Progressive Punch--Cannabis and Shrooms
Well, one good thing out of this set of elections is that medical and recreational drugs did very, very well.
Cannabis
Four additional states legalized recreational cannabis yesterday, bringing the total number of states to 15, plus Washington DC and a number of island territories. The four new states are:
South Dakota
Montana
New Jersey
Arizona
Furthermore, two new states legalized medical marijuana, bringing the total number of states with complete medical legalization to 35 plus Puerto Rico (there are also 13 other states that have legalized medical cannabis, but only with limited THC content):
South Dakota
Mississippi
All cannabis legalization proposals nationwide passed in this election. To see where marijuana is legal (and to what extent) in the United States, see the map here.
Shrooms and Other Drugs
Washington DC decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms, allowing no sales, but allowing small amounts of personal, non-commercial growth and use of shrooms without legal penalty. Not legalization per se, but pretty damn close.
Oregon did, however, legalize psychedelic mushroom use at "psilocybin service centers" in the presence of trained facilitators for psychological therapy. Oregon also decriminalized the use of all drugs, including LSD, MDMA, heroin, and methamphetamine in a separate measure.
Progressive Reasons for Legalization of Drugs
The War on Drugs has been a complete disaster in terms of deaths of people, wasting of billions of dollars to almost no effect, encouraging underground drug cartels and gang violence, and imprisonment of large portions of the population.
The idea of the United States was supposed to be the "land of the free", which criminalization of drugs does not align with. Legalizing tobacco and alcohol, but not allowing less dangerous drugs such as cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms to be used is ridiculous, and is mostly the result of pharmaceutical companies not wanting competition for their commercial drugs for things like pain relief and depression treatments, and getting laws passed to that end.
A pretty good result!
Comments
This
I've always wonder why we (as a country) don't have specific centers set up where people can go to get high, legally, with trained medical personnel on site. Kind of like a hotel resort. (lol)
I remember the first time I did LSD. We had a party at my apartment and had a friend of ours (my roommate and I) who served as the "tour guide", to stay sober (not on LSD) and make sure all of us who were taking LSD, stayed out of trouble.
Our Tour guide as it were, was a huge toy rep for a variety of toy manufacturers and he brought a huge box of all kinds of toys for us to play with. (Yeah, I know, a bunch of grown ups playing with toys...)
But it was awesome. I was so fascinated by the slinky. "Dude, check it out, look at the slinky go down the stairs..." It was the most amazing thing, or so I thought at the time. lol.
No one freaked out, no one had a bad trip and we all had fun. No harm, no foul, I say! (well, Mr. Potato Head was kind of freaky...)
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
Yes. Agree. And...
I found it interesting that, in the Oregon voters pamphlet, where besides a general description of the measure and its economic impact, arguments for and against a measure are placed, the *only* argument against the psilocybin measure was from a professional group of Oregon psychiatrists. Gotta protect that turf I guess.