In which I alienate half my readership

[sabotabby]

Try as I might, I just can't get excited over Proposition 19.*

I mean, this isn't an ideological stance or anything. I think that pot should be legal. The War on Drugs is ridiculous and responsible for the destruction of countless lives. It's just not an issue that I would, personally, get all activist-y about. The older and more curmudgeonly I get, the less I care and the more I wish people would get up in arms over things like convictions based on evidence obtained through torturing a child.

It might have something to do with so many of the most vocal potheads, and pot-legalization activists, are libertarian douchenuggets like this guy, and don't care about the human rights of anyone but potheads. Pot is almost worse than alcohol for bringing out the douche in people who already have latent douche tendencies. Also it smells godawful.

Anyway, those of you who are having elections right now, I hope yours go better than ours did.

* The fact that I'm Canadian might have a wee bit to do with that; Americans didn't exactly get excited over Ontario's municipal elections.

Comments

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the torturing-of-children thing. There was So Little Press on it yesterday/today, and the existing press so completely overlooking the fact that He Was a Child, I felt like pulling my hair out. How can people look their own children in the face after condoning such a thing? I have no idea.

[akisawana.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not going to lose any sleep over pot as long as it's legal to beat your children but illegal to get an abortion.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Did someone expect you to get excited?

I know this dude in orange county. His wife has multiple scr. She uses pot for that. He felt it helped her and became a real believer in it as medicine. He opened a dispensary, and the feds raided him and have taken the kids away from the family. This was in 2009.

You know the laws were put in place to clamp down on mexicans and blacks yes?

I guess overturning racist laws that are actually still destroying peoples lives and wasting resources is important to me.

Its frankly fucking depressing that even the left doesn't care to fight that one. It'll lose cause most of the left feels like you do and the right would love to arrest more and fill the prisons.

I should just turn myself, my mother, my father, my friends, in and get it over with....

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Also, the thing you linked is off the charts crazy. The war machine marches on....

[kadath.livejournal.com]

US prisons are stuffed with non-violent drug offenders, the majority of them black. Legalizing or at least decriminalizing pot will keep a whole lot of people out of jail whose only crime is liking a drug that doesn't have corporate backing.

Not that California's referendum process isn't incredibly fucked up, mind you. But our system is such that often a big state can give the push necessary for national change.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I didn't even know there was some new prop up out there. huh. I guess I didn't care, and I'm even an American. woo?

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

It might have something to do with so many of the most vocal potheads, and pot-legalization activists, are libertarian douchenuggets like this guy, and don't care about the human rights of anyone but potheads. Pot is almost worse than alcohol for bringing out the douche in people who already have latent douche tendencies. Also it smells godawful.

QFT.

It's not going well, we now have a Randroid senator in Kentucky and here in Nevada my new Senator will be a moronic Christian Dominionist who thinks that the government should do....um basically nothing but fill potholes and keep people from invading us. Oh yeah, she also also believes that there is no separation between church and state (which in my book would put her in dominionist territory).

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way - I have to admit I'm a little disappointed w/my girlfriend who seems so focused on Prop 19 and thinks it's some panacea.

I have hope for it, I think it's the right thing to do, I think the drug was is the cause of a LOT of problems (prison-industrial complex, militarization of the police, imperial low intensity conflict/small scale warfare, drug kingpins and murder/rape of innocent (mostly brownskinned) people around the world and on and on) so I think it's *very* important.

But I am saddened that it's wrapped up mostly as "I can smoke when I want" privilege attitude, or some hippie-dippie "hemp EVERYTHING will save the planet" Both are good and right, but not, to me as important as the other issues at play in the legalization issue.

And the primary focus on this is a little disheartening, because, as you said, there are so many more issues that we have to deal with.

My vote in Dane County to help push the State Legislature to take up a Medical Marijuana bill (futile and small as it is) is one of the few good moments of my voting tonight, to be crushed by a horrid defeat by teabaggers, and the worst - my own great Senator... Feingold... being defeated by one of these Teabaggers. Sickening.

Gonna go drink now. *sigh*

What were we to get excited about? That douchebag for mayor of Toronto??? ;P

It's depressing. Why the fuck are we not climbing out of this god-forsaken mess? Each step we take forward seems we keep going back. Merkel and her anti-immigrants policies, France and Sarkozy and his anti-Roma/immigrant policies, the destruction of the Commons by the Tories and their lovely "Liberal" allies... Disgusting.

At least the French and Greeks know how to fucking protest, yet.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on this. I voted for Prop 19, because I live here, and I would like the War on Drugs to be shut down - but there are far more important things, and they can't be summed up into "Proposition 189428423: A Modification To The California State Constitution To Renounce Being A Fucking Empire."

[firinel.livejournal.com]

As someone who has several friend who use pot medicinally, and someone who'd more likely than not really benefit from it but can't be arsed to do something illegal that might risk the pet immigrants she keeps, I find myself more concerned with it than a lot of liberal Americans are. Honestly, down this way, it doesn't seem to be the sort of 'everyone's for it' thing that you're describing, at least not that I've noticed.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I'm getting really worried about the guy next door. His outbursts seem to be getting more frequent. I'm not sure what one can do about it, though, as he doesn't seem to be actually physically violent. As far as I'm aware, there are no bylaws or statutes against screaming at your dog and slamming doors. And in the two and a bit years that we've lived here, I've never heard anything turn more violent than that (unlike at the Eyrie, where things downstairs did sometimes), so I just don't know.

Why are so many people so angry and apparently incapable of managing their anger?

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Well, you didn't alienate me. I hate the smell of the stuff too. And Prop 19 failed anyway.

Out here in BC we're concerned over a few things: the violence by gangs over the control of distribution and sale of pot, and/or smuggling it into the US; the socioeconomic effects (BC Hydro estimates that about $100 M of electricity is stolen each year by the thousands of grow-op houses. Also, those thousands of indoor grow-ops are almost exclusively in rented houses, meaning that there is very little affordable rental housing for people in this province.); and the plain economic effects (legalizing it in California would probably reduce the profitability in the short run, undercutting a BC industry that is worth billions of black-market dollars, some of which actually gets spent here to prop up what's left of our strip-mined, clear-cut landscape and people).

Legalization in BC might do something about the latter two issues, but I don't believe the hype about how legalizing marijuana will magically make all the violence and mayhem associated with its illegality go away overnight. Repealing Prohibition didn't make the Mob go away. And since last year Mexico has decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, etc., even meth), putting the legal stamp on what has for some time been a civic fait accompli. Yet the violence within Mexico itself, far from all of it tied up with supplying the USA with drugs, gets worse every week.

Decriminalizing an act because the laws surrounding it are hard or expensive to enforce, or because you think you could get a nicer and fatter revenue stream out of it than you could in keeping it illegal, does not make the act, or the activity surrounding the act, inherently less harmful to people or the community they live in - or another community: if Prop 19 had passed, marijuana would still be illegal in the rest of the USA, and therefore still fantastically profitable to produce and smuggle into that country. (I also note that California's Proposition 19 was all about domestic possession, sale and production: it maintains the existing laws against transporting it across state or national borders.)

Dope will still be a product in demand, and people (currently, people involved in organized crime) will compete to supply that demand, and be aggressive in, well, let's call it "securing market share" (though someone living in the crossfire in Abbotsford or Surrey might have a different name for it).

And yet, when you think about it, legalization is actually a fabulous method of social control for government to get into. People are already quite accustomed to and comfortable with their own government selling them, or profiting from the sale of, substances more harmful and addictive than pot. And yes, pot smokers don't make a fraction of the trouble drinkers do, but they don't get up to much of anything but shambling around looking for snacks and more pot, or going to one of those asinine pro-hemp rallies. Ideal if you want your population to be quiescent, socially and politically disengaged, law-abiding (since we've abolished that law) zombies. And They profit off it too.

All of this, of course, dodges the most relevant question - why there is in the first place such an apparently insatiable demand for substances that screw people up.