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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

> I have a firm belief that presidents should be accomplishing these things in the legislature through party discipline and direct appeals to voters to help him rid himself of specific legislators

That’s exactly what he just did with the pardons. He’s signaling to voters that he wants to legalize it and needs the right partners in Congress to make it happen. From your other comments I don’t get the impression you’re open to discussing the implications so much as you just want to complain about Biden.

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He doesn't need congress to "legalize it" he only needs the DEA and FDA to unscheduled it. He can do that as expeditiously as he likes with an executive order.

Wait, genuinely confused here. Do we really want the president to make unilateral executive moves overriding the existing organizations with actual experts on how to do things? Isn't that kind of bad and dictatorial? Weren't these organizations originally created because the president isn't an expert in drugs and therefore should have a fleet of drug experts with the authority to make decisions?

Ah the "expert fallacy." No, there are very few "experts." Mostly just career deep-staters or unelected-bureaucrats or whatever else you want to call them. Just look at the great results we've gotten so far from the "fleet of drug experts."

I mean yeah I think the FDA, CDC, NIH, OSHA, EPA etc. have done some really awesome shit compared to when we didn't have them. The EPA in particular is doing such a good job moneyed lobbyists are preemtively trying to cut off their ability to regulate emissions.

Yeah that opioid epidemic was some "really awesome shit." What would we ever do without the FDA and their regulatory capture in the pharma-industrial complex?

https://www.businessinsider.com/fda-chief-approved-oxycontin...

I mean frankly the opioid epidemic could only be discovered because of organizations like the CDC tracking stuff like this, so yeah that's pretty awesome. Remember that before we had organizations like the CDC and the FDA things like opioids had no regulation at all. These aren't perfect organizations and we should always be critical and pushing them to do better, but it is also vitally important to acknowledge they are worth having around at all.

Wow, that is certainly moving the goal posts faster than QAnon and make me question why on earth would we trust the same experts that have a history of lying. God I remember the propaganda they spewed years ago about marijuana making my testicles shrink and that it was a gateway to meth.

Placing and maintaining marijuana as a schedule 1 drug clearly indicates that these departments are not experts.

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