… And it’s still illegal to carry on federal land (including boarders). This is a win but it’s a fucking minor one.
Amazingly enough after Canada legalized weed our country didn’t instantly fall into anarchy.
Still waiting on Congress to decriminalize and expunge records.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3617
Amazingly enough after Canada legalized weed our country didn’t instantly fall into anarchy.
Not yet my friend, not yet /s
Admittedly I’m sitting here in Winnipeg, having just taken a huge bong rip but I would sincerely challenge your claims that our country didn’t fall into anarchy post legalisation.
I’m not saying weed is the cause, in fact I believe more people should take a toke but seeing everything around me going to shit like it is, seeing it accelerate since '19 doesn’t really help with this Indica induced anxiety. Trucker convoy, campuses being taken hostage, food banks over run… This ain’t been a good run bro.
I agree that weed wasn’t the cause - I’d also argue that it isn’t Canada as much as the whole fucking world going to pot. And, as much as I’d hate the conservatives even more, neoliberalism has been absolutely wrecking us. Things like food banks, health care, public transit, and the post service don’t need to be independently profitable. Raise our fucking taxes and fund this shit right.
Hey a half a loaf. Its Zenos paradox of legalization. With progress like this, in another 40 years we’ll be another halfway there to legalization.
It will at least open up research for cannabis drug development into FDA approved products.
It also basically will legalize Medical cannabis federally. This could lead to many other benefits. Get a medical card, it’s legit with the state and the feds, then there shouldn’t be any grounds for drug tests to affect your employment.
The big thing is federal contracts.
Its 10 years too late for anyone to care I think. Democrats should have just straight up legalized under Obama, and even if they legalized now, they aren’t going to be making major points off this politically. Its just jerk-off material for the commentary crowd. If it isn’t going to make a difference to peoples lived experience, it isn’t worth pursuing.
You guys seem to think that the democrats had a fillabuster proof majority the entirety of obama’s terms.
They had two years. In those two years, they spent their capital on getting the ACA passed.
Then the 2010 midterms happened, and the dems lost any chance of anything meaningful happening.
To be clear, they didn’t have 2 years. They had ~70 days where they had the seats to pass legislation. That’s when they passed the ACA.
ACA, civil rights legislation, climate policy, and immigration reform. It was a pretty progressive two years.
But not progressive enough so I will help the least progressive candidate win. /s
And you seem to think two years is basically no time at all. Think about how much awful shit Republicans got up to under Trump. Approximately half of that got done in a two year period and that was even a historically deadlocked Congress. Democrats lost in 2010 precisely because two years is a long time and the best thing they got out of it was a shitty healthcare plan that, more than anything, ensured our current unsustainable system stays in place for at least another generation.
Democrats are obviously much better than Republicans in basically every sense of the word, but Republicans get their legislation passed when they have the chance and Democrats trip all over themselves trying to appease the idiots who will never join their coalition. They could learn a lot from Republicans about pushing their agenda but it seems pretty clear by now they aren’t going to.
It’s the classic problem. Democrats can’t get anything done, Republicans get the wrong thing done. Been that way as long as I can remember.
Yep, it’s amazing what you can do if you ignore laws, lock out the opposite side, control all three branches of government, and literally pass shit with stuff penciled in on the side.
Being democratic and inclusive is pointless if it prevents progress. People want good, affordable healthcare more than they care about if it was achieved with Republicans at the table too. The Democratic process is a means to an end, it’s not sacred and should be disposed of when it can’t work.
If Democrats are incapable of governing when given the power, maybe we should stop voting for them.
There is no point in empowering someone with my vote if they can’t do anything with it once they’ve taken power.
Republicans have gotten more done in minority positions than Democrats have when in majority position over the past 20 years.
Democrats are conveniently bad at this shit when it comes to getting the things their voters want done, done. When it comes to getting shit Republicans want done, they are also conveniently powerless.
Maybe we shouldn’t vote for Democrats.
That all depends on when Democrats get congressional majority. Congress is responsible for legislative decriminalization.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3617
You make the assumption that Democrats (the politicians, not the voters) actually see this as a legislative priority.
Kamala has been treating it as priority, and speaking in favor of it every chance she gets. The bill was co-sponsored by 114 Democrats.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3617/cosponsors
Any day now then…
For people like me who use it medicinally, this is a huge win.
Still illegal without prescription
There’s two things this changes.
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Easier to research.
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We get a lot less tax money from it.
For 1, it’s not that much of a gain, we don’t need more studies to show it’s safe. That’s been accomplished, and it wasn’t that hard to do a study the last couple years.
For 2, tax money was the biggest reason states could be convinced to legalize.
There’s a little bit of a 3 involved. I forget the specifics from an earlier article, but I read something about while a lower schedule may let them transition from cash only to banking, the DEA can still seize all their funds because it’s on the schedule. It’s just now they can do it from a computer.
When they don’t use banks, at least the DEA had to actually show up and
stealseize their cash.So say a Republican takes office and is pissed at Cali, he can tell the DEA to freeze and seize the bank accounts of every business and person connected to the cannabis industry.
And it’d all be 100% legal, take very little effort, and can easily be converted into some kind of “border security” bullshit like building a giant pointless wall.
I dunno, lately I keep getting frustrated at people never realizing what shit can naturally lead to. Maybe my standards for planning ahead need lowered?
I just don’t understand why this is acceptable when Biden told us decriminalization was the goal.
A co.plete removal from the schedule would have been that, and would have accomplished a lot and taken the same effort as this. I don’t see why we don’t try to actually fix shit.
Biden is right of Reagan.
Get a clue.
Dems are not in favor of legalization. Neither are liberals.
Biden is right of Reagan.
On which policies?
Dems are not in favor of legalization.
Then why has literally every single legalization come from democrats?
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Will they retroactively commute sentences of people who were charged with the previous classification?
No, because it’s still illegal. This reclassification is a compromise, not a solution.
Biden has done what he is able to do. He proclaimed presidential pardon for federal marijuana charges in late 2022. However, the executive branch has no authority to impact state level charges, which would likely be the vast majority of people affected by marijuana policing over time. In a world where government works as intended, state level organizations should take their cues from what the federal government is doing, but, as I understand it, they are not necessarily beholden to slavishly adopt the federal posture. Perhaps someone with a deeper understanding might illuminate us further.
Will this allow dispenseries and retail stores to use banking?
Probably not yet…biggest advantage of moving from Sch 1 to Sch 3 is that it means federal research grants/money can be used now to determine what the actual medicinal uses.
Nice. So we’ll publicly fund the research and the drug companies get a bunch of new medicines and don’t have to pay for the rights.
No. It is still a controlled substance. They have merely lowered it’s classification rather than DE-classifying it entirely, which is what they should have done.
So how many other agencies have to sign off on this?
As many as they can possibly require so that this doesn’t finish before Trump is inaugurated next year. Then he can kill it and the democrats can recycle the campaign material in 2028.
What happened to legalization?
The President can initiate rescheduling, but does not have the power to decriminalize (legalize) a drug on their own. That requires an act of Congress. The current bill for decriminalization and record expungement is in the House with 113 Democrat cosponsors. We’re just waiting on Republicans to come around.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3617/cosponsors
In all but a handful of states, you can buy almost anything you want online and have it legally shipped to you.
You’re talking about state law, and this is federal law
2018 Farm Bill. I’m in Texas and get a lot of it legally delivered to my mailbox.
Now if we could just agree that a plant that grows naturally is not a fucking drug
Just because something psychoactive grows in nature doesn’t mean it is not a drug. Anything that has a physical or psychoactive effect, or anything at all beyond nutrition, is a drug. DMT, Salvia, Psilocin, Mescaline, Phenethylamine, Opium, these are all indeed drugs.
The reason you said this is because the word drug has a (very unfair) negative association because it is used as a blanket term to describe the reason someone acts a certain way on them, therefore making it seem that all drugs are bad (drugs, like anything in life, are only bad if you abuse them).
I tend to associate the word drug with something made in a lab for a medicinal or elective purpose. Hence why we call pharmacies “Drug Stores” and not “Herbal Stations”
This is not a win, don’t mistake it. They reclassified it and now it’s going to be even hard to legalize because they’ll use the excuse “we reclassified it already!”. Full legalization is what we need, this doesn’t actually change shit. Marijuana being illegal is one of the most racist laws we have.
Only on lemmy would Biden drastically reducing a very stupid and racist drug law that has persisted for decades be a bad thing.
Changing the classification away from “its basically heroin” changes a lot actually. Research funding, federal therapeutic use, authorized law enforcement actions, banking laws, these are all able to be shifted and changed in the context of weed now.
Its not the end of federal legalization attempts, it’s the start. It drastically normalizes something at a federal level that has already been legalized at a state level. That’s how you fully legalize it.
It’s not some imagined set back because of weak “we did enough already” arguments that no one actually believes, especially with federal legalization at 70% popularity.
Only on lemmy would Biden drastically reduceding a very stupid and racist drug classification that has persisted for decades be a bad thing.
Lemmy is so full of extremists it’s insane. Nothing but unwavering ideological commitment is accepted by any side. There is no positive news, only unethical compromise.
I blame the migration from Reddit
federal legalization at 70% popularity
You just made clear that we don’t have a system that represents the people. How exactly does it become legal now with the argument “we just reclassified it”? When does that happen? 2, 5, 10 years from now?
You just made clear that we don’t have a system that represents the people.
Who the fuck thought we did?
Anyone who believes the statement “land of the free, home of the brave” or “for liberty and justice for all”. You’re blind to think that we don’t have so many in the US who believe we have a free country, and a free market.
You’re just arguing whatever makes you angry like so many others on the Internet. 🥱
Good troll. I hope you like America after Trump wins because of stupid bullshit that our country keeps pulling. 🤡
WTF are you even talking about? How does that relate at all to the previous posts in this thread? You might want to see the doctor because you post like you have a brain worm.
If you’re so up in arms about the inherent racism in the criminalization and exploitation of cannabis, maybe don’t use the manufactured term “marijuana”, hmm? Coined to sound foreign (yes, Spanish specifically), it’s part of the whole plan in the first place. 🤫
manufactured term “marijuana”
In accordance with my initial point that it’s a racist law to keep it illegal, I’ll use cannabis from now on. Reading the history of the usage of the term “marijuana/marihuana/mariguana”.
It’s funny how we try to regulate a plant, yet the term cannabis could be referring to industrial hemp or the dankest highest THC concentration cultivar possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_(word)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_sativa#Cultivars
Broadly, there are three main cultivar groups of cannabis that are cultivated today:
Cultivars primarily cultivated for their fibre, characterized by long stems and little branching.[21]
Cultivars grown for seed which can be eaten entirely raw or from which hemp oil is extracted.
Cultivars grown for medicinal or recreational purposes, characterized by extensive branching to maximize the number of flowers.[21]
A nominal if not legal distinction is often made between industrial hemp, with concentrations of psychoactive compounds far too low to be useful for that purpose, and marijuana.
If by “funny”, you mean “profit driven, all the way down”, then yeah. It’s fucking hilarious.
