I believe in laws one can enforce. Prohibition is not one of them. Although the people smoking weed tend to be unmarried, poorer, younger and minority in the USA, the general prevalence means that it is fairly easy to get hold of
In 2012-2013, 9.52% of US adults used marijuana in the past year, and 2.9% had a diagnosis of DSM-IV marijuana use disorder. Thus, nearly 3 of every 10 marijuana users had a diagnosis of a marijuana use disorder (approximately 6?846?000 Americans). Further, since 2001-2002, the prevalence of adult past-year marijuana use and past-year marijuana use disorders increased markedly; the prevalence of past-year marijuana use more than doubled, while the increase was nearly 2-fold in the prevalence of past-year marijuana use disorder. Because no increase in the risk for marijuana use disorders was found among users (in fact, the risk decreased among users), the increase in prevalence of marijuana use disorders can be attributed to the increase in marijuana users between the 2 surveys.
And note the time factor: as the rules of THC use have loosened, the number of people smoking marijuana has… increased.
The rates are roughly half that for tobacco use in the USA.
There are too many people using weed in the states to continue with prohibition as a policy. It would be better to move to a harm reduction approach. Unless, the state wants to truly set itself as the enemy of the general population, or wants to continue to use weed as a vector to support organized crime, as prohibition made whiskey.
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Disclosure: I don’t smoke, or toke. Dislike the taste and smell of both.
They’ve been trying to normalize weed usage for years. It’s been heavy since the 1960s, so we were eventually going to get there simply because the damage isn’t quite so directly attributable.
The major change is really going to be in the outright testing of employees. Now companies can both justify the expense and require it as a necessity for testing. Granted, the hilarious part is that the Busy Bodies will only be kept at bay for a little while. Now they’ll have something new to sue into the ground. 🙂
Oh, and it’s still a Sin. It takes very little to get yourself “baked”. That’s where alcohol is actually fairly different. A little can be very good for you, a lot is bad. It takes fairly little weed to alter the brain state.
I would like it if you could take a walk in the wild areas of our nat’l parks in safety… there are huge weed fields lost in the parks. Oh wait. We have drones for that… right? Right????? -sighs-
Oversee everything else, can’t send cameras where we know we have problems.
Drugs generally are trivially easy to get here.
Yeah.
Locally, Tobacco is more expensive.