It also doesn't help that Russia's best manufacturing centers were in the far west. When the Nazis invaded their best, high tech manufacturing was wiped out pretty fast. They had a competent semi-auto rifle which was cut off from production in 1940. A big reason you have the image of poor Soviet equipment and the reason for the lend-lease was they had to literally rebuild an entire manufacturing center from scratch at the beginning of the war. What they had was gone.

God basically all liberals today are Green Day. Where they think creating a crappy pop punk group where they say "**** Bush" is transgressive politics.

At least they produced delicious pop in the middle of the album



But they needed a credibility loss leader to get the big bux

liberals today give me no pop nuggets

only half ass lip service

Coming to broadway soon: Trump is a dumdum head, the musical

Springtime for Trumpler

Admittedly I don't know how much your garden variety liberal thinks that being subversive or transgressive is valuable for its own sake

If I could only rename this thread...

at least 80

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/americas-invisible-pot-addicts/567886/?utm_source=twb

The status quo for marijuana is, of course, untenable in many ways. For instance, obviously, people should not be serving lengthy sentences for possession of small quantities of it (especially not, as they currently are in disproportionate numbers, racial minorities). But also I suspect that many aren't taking seriously the widespread negative social consequences of widespread marijuana legalization, and especially commercialization. I've been especially troubled by the idea that, since most revenue will come from people who smoke marijuana everyday, there will be a strong incentive for marijuana growers and distributors to invent and sell marijuana products that make casual smokers of marijuana want to smoke more often, and turn them into daily users.

I wonder if there would be the same issues in a functional society composed of healthy communities, instead of this industrialized post apocalyptic wasteland?

It seems like an especially bad idea to make marijuana more accessible at this particular moment and to reduce the stigma associated with it in light of all of the bad potential futures that seem so feasible. A world where large numbers of Americans are jobless because of automation? Potentially, a bad world for marijuana to be easily and widely available in.

We're in the midst of an opioid crisis that the federal government is ill-equipped to address, but here, let's make marijuana more accessible anyway, and weaken some of the legal instruments for combatting its widespread use.

I don’t see why marijuana commercialization is any worse than the other million kinds of overconsumption the private sector has a profit incentive to encourage

it's not (or, I should say, it doesn't have to be in order for it to be worthwhile to do something about it). But I assume that you think those other instance of overconsumption are bad. Why should we change the status quo, so that there's yet another one? Why shouldn't we mitigate the risks associated with it? So far, that doesn't appear to be happening.

We don't allow people to advertise cigarettes in magazines or on television. Why should we allow them to advertise marjiuana, for instance?

Marijuana is an effective and non-addictive analgesic for chronic pain. If marijuana were commercialized it wouldn’t become a social blight on top of the opioid crisis, it would be a direct competitor to and replacement for the commercial prescription opioids and the pharmaceutical companies who are ultimately responsible for the crisis.

...but you do allow them to market Percocet and Vicodin....

Hopefully after talking about stuff for this long you realize I, of course, agree that commercialized marijuana isn’t a good thing... but not because of the marijuana part.

Capitalism is built on a mountain of corpses. This is not optional. The question here isn’t whether marijuana commercialization is by itself bad, it’s whether you think people would be better off dying stoned at 60 or of a prescription drug overdose at 30.

Two points:

Stop calling it the m word you racist

People should be encouraged to grow both themselves

Advertising prescription medications isn't legal in many countries outside of the US and probably shouldn't be legal there either.

Not necessarily. While it's true that many people who are addicted to opioids have become addicted to them because doctors have (over)prescribed them in order to treat pain of various kinds, that isn't the only way that people are becoming addicted. In many cases, people are becoming addicted from illicit substitutes (fentanyl) that are coming into the US from Mexico that are cheap and easy to get.

Also, there are many people who would smoke marijuana than they would if it were still illegal who don't have problems with opioids. In those cases, yes, it would be a "social blight on top of the opioid crisis".

hey look, it's the migger guy

That's not the tradeoff. Many people who become addicted to marijuana as a result of legalization won't have started because they were using marijuana for medical reasons, and treating pain with marijuana in place of opioids. They'll start smoking marijuana recreationally, just because they could.

I'm surprised. There are all sorts of ways that you can peg critiques of capitalism and the horrible consequences of profit motive to this issue, but I wouldn't do it in the way you're doing it.

you really are a piece of ****

According to the NIH, 80% of black market opioid users started off with a prescription. That doesn't even include the people who started because they stole prescription drugs or bought resold prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are entirely responsible for the crisis. How many doctors and drug company employees need to get dragged off in chains before people figure this out?

Decriminalization didn't increase consumption. There's very little evidence that legalization will in the long term. The vast majority of people who try a drug once never try it again.

Many people who become "addicted" to marijuana probably would have become "addicted" to scratchers instead.

Seems like the jury is still out on that: https://www.vox.com/cards/marijuana-legalization/marijuana-legalization-more-marijuana-use

Decriminalization and legalization are different things.

Also, I hope you aren't quoting only this part of my post in an attempt to handwave past the NIH's stats that 80% of non-prescription opioid users started with a prescription that got them addicted. Because that's a pretty important fact to understand if you're going to talk about the opioid crisis.

hmm. I am really starting to question my assumption now that Spook's demonstrable annoyance with me these days has at least been partially in jest.

Well, then you're bringing up of decriminalization isn't particularly relevant. We're talking about legalization, for which there is evidence that it leads to increased marijuana use.




I didn't feel like I had to type out some bull**** like "point taken", but if you insist: point taken.



I've already said this, but I'm less concerned about non-users of marijuana becoming frequent users than I am about people who are regular but infrequent users becoming daily users. I'm concerned, for instance, about massive marijuana corporations spending massive amounts on R&D to create more addictive strains of marijuana -- something which, it appears, current legalization legislation don't account for.

Like, now that you're aware that 80% of all opioid addicts in the United States are addicted because they were once prescribed opioids, maybe I can introduce you the gross fraud and misrepresentation in the 1990s and 2000s about opioid addictiveness that led to doctors overprescribing them, and the 2010s bribes that drug companies were paying doctors in the midwest to keep overprescribing them even after the truth came out. And then maybe you'll understand why I phrased my critique of capitalism the way I did.

Yes, because capitalism actively punishes agents who do the moral thing at the expense of short-term profit. Governments are forced to be reactionary to an endless stream of ever-mutating abuses. If you want a government that retroactively punishes bad actors, I suggest moving to China.

I've said this before, Eversor, but we don't even disagree here. Yes, there is an awful lot of room for abuses in marijuana, just like there is in... um, like, literally everything else. Cars, sugar, TV, alcohol, prescription drugs. You're arguing that the best thing we can do is to stop before adding yet another thing to the pile. I'm saying that isn't good enough, because if people aren't being exploited for their marijuana consumption, they'll just end up being exploited for something else: the problem isn't marijuana and it never will be marijuana, it's capitalism.

dont be raycis

Actually, you can't, because you can't introduce something to someone if they already know it, and I'm already familiar with that stuff. I thought the 80% figure was closer to 50%.



We may have some common ground, but we do disagree. I suppose you're being awfully defeatist. Capitalism can be bad, and there's currently one arena in which its harmful effects are somewhat limited. Your argument boils down to: capitalism is bad in lots of ways, so one more doesn't make a difference.

You can define "the problem" however you'd like, but I'd say that when it comes to marjiuana, the problem is marijuana, and it can be addressed effectively on its own without a systemic critique of capitalism. I'd argue that marijuana should be legalized but heavily regulated in order to mitigate some of its most harmful effects of commercialization. And it should happen now, before the industry is more established than it will be, and it has more resources to prevent regulations from being imposed on it.

That being said, maybe the government should grow its own weed and it shouldn't be a private industry at all.

Like, yeah, people died in car crashes in large numbers, and car companies didn't want spend money adding safety features to cars. It that doesn't mean that it was pointless to force car companies to add seat belts to all their cars, even if it means we still live under a capitalist regime, and, for reasons that have nothing to do with capitalism, people still die in car crashes.

okay but what about

it shouldnt be an industry it should be a part of appropriately scaled culture

the government should find a way to stop teenagers from looking at pornography