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California launches legal sale of cannabis for recreational use
California will launch the world's largest regulated commercial market for recreational marijuana on Monday, as dozens of newly licensed stores catering to adults who enjoy the drug for its psychoactive effects open for business up and down the state.
It becomes the sixth U.S. state, and by far the most populous, venturing beyond legalized medical marijuana to permit the sale of cannabis products of all types to customers at least 21 years old.
Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Nevada were the first to introduce recreational pot sales on a state-regulated, licensed and taxed basis. Massachusetts and Maine are on track to follow suit later this year.
With California and its 39.5 million residents officially joining the pack, more than one-in-five Americans now live in states where recreational marijuana is legal for purchase, even though cannabis remains classified as an illegal narcotic under U.S. law.
The marijuana market in California alone, which boasts the world's sixth-largest economy, is valued by most experts at several billion dollars annually and is expected to generate at least a $1 billion a year in tax revenue.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:16AM (8 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napa_County,_California [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wino [wikipedia.org]
If we are going to go by the amount of harm caused [ias.org.uk], LSD, buprenorphine, shrooms, and ecstacy should be legalized first.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:19AM
Then we don't talk about CalExit but CalEviction.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:49AM (6 children)
I wonder what those ias.org.uk guys were smoking. The paper claims that alcohol is drastically more harmful, even to the user only, than tobacco or cocaine. Hmm right... the average user of tobacco loses 14.5 years of life, while the vast majority of alcohol users get no negative effects whatsoever. I'm for one an alcohol user: I drink a beer every a couple days, make tinctures [wikipedia.org] and liqueurs [wikipedia.org], haven't been inebriated in like 15 years, and even when I did drink much [angband.pl], I never had any problems worse than a nasty hangover on a non-school day.
Both of these substances have a significant amount of users (in civilized countries, 20-30% smoke and the majority drinks at least sometimes), yet while tobacco affects every single smoker to a drastic degree (20% of total life span lost on the average), only a small minority of drinkers suffer from it.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:03AM (3 children)
If you look at the breakdown (the more detailed second graph), it includes categories such as "drug specific mortality" and "crime".
Basically, alcohol comes way ahead because of people drinking and driving. Drunk people also commit a lot of crimes that they may never have intended to commit, people on a nicotine buzz, not so much.
As far harm to the user only, alcohol makes a lot of people do things that cause them nearly immediate injury. You can also die of alcohol poisoning if you drink way too much or pour it up your ass or whatever. Not really the case with tobacco. Long term, alcohol causes cirrhosis, and it has been linked to cancer [soylentnews.org] as well.
You might disagree with the specific findings, but it should be considered a starting point towards using a "multicriteria decision analysis" (instead of an "asinine decision analysis" like we have today). There are very big differences between drugs on the left side and right side of the graph. We have drugs on Schedule I that will never cause nearly as much harm as alcohol, even if people were "abusing" it as much as possible.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:23AM (2 children)
OTOH, tobacco has been used in highly dangerous ways. E.g.
Back around 1500 the AmerInds had an working anesthetic, and the Europeans didn't...you take a cigar (I don't know the details) and slowly insert it into the patients rectum until they pass out, then you remove it some (but not entirely?). But you've got to be VERY careful, because the anesthetic dose is quite close to the fatal dose. I don't know how well this worked, but it's supposed to have been considerably more effective and controllable than alcohol.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by anubi on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:12AM
You know, I will never see a cigar smoker in the same way again.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:28PM
Sometimes I wonder how things like this were discovered. Then I think it's probably better not to ask such questions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:14AM
(I meant to say "Figure 4" instead of "second graph")
I'll refine my response a bit with some quotes from the paper, using alcohol vs. tobacco as the example:
In this category, tobacco causes zero or negligible immediate lethal deaths. Whereas alcohol has a blue box at the top representing immediate deaths caused by overconsumption. Nobody is "overdosing" on tobacco. Same with cannabis.
In this category, the magenta color which is at the top of the tobacco bar in Figure 4, you can see that they rate tobacco as having greater drug-related mortality than alcohol, DESPITE the inclusion of road traffic accidents.
And so and so forth. So they are actually not rating the drug-related mortality as higher than tobacco, as you objected. But they are including many factors (the multicriteria!) that you might not care about. For example, much greater "loss of relationships" with alcohol than tobacco.
But if you stripped away the portions of the bar graph you didn't care about (assuming you deem the scores they gave to each drug for each category to be accurate), than you could come up with your own multicriteria decision analysis that places tobacco above alcohol in terms of harm!
Again, the point is that there is a lot of harm associated with alcohol, not so much with cannabis, and much less for substances like "khat", MDMA, LSD, etc.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:09PM
And what makes you think there's something wrong with that claim? For example, Delirium tremens [wikipedia.org], a withdrawal symptom from heavy alcohol abuse, is very dangerous. You don't have similar health-threatening symptoms when withdrawing from nicotine or cocaine abuse.