Why did California vote down legal pot? | Hacker News Reader

Why did California vote down legal pot?

cnn.com

26 pointsmiles24 comments

FTA: "First and foremost, advocates must emphasize that in a free society, the burden of proof should be on prohibitionists to justify the interference with liberty that results from outlawing marijuana, a burden the prohibitionists have never met. Any calm assessment of marijuana versus alcohol, for example, shows that alcohol is the substance with the greater potential for harm."

This is naive, if we knew then what we know now alcohol would never have been legalised.

We have to deal with the situation we have and criminalising alcohol would be very difficult, its too entrenched.

The fact that alcohol is worse and legal is not in itself an argument for legalising cannabis.

"if we knew then what we know now alcohol would never have been legalised"

So the St. Valentine's Day Massacre isn't enough to convince you Prohibition was a bad idea, eh?

Prohibition was about criminalising alcohol, which I said was a bad idea. The problem was legalising alcohol in the first place, which would not have happened had we known then what we know now.

Also the SVD massacre was IMHO only tangentially associated with alcohol. It was part of a war between armed gangs, had it not been alcohol it would have been gambling, prostitution or something else.

However my karma has taken enough hits for today.

The problem was legalising alcohol in the first place

I'm pretty sure alcohol (like everything else) was legal by default, and had to actually be prohibited at some point before it could be legalized.

Downvoted why? Because it's not compatible with your groupthink?

That's one reason why politics is a bad mix with sites like this.

I don't even know if I'd agree that alcohol is worse. I guess you are in part referring to David Nutt's research. I'm sure his findings would be different if some of the other drugs on the list were decriminalised or legalised. The media haven't been that sensible with the reportage on that report. At least it labels alcohol as a drug and takes into account the bigger picture.

It's all law and nanny state - don't we give humans any credibility any more? It's good to have the debate. I've brought this up with family, my mum sees drugs as a black and white issue - but she's happy to be drinking wine whilst she's damning pot smokers. There is such a thing as moderation mother.

(There's a lot of that - I don't agree - so I'll down vote you mentality up here in the cloud :))

Eh? You are responding to the wrong guy. I just said politics doesn't belong here.

I've read that when it comes to votes on specific propositions (Initiatives) the average voter tends to be more cautious. Therefore we tend to give into the prohibitionists and fear of allowing something, even if most of us would consider themselves non-conservative.

Examples:

- California says NO to prop-19

- Switzerland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret_controversy_in_Switzerl...

- Hamburg says NO to modernize public school system

- Netherlands + France say no to european constitution

- Initiatives to combine administrative entities (e.g. federal states) mostly fail

- If a referendum about the euro was hold in Germany in 1999, there wouldn't be no euro today

> Netherlands + France say no to european constitution

Why is that a bad thing? The constitution would be a major setback for democratic process in EU, where the actual governance is already too far removed from voter.

I'm not saying that voting it down was wrong. The same would have happened if we germans hat a chance to vote on that. But it proves the point isn't it?

Well yes, it's just that it was on the list with other items supposedly illustrating a backwards/un-liberal voting pattern.

But sure, your point was clear.

Well that's actually true. But i guess that voting the pattern was not intended to be "people voting down good things" but "people voting to prohibit changes"

Conservative is probably the better way to characterise referendum results, because conservatives are generally better at mobilising themselves to vote.

It actually looks like it added more complication than is already present. It touted the fact that it taxed use heavily, where it's not taxed today.

It also stood to undermine freedom of association, putting limits on an employer to fire you for using marijuana. It's already hard enough to fire people ('firing', otherwise known as 'get someone working in a job where they're actually creating value').

it's taxed ... just by drug dealers who get to charge a premium for something that could otherwise have been cheap and/or could be generating a revenue stream for the government. not saying that i'm pro-pot, i'm not. but i am anti-regulation of substances which create an incentivized underground market, to a large extent.

All so backward - why even have the middle man. How about a sensible use policy, illegal to sell pot, but make it legal to grow your own, still illegal to grow with intent to supply. Or even cap the amount of plants you are allowed to grow. In the UK you can make your own beer, or grow your own tobacco, but there is a cap on production.

Not everything has to be a business!

Making cannabis an exception to the law of comparative advantage doesn't seem like a sensible use policy to me.

I'd not come across the term 'comparative advantage' before. Not thought of it from that angle. You want the freedom to turn pot into a commodity?

Growing the plant, a weed is pretty trivial. Anyone could do it. Which means those barriers are not in place. However, I appreciate some people might not have the time and energy - how about additionally making it okay to give to your friends?

The recreational drug I do frequently is alcohol just because it's legally and sociably acceptable - given a free choice it certainly wouldn't be my first.

Without unleashing the market upon pot, criminals could still make large amounts of money on the black market.

More to the point though - as the article says, the burden of proof is on the side advocating restriction! We don't require governments to allow us to do every little thing - the basic assumption is we can do anything we like, except for a few restrictions needed to prevent reducing others' freedoms.

There were some late commercials stating that prop 19 actually reduced some rights of patients to grow their own, let cities opt out of some things and imposed new penalties for some things. I don't know how true those statements were, but perhaps they created some doubt about the measure.

I voted yes, but I think many people simply vote no when the situation isn't clear.

Pick a simple message, stay focused, and compromise (co-opt) your potential opponents. That is, find some people who would naturally take the other side and convince them that your plan is the best. Potential opponents will do much more for your argument than echo-chamber cheerleaders will. In fact, many times you want to shut up the cheerleaders because their enthusiasm and over-the-top rhetoric can easily polarize the undecided.

This has been the way of politics for thousands of years. On all kinds of issues.

It sounds like Prop 19 failed in all of these areas. I'm not a smoker, but I'm a libertarian, and I was rooting for it. It's a shame it didn't work out the way many folks wanted.

Am I the only one that gives some credence to the possibility these things are rigged?

I guess exit polls were in line so it's not likely at all; but I am surprised people don't give that serious consideration.

If things haven't changed since I voted there in 02, there isn't even a paper trail in California (at least in some districts). So I am not sure if a real audit is even possible considering they are allowed to keep their source closed.

Prop 19 didn't pass it seems because the kids just didn't get out and vote. It was a generational gap more than anything, and the less-voting generation didn't increase their voting, thus they lost.

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