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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Anti weed people made a lot of noise when CO and WA legalized retail sales 4 years ago, as if it would cause mass chaos, but really nothing much has changed in those states. Law enforcement have much bigger problems to deal with like a fentanyl epidemic, and Seattle's rapidly growing homeless population and property crime problem.

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There's a lot of "monster under the bed" psychology used by opponents of this stuff, same happened with gay marriage. It's an exploitation of information asymmetry basically, most people simply don't have time to really look into details of everything, so the default "safe" position is generally seen to be the status quo unless they personally experience something wrong (either themselves or via part of their close social network, family/friends/close coworkers etc). Dishonest campaigners can lie and posit endless "possible" harms that are hard to conclusively disprove so long as there are no real world experiments anywhere, and have proven to be able to quite successfully delay progress for a long time. Having it be illegal can be sticky as well since it encourages people to hide how they personally are connected.

However some consolation can be derived from it being a castle of sand and thus subject to a real tipping point effect. As soon as some trailblazer does manage to move forward and shine a light under the bed and it turns out that no, there is no monster, the sky does not in fact fall, and people realize that they do in fact know many people involved who were just hiding it before. Then it fairly rapidly becomes a non-issue to the majority of the population as they move on to new concrete (or invented, but new anyway) concerns. Hopefully the drug "war" will soon become the latest example.

> Having it be illegal can be sticky as well since it encourages people to hide how they personally are connected

This is a huge issue and cannot be overstated. Most of us are willing to go to great lengths to avoid cutting off potential future opportunities, and showing any support for (or even knowledge of) cannabis use can absolutely do this. I have personally lost out on at least three major career paths because of it, and that was without any direct admission on my part.

You mean pot is safe, Muslims are not waiting to kill me on every corner, and if a homosexual person looks at me I won't catch AIDS? What about that healthcare thing? I heard free healthcare will turn me into a communist.

>>I heard free healthcare will turn me into a communist. God, if that's the case I would have been campaigning twice as hard to get it in place!

I wouldn't say that nothing has changed but nothing has occurred like what anti-cannabis activists claimed would happen.

One outcome that gets mentioned is that vehicular accidents increased in Colorado following legalization but the population growth outpaced the relative growth in accidents, meaning per-capita vehicular accidents actually fell.

Some data on cannabis and accident rates: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/evaluating-res...

On a state (or country) level the increase in car crashes (only a small fraction of which will cause harm to people) is nothing compared to the negative side effects of criminalizing possession of weed. Decriminalizing drugs is a massive net win from a societal point of view even though there are negative side effects.

Wouldn't that mean that while many people moved to Colorado (some presumably for the weed) vehicle accident rates fell after legalization? The way you word it seems to imply that weed led to more accidents, and the incoming people "covered it up" statistically, but that doesn't seem to be the simplest read of the numbers.

> but really nothing much has changed in those states

the cash-only nature of the businesses (because of ongoing federal restrictions on banking for people engaged in activity the feds consider illegal) caused an ecosystem for cash handling to spring up along the front range in colorado.

that made it a somewhat more fertile area for organized crime, and so the cartels are more active than they were. and they can't sell pot, so they're selling heroin.

(beats me if the news has covered this, go talk to some denver cops or something.)

> (beats me if the news has covered this, go talk to some denver cops or something.)

So, no sources then? I'd love to see them, all the same. :)

I've actually talked to DPD a bit. Legalization hasn't led to the heroin/opiate epidemic increasing, at least as far as I can tell.

In talking to doctors at the VA, though, what has gone up is severe head injuries. It's a total mystery as to why, but it seems that legalization is associated with head trauma. They'd love to research it more and publish on it, but as a schedule 1 drug, they can't.

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