Posted on 11/15/2018 6:21:42 AM PST by Kaslin
Times change, attitudes change, and (thankfully) hairstyles change. In the last few years we’ve been witness to one amazing change that is surprising in its speed – the idea that adults should be allowed to smoke marijuana, either for medical purposes or because they want to. There’s no reason to think this trend will ever reverse itself.
In the interest of full disclosure, while it’s been more than a decade, I am intimately familiar with marijuana. I didn’t experiment with it, I majored in it in college. But, like most people, I grew out of it. I didn’t make a conscious stop, I just stopped. There comes a certain point when you just don’t do the things you did when you were young, I suppose that’s a roundabout way of saying we grow up.
There also comes a point where everyone (or at least most people) decide they’d rather be able to pass a drug test for a job or not get arrested for possession and walk away. When I think of all the stupid things I did in my 20s, not only were I and my friends lucky to avoid arrest, we’re lucky to be alive. I’m not unique in that.
When I “smoked down,” I knew I was breaking the law, but I never gave it a moment’s thought. It was usually at parties or with friends, it was just what we did. We’re older now and we don’t do those things anymore – parties have seen joints and keg stands replaced with wine and dinner, and we now have kids. We’ve changed. And so have attitudes.
In last week’s election, weed was on the ballot in 4 states – Michigan, North Dakota, Utah, and Missouri. The pro-pot sentiment won in all but North Dakota.
Michigan, where I grew up, essentially legalized pot (where was this when I was a kid?), while Missouri and Utah (UTAH!) legalized medical marijuana.
I’ve always been in favor of medical marijuana, I think the sick and dying should be able to do pretty much whatever they want to alleviate their suffering, and even if it just increases their appetites, more power to them. But I have had reservations about recreational use.
Part of me, cynically, likes to joke that when I was young I had to know a guy who knew a guy and go to a place, etc., in order to buy an eighth, so why should kids nowadays have it so easy? I risked arrest and more, and now people want to be able to go to store? It helped, I joked, meet people and learn to read and trust or distrust people – there was one friend I knew in college I’d not only never buy from again after one experience, I avoided him altogether.
But the less-bitter answer is I would have been fine with marijuana being legal if there was a way to know whether someone was driving while high, meaning high at that moment and not the weekend before. To my knowledge, there still isn’t a test to tell the difference – it’s either in your system or it’s not.
That’s neither here nor there. As is often the case with societal attitudes, they change even if you don’t. I have.
Through a combination of inevitability and my libertarian streak, I’m now on board with legalization. I don’t know if it’ll be a good thing or not, but people have to be free to choose. It’s available and at least decriminalized throughout the country and there’s no going back.
Think of it like gambling. When I was a kid there was Vegas and Atlantic City, with the occasional small Indian casino on a reservation here and there. Then, kind of quickly, they started popping up everywhere. Detroit, where I grew up, now has 3 big casinos, for example. The predictions of doom and gloom didn’t come true. Of course, some people were hurt, gambling is addictive, but by and large it didn’t make much of a difference. People who want to gamble now don’t have to hop on a flight to Nevada or Jersey, they can get in their cars. Marijuana is going to be the same, sooner or later.
I’d rather have the tax revenue and have it above board, out in the sunlight, than run out of a skeevy apartment or bathroom somewhere. I’m not interested, but I don’t want to tell anyone else how to live because I don’t want to be told how to live by anyone else. And that’s the irony of last Tuesday, to me at least. Areas where individuals have won the right to smoke weed if they want have embraced authoritarian liberal politicians who seek to impose so much on those people who voted for personal liberty. Marijuana laws are going up in smoke, hopefully the people who support that will wake up and realize they’re electing people who want most of the rest of their individual rights to do the same.
Prohibition was part of the temperance movement which was more than an effort to moderate unbridled drinking; it sought to abolish it entirely.
The “Blue” laws were also an effort to reduce immorality and prohibited many public activities on Sunday (the Sabbath, sort of). Societal sinfulness was kept behind closed doors.
Drinking, smoking, kissing and shopping (buying or selling) among many other activities, including playing cards and not simply gambling, were legally prohibited. Marijuana has not become accepted overnight. It’s been a long process.
You could make the case that the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s marked the end of the United States of America as our "libertarian" Founders envisioned it.
“Once a week? They’re rookies. “
I guess you could say they are not potheads.
Nah. Once a week wouldn't get you any cred @ a Chris Robinson concert.
Or, one could look at it through a more liberty oriented lens and say that the state is no longer prohibiting people from smoking marijuana.
Personally, I detest pot, but it's not really the state's business.
What kind of a people have to drug themselves just to get through the day? No one that I want to know, that’s for sure. Bunch of weaklings who should not breed.
A couple years ago, my kids and I were talking about states rights and I used recreational pot legalization. I suggested that it’s fine for a couple states to be the experiment and other states study the effects.
I’ve spent just enough time in Washington state to see for myself legalization leads to an increase in slovenliness among the users.
Sadly the states just jump on the bandwagon instead of waiting and studying.
Their are lots of studies that suggest a higher rate of car wrecks in legalization states, but of course they get little air play so we can’t see the results.
Hunter is right on one points. Terminally ill people get whatever relief they want. Anything.
But, in Maryland, they just legalized medical pot. It’s amazing how many dispensaries there are. Must be a whole lot of truly sick people here.
The only thing state governments care about is revenue. The feds (AKA ‘national socialization’) will pick up the tab on health care and other costs related to legalized recreational marijuana.
Good point, but think of it this way: A libertarian approach that allows people to drink and smoke whatever they want — combined with an authoritarian approach that requires employers to pay for medical insurance for their employees — is an absolute ‘effing disaster.
“And isn’t this just what we need? The whole country vegging out on drugs and losing all motivation to do anything else.”
I think you’re just being paranoid. As it stands, just about everyone tries this stuff at some point in their life anyway, and most people don’t choose to keep smoking it because they don’t enjoy it that much. Legalizing it isn’t suddenly going to make the majority of people want to do it.
It’s much easier to enforce tax on alcohol than it will be on weed. Bootleg booze takes effort to hide and transport.
Weed can be grown anywhere and transported with ease.
When I was a little kid in the 50s and early 60s, we used to take family driving trips every couple years to visit all our relatives around the country. On the way home, we’d stop in Fort Worth to see my Mom’s brother and family. From there, we drove east and finally turned north to get back to New York State.
My mom & dad would always freak out when we were driving into the “dry” counties in the southern states. For them, the thought of a night without a drink was enough to cause the shakes. They always planned ahead very carefully to make sure they had a bottle of booze in the car before heading into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
What is/was the purpose of a ‘’dry county’’ anyway?
One of my big problems is that there is apparently not an easy roadside test to confirm that a driver is cannabis impaired.
For decades my Constitutional rights to travel freely have been impinged by drunk driving roadblocks, in the name of public safety. But if I am now going to be sharing the road with other drivers who are impaired by legal substances that can not be tested for, we have effectively just shattered the equal protection clause too.
I’m gonna get flack for saying this, but the one factor that has left conservative ideology with its back against the wall, having lost control of the music biz, Hollywood, news media, youth culture, extreme sports, academia, popular literature, etc. has been the ability of cannabis usage to free minds from habitual thought and emphasizing a tendency towards creativity.
This is hard for conservatives to swallow but it is absolutely the case that dope will, in fact, make you less willing to tolerate the same old same old and more willing to experiment with creativity by providing greater depth of concentration and focus and a breakout from various forms of cultural behavior strictures perceived as repressive, out of date, irrational, habitual.
Yah, guys, dope made them hippies quicker of wit, less compulsive, more inventive, more creative, better able to break out of a 15th century Calvanist social ethic that finds it hard to survive in technological society where life is no longer a struggle for survival but a struggle about how to improve the functioning of your mind. It’s the one factor that defines the 1960’s and all the fallout we experience today. Go over that list in the first paragraph again and tell me what or where conservatism has made gains in the past 3 generations.
Trump is basically the result of over reach and blow back from radical leftist social engineering and may be the last chance conservatism has to remake itself in the image of the Age of Info, cyber culture and other takes on high data throughput social imperatives. It’s meme warfare out there, kidz, and we better damn well learn what a meme is.
Go ahead, pile on...
To make sure families got to church and men didn’t beat their wives and kids.
LOL!
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