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A good election night for marijuana legalization
The Volokh Conspiracy ^ | November 5, 2014 | Ilya Somin

Posted on 11/05/2014 9:11:15 AM PST by right-wing agnostic

The 2014 election was a successful one for marijuana legalization. Referendum initiatives legalizing recreational marijuana passed in Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia. Florida’s legalization amendment (which was limited to medical marijuana) failed, but only because victory required a 60% supermajority (it got just over 57% percent). A medical marijuana initiative did pass in the Pacific island territory of Guam.

Coming on the heels of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington in 2012, this is a further sign of pro-legalization momentum, and perhaps of dissatisfaction with the War on Drugs more generally – even among some conservatives.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: 2014elections; cannabis; conservingdependency; marijuana; marijuanalegaltion; pot; wod
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To: ConservingFreedom
That's the conservative position.

No it isn't, that is the "let's destroy society because we only have our own short little lifetime of experience to call on" Libertarian position.

There is nothing conservative about introducing a poison into society.

There's a good sporting chance some of your neighbors already smoke pot.

Sure, the lazy ones which we all get to support with welfare money.

21 posted on 11/05/2014 11:17:21 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: DiogenesLamp

bump


22 posted on 11/05/2014 11:18:46 AM PST by GeronL (Vote for Conservatives not for Republicans)
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To: ConservingFreedom
We've tried banning alcohol and marijuana, and learned that these bans also had damaging effects:

Yes they do, but they pale in comparison to the horrific disaster caused by tolerating drugs.


23 posted on 11/05/2014 11:19:49 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: ConservingFreedom
Increased liberty is a cause for weeping?

It isn't "liberty." You constantly slander the word with your application of it to your childish indulgences.

As Edmund Burke pointed out over 200 years ago.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

24 posted on 11/05/2014 11:24:22 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: ConservingFreedom; All

Look, smoke your weed, wash my car (leave my change alone), deliver pizza to my kids...I can assure you NONE of my neighbors smoke that silly a$$ $hit — We are men, men that have served honorably and have never seen any wisdom in smoking that $hit, you are just going to have to trust me on that one.

So you window licking short bus riders smoke your $hit and work your pathetic no brain required jobs, because either you or illegals will have to do it.

Another positive note, at least if you are smoking pot you won’t have enough enthusiasm to hump anything and get it pregnant, so that is a good thing.

I know I won’t be competing with you in the grown up job market so that is another good thing.

Smoke up!

Nothing but upside for me if you are smoking weed...


25 posted on 11/05/2014 11:24:36 AM PST by areukiddingme1 (areukiddingme1 is a synonym for a Retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and tired of liberal BS.))
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To: ConservingFreedom
How is marijuana legalization a leap into the fire?

How does a match burn down a forest?

26 posted on 11/05/2014 11:25:10 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: areukiddingme1
I can assure you NONE of my neighbors smoke that silly a$$ $hit

No, you can't - you can assure us only that any who do have taken care that you not find out.

Nothing but upside for me if you are smoking weed...

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't and won't.

27 posted on 11/05/2014 11:27:19 AM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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To: DiogenesLamp
How is marijuana legalization a leap into the fire?

How does a match burn down a forest?

What's the "forest fire" in this analogy?

28 posted on 11/05/2014 11:28:24 AM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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To: DiogenesLamp; areukiddingme1; Blood of Tyrants
areukiddingme1: I have come to the conclusion that if someone wants to smoke that $hit, fine, knock yourself out, but to quote a scene from Godfather the movie: "...I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools - I don't want it sold to children!

That's the conservative position.

No it isn't, that is the "let's destroy society because we only have our own short little lifetime of experience to call on" Libertarian position.

You shouldn't call areukiddingme1 a Libertarian without pinging him.

And as Blood of Tyrants has pointed out, there's plenty of experience: "For the first 125 years of this country, there were no marijuana or drug laws."

There is nothing conservative about introducing a poison into society.

That introduction was made decades ago. There is nothing conservative about enrichment of criminals or removal of a substance from effective regulation (such as age limits).

areukiddingme1: It's comforting to know you will never be my neighbor.

There's a good sporting chance some of your neighbors already smoke pot.

Sure, the lazy ones which we all get to support with welfare money.

areukiddingme1 says he doesn't have neighbors like that - and I beleive him.

areukiddingme1: Man, that Darwin guy was really on to something.

Nobody ever died from the proximate cause of smoking too much pot (unlike the toxic legal drug alcohol).

Right?

29 posted on 11/05/2014 11:35:28 AM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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To: DiogenesLamp
We've tried banning alcohol and marijuana, and learned that these bans also had damaging effects:

Yes they do, but they pale in comparison to the horrific disaster caused by tolerating drugs.

Alcohol and marijuana are not heroin.

30 posted on 11/05/2014 11:36:31 AM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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To: DiogenesLamp
Your Burke quotation establishes that marijuana legalization 'isn't "liberty"' only under the baseless assumption that all marijuana use is "intemperate."
31 posted on 11/05/2014 11:39:32 AM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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To: Blood of Tyrants
For the first 125 years of this country, there were no marijuana or drug laws. It was withe the Rats under socialist/racist Woodrow Wilson that southern Rats began to spread the lie that blacks were getting high on cocaine and raping white women in order to imprison more blacks on their prison plantations. Ever since, the government has taken away more and more rights in the WOD to the point that they can now take your property on the SUSPICION that it is related to illegal drugs. THAT is where the WOD has led us. No thanks, I’d rather deal with the potheads than a government that can ignore the Constitution.

This is false history. You are just repeating the ignorant propaganda of the Pro-Drug advocates.

Drugs did not become a problem until the Civil war made them heavily imported and widely distributed in this nation. Prior to the Civil war, most people were unfamiliar with cocanoids and Opioids. Those that knew of them regarded them as medicines, which is indeed how they became widely disseminated after the civil war. They were used as pain killers for soldiers (on both sides) who were wounded in battle.

Following the civil war, drugs started getting much more usage in the form of patent medicines and elixirs which were being disseminated by a lot of unscrupulous people who only wanted to make a fast buck. Most of these contained cocaine or some form of opium, and they were highly addictive. (and were causing many deaths)

Various Doctors (in the 1890s) working for the US Government began to notice that a lot of these "medicines" were bad for people, and they began to wonder what was in them. After the pure food and drug act was passed in 1906, they realized most of them contained serious narcotics, and so efforts were made to ban them.

Shortly thereafter, they produced the Harrison Narcotics act which forbid the usage of these dangerous drugs, and if you don't think this was necessary, I will point out that Coca Cola was effectively Cocaine Cola. Every bottle contained several hundred milligrams of cocaine in it.

Do you really think society could have coped with cocaine infused soda pop? Do you really think that would never have caused any problems?

32 posted on 11/05/2014 11:46:39 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: right-wing agnostic
It's a shame more so-called "small government" conservatives fail to realize or simply do not care what the War On Drugs has done to the Fourth Amendment and prison budgets.

It's evidence liberals and those conservatives really do not differ - they both want and welcome Government into their lives, just for slightly different reasons.

33 posted on 11/05/2014 11:49:01 AM PST by gdani (Ebola has exposed the U.S. as fearful, easy-to-manipulate weaklings)
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To: DiogenesLamp
Do you really think society could have coped with cocaine infused soda pop? Do you really think that would never have caused any problems?

Yes and as the morons killed themselves off, it would be a self correcting problem.

34 posted on 11/05/2014 11:54:20 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants (The cure has become worse than the disease. Support an end to the WOD now.)
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To: ConservingFreedom
What's the "forest fire" in this analogy?

It's addicted people.


35 posted on 11/05/2014 11:55:45 AM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: DiogenesLamp

PS So you would rather spend billions of dollars every year and take the rights away from the majority to punish a minority?


36 posted on 11/05/2014 11:56:03 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants (The cure has become worse than the disease. Support an end to the WOD now.)
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To: DiogenesLamp
Do you really think society could have coped with cocaine infused soda pop?

Do you really think the State governments were incapable of it?

37 posted on 11/05/2014 11:57:01 AM PST by tacticalogic
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To: Blood of Tyrants

Yes, that’s exactly what they want.


38 posted on 11/05/2014 12:06:08 PM PST by Wolfie
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To: ConservingFreedom
You shouldn't call areukiddingme1 a Libertarian without pinging him.

I responded to *YOU*, not him, and now you are trying to manipulate quotes to make it look as though I was responding to him? Pretty low class tactic, that.

That introduction was made decades ago.

No you silly child. New people are introduced to these dangerous substances every day of the week. It isn't happening a hundred years ago, it's happening daily, and it is people like you who are seriously wrecking people's lives because you insist on making it easier for more people to make contact with this crap.

You are a rhetorical drug pusher.

39 posted on 11/05/2014 12:07:05 PM PST by DiogenesLamp (Partus Sequitur Patrem)
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To: gdani

>> It’s a shame more so-called “small government” conservatives fail to realize or simply do not care what the War On Drugs has done to the Fourth Amendment and prison budgets.

> It’s evidence liberals and those conservatives really do not differ - they both want and welcome Government into their lives, just for slightly different reasons.

Points about liberty vs use of government for social good purpose are well-taken.

I am not so libertarian that I’d forbid the government from intervening when Party A does something to harm innocent Party B while I am observing as Party C.

This is one of the legitimate purposes of government: to enforce contracts. Or, in this case, to prevent Party A from imposing his will against the interests of less powerful Party B, who has not agreed to a contract with A.

In the case of drugs and alcohol and gambling, many Party A’s do indeed infringe on the freedoms and liberties of many Party B’s: their spouses, children, neighbors, communities by their use and abuse of intoxicants.

We conservatives, unlike liberals and unlike full-fledged libertarians, do believe in the use of government to intervene in contract breeches. The data on drug, alcohol, and gambling is strong enough that we can predict a widespread deleterious effect on spouses, friends, children, etc. when these vices are legalized and freely available. The conservative can remain a conservative and support criminalization of a narrow range of vices.


40 posted on 11/05/2014 12:10:30 PM PST by mbarker12474
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