Legalized Marijuana

[Idaho]

I think you are right. Legalisation is about recognition. Recognising that drug use is an inherent part of society that won't go away with moralising or legislating.

[Fragony]

I think you are right. Legalisation is about recognition. Recognising that drug use is an inherent part of society that won't go away with moralising or legislating.

Why care about how it's frowned upon, just go for the easiest solution. Outright legalization doesn't really serve any purpose imho, building it down like an addiction is better

[Kralizec]

The Dutch policy does not "work".

Cannabis is still classified as an illegal drug, but there's a policy of not prosecuting people for possessing small quantities. Likewise, coffeeshops are tolerated and not prosecuted provided that they don't have an inventory exceeding 500 grams at any given time. Growing the substance, or supplying it to the coffeeshop, is still actually prosecuted. If that's not hypocricy, then what is?

About the 500 grams: that's not a lot to begin with for a shop owner. There's a city in the southern part of our country where the local government resisted the establishment of more than the existing two coffeeshops. You can't service all your local clients in such a case with 500 grams, nevermind the Belgians and the French who come over here to buy the stuff. So they had a considerably larger turnover and inventory than was strictly speaking allowed for years. Then, completely out of the blue the cops raid the shop and arrest the owner.

Then, our last cabinet tried to eliminate drug tourism by mandating that coffeeshops can only serve registered, card-carrying clients based on residence. In other words, the government wanted to regulate something that they continued to maintain was illegal. Totally surreal.

All of this nonsense could be avoided by introducing national legislation that determines under what conditions you can grow, sell and possess cannabis. Probably not going to happen, sadly.

[Fragony]

It's actually being regulated, do you think the police doesn't know where the growers are.

[Kralizec]

You mean before they shut them down and arrest them?

[Fragony]

You mean before they shut them down and arrest them?

Some, not all. They know exactly where they are, deal is that they don't move to anything harder. Newcommers to the market will be arrested yes because it upsets things. It has it's own logic.

[HopAlongBunny]

Newcommers to the market will be arrested yes because it upsets things. It has it's own logic.

Don't you get just how crooked that arrangement is? Essentially the gov't aids organized crime by keeping prices artificially high, and limits entry of competition. There is not a business on earth that would turn down such a sweet deal if they could get it.

[Kralizec]

There's no actual policy on growers, other than that it's illegal and can land you in jail if they go after you. Since police and prosecution are somewhat decentralised it would not surprise me if in some regions the police strongly suspects/knows that person A is a harmless grower and leaves him alone, but that would be an exception. And it just proves what a mess our drug policy is; with all the differences in how local authorities deal with the issue.

They should simply have legalised the junk and made clear regulations on the subject back in the '90ies. Our current half-assed policy was a result of short-sighted pragmaticism and I never understood why people ever presented the Netherlands as some sort of role model for drug policies.

A case in point: anti-cannabis sentiment is on the rise in some political circles and one argument they use is that the THC content of Dutch weed has risen dramaticly, and therefore it should be considered a hard-drug nowadays. That argument is debatable in itself, but in any case that would never have happened if we had legalized the stuff with conditions like purity, THC content etc.