Well, of course it did, 40 years of sunk cost fallacy (e.g. War On Drugs) can’t be wrong!
War on drugs, what a crock O shit!
Government policy in this area has always been insane, and has always been politically motivated. I confess I don’t quite understand the political motivation at present – what votes can they possibly get with this idiocy – but it’s got to be there. Somewhere there’s the answer to the cui bono. It used to be obvious the benefit was for the tobacco and alcohol industries and their various state legislatures, but those aren’t Democrat anymore anyway, so really I have no idea.
At this point I think it’s just that after telling the same lie for a long time it is very hard to tell the truth.
The ‘war’ on drugs is big business and a major funding reason, a lot of the money has to got to fight pot, not to mention the big pharma would rather you take their pills instead of pot.
I think we need look no further than the Prison-Industrial complex. There are a lot of people making a lot of money from imprisoning a lot of other people for marijuana related offenses.
It’s corporate ethics to protect shareholder value for all the people who own stock in private prisons and/or police technology and support firms.
One sure way to promote and protect shareholder value is to heavily lobby for legislation which creates, maintains, or improves market position.
Does this mean that if any state chooses to legalize heroin then the Feds won’t get involved there either?
This is a very strange situation. It looks as if the Federal government just wants the power to arbitrarily arrest people for possessing marijuana whenever the mood strikes them. The President could, with just a stroke of the pen, change the scheduling to legalize it for medical purposes or totally legalize it. Republicans like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie end up being more compassionate because they have supported legalized medical Marijuana than our black Democratic President. Our system of labeling politicians is broken.
Seems unlikely that anyone would bother pushing the issue, when the ‘really punchy opiates’ are a bit of a chemical extended family, parts of which are already legal by prescription; but it is actually kind of weird that heroin is Schedule I.
Schedule I is supposed to require ‘no currently accepted medical use in the United States’ (obviously ‘accepted in the United States’ is…flexible); but medical use of heroin is not exactly exotic or experimental, noted radicals like the NHS use it fairly regularly, and the fact that it is very good at doing what opiates do (for good and ill) is not exactly a matter of unproven theoretical speculation.
I don’t expect to find it next to the asprin any time soon; but it seems like a pretty obvious Schedule II candidate.
This was me a minute ago, reading this headline in the old RSS…
For a discussion of this that’s far less sensationalist, see:
See I think if Big Pharma is fighting legalization, they shouldn’t. They stand to make a lot of money because they already have the infrastructure to make and sell drugs.
Especially with medical weed, who would you rather trust? Bayer or some other no name company? They got the resources to make good shit. Not to mention things like pure heroine or cocaine or opium. And thy have the infrastructure to make a lot of it.
How is it even possible for a druf that is PRESCRIBED be classed as a Sched I ???
the whole point of Schedual I is that the drugs have ZERO medical usage. Complete contradiction.
Most people take medical pot to replace Oxycontin, which is just as dangerous as H when injected. shit makes no fucking sense.
if you drop 1kg of heroin, marijuana, or bricks from a 3rd story window, they really are equally deadly.
Citation please
Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II would make it available under the same rules and restrictions as other Schedule II drugs like oxycontin (or not, as with other Schedule II drugs like cocaine).
As a CA medical-marijuana patient, I don’t find that even vaguely satisfactory.
Rescheduling marijuana doesn’t solve any of the ‘war on some drugs’ issues (it’s not like Oxy and coke don’t get their share of WOSD problems), and it has the potential to make things far worse for medical MJ patients.
It’s really not the good idea it might seem at first blush.
Legalization is the answer, not rescheduling.
Only if tightly wrapped. A kg of buds or powder falling loose wouldn’t do any harm from any height, whereas a single brick could kill someone.
tldr: Make bricks schedule 1.
You can read the wiki on scheduling, I’m mobile so it is a pain in the ass to cite. Basically, it is controlled through executive branch agencies run by people Obama appoints. Obama can simply order the DEA to reschedule. Hell, he doesn’t even need to order that. He could just order them to use their own fucking criteria. Schedule I is reserved for drugs with no medical value and a high likelihood of abuse. Marijuana clearly fails both criteria. The fact that opiates are schedule II and marijuana is schedule I is both insane and literally a crime against humanity. The number of lives that could have been saved by using marijuana instead of opiates has to number in the tens of hundreds of thousands over the past half century.
Obama is a spineless shit or a corporate dog. Hope and change my ass. The only thing Obama has going for him is that he is slightly less awful than the other guy. I pity the Democratic this election cycle. Anyone with a message of hope or change is going to be laughed out of the primary.
Obama’s Department of Justice says marijuana as dangerous as heroin
What the hell are they smoking?
