Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/18/joe-biden-failing-to-support.html
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OK, boomer carceralist tool.
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Legalizing Marijuana is a gate way drug to a better tomorrow, so long as they don’t stop there.
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Just stop old man. Stop.
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Especially for all the POC Uncle Joe’s legislative career helped put in prison, destroying countless families.
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Joe Biden is a gateway centrist.
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This is such a telling position because it shows as clearly as anything that Biden thinks it is still 1990.
At no point has he sat down with smart advisers to have a conversation about how the world might be different in 2020 than it was when he was having martinis with Bob Dole and the country had the good sense to listen to old white men exclusively.
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He’s right of course. It is a gateway(*) drug. That’s not a good reason not to legalize it though.
(*) As in, relatively socially accepted, like beer and wine (and smoking, to a degree).
I’ve seen a lot of friends move on from ‘accessible’ ‘gateway’ drug (weed/beer/wine) to heavier stuff in their experimental phase. Sometimes with bad results (one dead, one recurring alcoholic, one junkie, though in all of those cases drugs was never the main problem, more of a self medication for mental issues).
If people use a drug anyway, it’s better to legalize it collect some tax on it and use the raised money to help the people who can’t handle it.
p.s. I think (modern, high THC) cannabis is way scarier than it’s reputation betrays. I’ve seen a few too many people with full blown psychoses triggered by cannabis.
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Third-way neoliberalism, now there’s a gateway drug. Someone needs to do a remake of this commercial, with Biden deepfaked in as the dad and the box-o-drugs replaced with a copy of “Atlas Shrugged”.
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A majority of Americans now live in states that have legalized marijuana for recreational and/or medical use. Just how many decades’ worth of data do we need to collect before concluding that any negative impact from legalized marijuana are grossly dwarfed by the negative impact of waging a war against it?
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“Gateway drug” argument is pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. The same case can be made for milk, ffs.
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I’m only a couple years younger than Biden, and I strongly suspect that his take on grass (see–I even use the old term for it) is not typical of our demographic. Of course, some of the college-in-the-Sixties cohort have drifted to the right over the decades, but it doesn’t look like a stampede to me. On the other hand, I suppose it’s possible that there’s one of those odd cultural gaps operating here and that the two years separating Biden’s particular cohort and mine marks a break in a number of attitudes. But if I think back on who was smoking dope back when I was in grad school a half-century and more ago, I don’t recall much difference between my bunch and those who were two years ahead of me. (Or some of the faculty, for that matter.)
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Dear Uncle Joe,
Do you want Pete Buttigieg to win the Democratic primary?
Because saying shit like that is how you get Pete Buttigieg as the Democratic candidate for President.
So, on second thought, carry on sir!
Very Sincerely,
The people who recognize your sell-by date was over a decade ago.
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For quite a while, I didn’t care about the whole VR thing. I mean, cool, sure, but for whatever reason it doesn’t excite me personally. Just not my thing.
But then I realized, politicians.
Someone get on making that good enough to actually fool 70-something blowhards. Then we go kindler-gentler Logan’s Run on these people and let them all go play in the Metaverse while the rest of us try to get something done.
Eh, a guy can dream, right?
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“It’s a debate, and I want a lot more before I legalize it nationally. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind it.”
No Jo 2020! And , OK Grand Pa!
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The causality there is in question. While people who use cannabis heavily are at higher risk for psychosis, populations that use more cannabis don’t seem to have higher incidence of psychosis. People are still studying this (and legalizing cannabis in more places would make it a lot easier to study) but the studies I’ve read leave me feeling that cannabis has a risk of triggering psychotic episodes in people who are vulnerable to them (e.g. people with schizophrenia or other psychosis-causing mental health problems), but that it doesn’t seem to turn you from a person who doesn’t have psychotic episodes to a person that does.
And of course people who have serious mental health issues might self-medicate with cannabis, causing the correlation to look overly strong. There’s even some evidence that CBD might be an anti-psychotic (I just found this out doing some googling now to verify my understanding of the science).
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This is, almost point for point, the pseudo-logic employed by ⊥rump to “justify” his Muslim ban decree.
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The whole gateway drug hypothesis rests on the idea that the main thing preventing people from using weed is that it is not legal. It never stopped people vis-a-vis booze in the '20s, and it doesn’t stop them now, with weed. Those who need to get high will find a way.
What we should be trying to do is identify why some people are more prone to addiction than others and address that as a matter of public health rather than a criminal matter.
Uncle Joe should come talk to Canadians. We legalized weed country-wide a year ago. The whole gateway drug thing has not come to pass. There hasn’t been an uptick in impaired driving. There hasn’t been a surge in the use of harder drugs.
Of course we still haven’t figured out how to profit from it (government dealers are losing money because they charge too damn much and edibles are not figured out), but none of the doomsday scenarios have come to pass.
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