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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.

Look, I don’t like pot. I think it has ruinous long term effects and personality changes that a fifth of whiskey doesn’t. But I also just don’t like fucking hippies and think they need to be beaten by the police. At least a good third of my opposition to just legalizing and taxing the stuff is because I don’t like the people that do it.

I think it has ruinous long term effects and personality changes that a fifth of whiskey doesn’t.

I have seen plenty of people who make me seriously question if alcohol is a form of literal demonic possession.

lol

I have to admit I was pro marijuana legalization when the only people I knew who did it were me and my nerdy Internet friends. It was like some quiet patrician indulgence.

Then I moved to a place where it's been legal for decades and people in the rest of the country moved to almost entirely because it was legal there and I'm ready to turn into a Reagan Republican wrt weed.

I could probably say this about a lot of topics. The Beatles? Great music and I enjoyed listening to them. And I'm ready to never hear a Beatles song ever again and talking about the Beatles should be a ticket for a first offense. Beatles fans ruin me on the Beatles.

I could imagine being gay. Even living in a Chelsea high rise with a rotation of young twinks and staying up until 8am at chemsex or circuit parties. Seems fine. But spending any time walking around in the Castro makes me want gayness criminalized.

I'm in favor of a lot of progressive ideas until I realize how unlike the median progressive I actually am

It took 7 years, but it's finally starting to feel normal again here since legalisation. I think it helps that it was the whole country at once, so there was no effect of attracting all the stoners to one area, but I rarely smell weed anymore in the streets or parks, it no longer feels transgressive to just be able to smoke weed so people seem to know to keep it to themselves now. As for the commercialization, I guess the government taking care of the sales has the benefit of the stores looking nice and neat, rather than like head shops.

Do you think going to an anti-weed position would lose some of the young men the GOP has recently picked up?

Almost certainly

@Lomez had a good take on this, saying "Legal gray areas are good, actually".

Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".

Vices belong in that third category.

Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.

We were better off when you had to get some bullshit certificate from a fake doctor and then grow your own weed. Or just get it illegally with the understanding that the cops probably wouldn't bust you unless you were doing something else annoying.

Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.

As someone who lives in a weed-legal state (Oregon), I disagree with this. A couple reasons:

  1. The weed market is currently crashing hard. The gold rush is over, dispensaries are failing left and right, and weed farms are hugely overproducing leading to incredibly low prices. In 5 years there will be a LOT less dispensaries, billboards, etc.

  2. A significant cause of violence at dispensaries is that the bank/credit card companies will not service dispensaries because of federal laws. This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this; even consuming the product makes you less violent. If the federal legal complications get cleaned up (aka we get federal legalization) most of the issues with crime and violence will dissolve. And it has, in fact, reduced violent crime by eliminating the black market trade.

That being said, I agree with Lomez about this more generally and am firmly against legalization of all other drugs (holy shit legalizing meth and opiates has been a disaster).

Good points all around.

This means that dispensaries are forced to work in cash and that makes them juicy targets for robberies. There's nothing about weed stores that's inherently violence-causing besides this;

In my neighborhood, there's another issue, which is that shitheads tend to congregate around the large pot shop (which is also a liquor store). So there is lots of crime nearby. Unclear if crime would decrease if the shop vanished, or if the shitheads would just congregate somewhere else. Either way, you don't want these places in your neighborhood.

Up here they're all in downmarket strip malls or one of those parking-lot-and-two-buildings compounds right off a state route. Nobody would tolerate them in a neighborhood, despite something like 80% of them voting to legalize it...

Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".

There's another "third" category: fully commercialized but not celebrated. Nobody cares what kind of shampoo I use or what snacks I eat at home, and I can buy what I want when I want, for the most part. I'm also not pushing my choices in your face.

I don't know how much weed culture is inherent to the product vs cultivated through the isolation of decades of being illegal. If we have decades of it being legal, will weed culture disappear? If you live in a small apartment, smoking weed in your home is necessarily making everyone else in your building smell it, unlike most of my shampoo and snacks, so maybe there is always stigma that then attracts "the worst people" who don't mind the stigma.

There's another "third" category: fully commercialized but not celebrated. Nobody cares what kind of shampoo I use or what snacks I eat at home, and I can buy what I want when I want, for the most part. I'm also not pushing my choices in your face.

Those things are still heavily advertised.

I don't think weed commercials about how fun and empowering it might be (which I've seen for cleaning and food products) really fits "only begrudgingly tolerated" as OP imagines it

There's exceptions, but most ads don't define people's identity. If we want something that's legal but non-intrusive, shampoo seems like a good enough model.

I think OP wants something like legal but shamed. Given the tendency to want to make bad things illegal, I don't know if that's a stable category. Given the influential weed culture that already exists, I don't know if either legal-but-non-intrusive or legal-but-shamed are really options.

If we have decades of it being legal, will weed culture disappear?

With less than a decade of it being legal in Canada, yes, I believe so to some extent. It took some time because of the "exhuberant release" of legalization lasted a little while, but I rarely smell it in public anymore. In the first year of so, stoners would just smoke anywhere, including places that explicitly disallowed cigarettes, but now I rarely smell it in public. Once in a while you see some guy who thinks he's being super stealthy at a show/event with his THC vape, but you also see that with nicotine vapes.

I remember the memes showing Seattle's Space Needle on a foggy day as "the first day of legalization" so I guess that has calmed down. But I also mean how casual is the average user? How much does using it define your social circle and your free time activities?

I remember the memes showing Seattle's Space Needle on a foggy day as "the first day of legalization"

I still make that joke; I don't really smoke weed, but I appreciate that at any time I could choose to.

It's not "grudgingly tolerated" if it's illegal; it's banned. If you have to commit some sort of fraud to do it, it's banned. If you have to rely on the cops not busting you because they don't feel like it, it's banned.

legal for decades

In no place in the country has recreational use been legal for more than thirteen years. Are you including medicinal uses, or lumping them together? I could see the argument, but there's a difference between finding a doc-in-a-box to write you an anxiety script and simply rolling down to the corner weed store on a whim.

I'm including medicinal use where it was basically a joke to get a card and grow absurdly large bushes in your back yard for "personal use" that were obviously being sold.

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