is that if we just let this issue fester and don't address it, it might end up being the best thing that ever happened to drug warriors in 30 years.
You raise an important point with some landlords disallowing renters to smoke in their apartments, and something will have to give on that front. Some combination of pot bars, better indoor ventilation systems, restrictions on what landlords can ban, and maybe incentivizing more people to get their THC though other methods aside from smoking it could help with that.
It’s the same story with tobacco. You can hardly smoke that anywhere. I don’t smoke it, but it seems a little absurd that a little whiff of a cigarette outdoors is going to really bother someone. Of course, most of my liberal friends support the tobacco bans but love the pot legalization, so that seems a bit hypocritical.