[Closed] Objective commentary on legalisation of pot

[*]Purely from an economical perspective it makes sense.
Currently is as easy to buy as a takeaway pizza, and it's illegal. That is a fact.

Another fact is its illegal status is having zero impact on its use.

Divert the money it costs to police and prosecute a losing battle to education, rehabilitation etc.
Legalise it and tax the sale of it, everyone's a winner.

It's really that simple.

The article seems to be ignoring much bigger social issues and focusing on one tenuous angle.

Once you've witnessed Biggins getting off his tits on five scoops of cannabis laced ice cream before chucking a massive whitey,then waking up in the Flintstones believing himself to be dead and in hell, the case for legalisation is self evident.

I totally agree, we should legislate Biggins.

Objectively, the only bit I have sympathy with is the observation that homeless users migrate to Colorado due to easy access.

That's an argument against selective legalisation rather than legalisation as a whole - if the rules were the same everywhere then that wouldn't be an issue.

If you start from the premise that all drugs / intoxicants (including caffeine etc.) can cause physical harm to users, there's not much of anything I can see there that couldn't equally validly describe alcohol. Now, that could be used as an argument to ban booze, which some would advocate (and the merkins have tried before). On some specifics:

Five years of Big Marijuana ushered in a doubling in the number of drivers involved in fatal crashes who tested positive for marijuana

Okay, what would be more useful would be the figures for people judged to have [b]caused[/b] fatal accidents* - for all we know all those pot smokers were the innocent victims of drunk drivers. On which note: another very useful comparator might be the numbers of drivers involved in fatal crashes who tested positive for alcohol.

An investigation by Education News Colorado, Solutions and the I-News Network shows drug violations reported by Colorado's K-12 schools have increased 45 percent in the past four years, even as the combined number of all other violations has fallen," explains an expose on escalating pot use in schools by Rocky Mountain PBS in late 2016.

A few problems potentially with this. On scale, we only have a percentage increase but we don't know from what to what. If it's gone up from 100 per week to 145 per week then that looks potentially significant, if it's gone up from 20 per year to 29 then we're not nearly as bothered.

We also don't definitively know that this reflects increased use (though, granted, it may well do). "Figures reported" - could be that there's some politics in there - school heads that used to turn a blind eye now reporting every red-eyed teenager to add to the weight of an argument to reverse the law change, for example. Or the testing regime might have been massively increased. That it came from an "expose" in the media suggests that those stats might need a bit more investigation before accepting them at face value.

The investigation found an increase in high school drug violations of 71 percent since legalization. School suspensions for drugs increased 45 percent.

Same again - nothing in those sentences definitively evidence increased usage, there could be other credible explanations.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health found Colorado ranks first in the country for marijuana use among teens, scoring well above the national average.

Well, that sounds on the face of it a bit more rigorous - I can't be bothered to check though - that National Survey might well be a properly rigorous, objective thing. It might not though, it might be organised by the Church of the Gun-toting Redneck for all I know, would be worth checking I suppose.. One thing that might be a factor that could skew results though is that Colorado teens might be more willing to admit to "the man" that they smoke pot than those in other jurisdictions where it's not been decriminalised.

And finally, on that booze equivalence thing, I only had to change two words in this whole section. Obviously the "number one state" bit wouldn't hold true (probably, dunno where the teen booze capital is in the US) but otherwise I think this whole thing is broadly plausible with the changes:

It's one thing to decriminalize [s]marijuana[/s] alcohol, it's an entirely different thing to legalize an industry that has commercialized a drug that is devastating our kids and devastating whole communities," said coalition founder Justin Luke Riley. "Coloradans need to know, other states need to know, that Colorado is suffering from massive normalization and commercialization of this drug which has resulted in Colorado being the number one state for youth drug use in the country. Kids are being expelled at higher rates, and more road deaths tied to [s]pot[/s] booze have resulted since legalization.

So where does that leave us?

There seems to be evidence that decriminalisation leads to increased use. That seems intuitive. But I'd contend it's worthy of deeper investigation. Ignoring the influx of stoners only in state for the weed, it could just be that people are not hiding it anymore, so it looks more prevalent simply because it's in plain sight.

As to harm, well there's nothing really there at all. More people with pot in their blood are involved in fatal road accidents* but we don't have any evidence that either they, or their intoxication was the cause. We certainly don't get any figures suggesting that the number of fatal accidents has increased. Maybe loads of boozers have switched to pot and are actually now driving more safely and the fatal accident rate has gone down. We simply don't know, but if I was writing a "look at the damage pot has done" article and the number of fatal road accidents had increased, I would certainly have mentioned it. Prominently. So my assumption is that it isn't there.

Also worth noting that weed stays in the blood for ages. You could smoke a joint and test positive weeks later after a fatal accident* - doesn't mean that joint you smoked a fortnight ago caused the accident*. For further details on that one, ask alpin of this parish, he knows the details.

So, what about the kids? More of them are getting busted and reported at school but apart from increased suspensions, there is no evidence presented of any actual harm - no figures for declining SAT scores, grade point averages or any measure of academic attainment whatsoever.

Nothing on any crime statistics

No economic measures - changes in employment / unemployment levels, average earnings etc.

So what do we have?

1) More people in Colorado seem to have weed in their bloodstream (including
those that drive cars and attend school), but no direct harm from that
fact is demonstrated in the article at all.

2) There's a whiff of weed in the air near the growing houses and

3) some homeless people have made their way to Colorado 'cos it's easier to
score there.

3) some homeless people have made their way to Colorado 'cos it's easier to
score there.

That's an interesting point, the US is kinda weird like that with different laws in different states.
You can't really include interstate traveling as part of the stats as it will twist the figures.

I imagine that happens for all sorts of economic reasons, petrol or guns cheaper over the state border? Guess where everyone will go to buy them.

Once you've witnessed Biggins getting off his tits on five scoops of cannabis laced ice cream before chucking a massive whitey,then waking up in the Flintstones believing himself to be dead and in hell, the case for legalisation is self evident.

I can't stop watching it either

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