This to me just totally seems like something they would do.
The drug war is a disaster in itself that was started by the deep state in order to wage war on Americans, anyway. Like every deep state plan they phrase it as something that's for our own good. After decades of drug war, overdoses are at an all-time high, drug-use is at an all-time high, deep state was flooding inner cities with crack, using drugs as pretext for violation of 2A, as well as excessive and seizure and civil asset forfeiture. I could go on at length about this but that's what my assessment of what the plan is.
Trump said in office that if congress gave him a bill to legalize cannabis he'd sign off on it, but otherwise took no real action. As someone who works in legal cannabis I was very pleased with how much he left us alone at the state level and only intervened in operations that trafficked stuff into or out of their respective legalized states, therefore breaking the laws of the states that legalized it and infringing on the sovereignty of states that didn't.
Now the deep state is trying to sell conservatives on more drug war by hyping up military intervention against the cartels. Was that ever necessary when Trump was in office? We don't need another long drawn out expensive foreign military intervention, he had a great relationship with the president of Mexico and was working with him to clean up corruption!
But I think the deep state will try this, give a too-little-too-late concession (they've already lost the optics war for the most part and now just appear brazenly tyrannical) on cannabis legalization, and have their controlled op conservative mouthpieces really step up the attacks on cannabis, so it drives the liberty minded people and moderates away from conservatives and back towards Dems.
And it's really fucking funny seeing all these conservatives/GOP who for the last few years were ranting and raving about tyrannical government and appearing to be the "party of liberty" jumping back on the prohibition train and speaking out against cannabis.
God damn I hate RINOs. If it weren't for Trump I would probably vote libertarian, except the Libertarian party is also fundamentally broken.
Decriminalization means it’s not a crime to possess or use a substance. It does not make it legal to produce, manufacture, market, and distribute said substance.
Defining a substance as legal allows for the above. If you don’t want government oversight and regulations, I’m all for that, but it’s incongruent with everything else in our society. It would be a distinct anomaly when it comes to products and services that are traded and sold in markets.
In my opinion, the answer is that the substance be recognized as legal on a federal level, and then any potential regulations are determined on a local level.
When it comes to hard drugs that can easily kill someone, I think it would be reasonable to have standards for potency and purity, in a similar way that we have standards for proper food handling. We don’t want people dying unnecessarily from an accidental overdose - that’s one of the biggest problems with the current black market.
But again, that’s up for the individual localities to determine in my opinion.
We could discuss the potential of a self regulating industry, but this would all stem from a substance being recognized as legal.
If this describes your idea of Decriminalization, unfortunately I think you’re the one who is confusing terminology.
"Legal" does not mean "approved", "allowed", "safe", or whatever you seem to think it means. The root word "legis-" means "written" so to "legalize" something means to make written rules i.e. laws. When you say it should be legalized federally you're saying you want the federal government to make universal laws that all states will have to follow.
Decrim doesn't make new laws, it just redefines the statutes to recognize something that used to be considered a crime as no longer a crime. And I believe all federal drug laws are unconstitutional anyway.
Why would those activities need to be "legalized" if they are already decriminalized? What you are describing is the condition of being unregulated, neither legal nor illegal, as it should be because we're talking about a natural substance.
We agree on this, but this:
No, it has nothing to do with being "legal". Unless to you "legal" means a written law that says no one shall be punished for xyz or recognition of the right of self-medication or something to that effect.
This is a hard conversation to have because the legal language is all about definitions but not the same definitions we use in everyday speech.
I’m honestly not sure what you think I’m trying to say here, or what you believe my understanding of “legalization” to be.
I also don’t understand how you believe that decriminalization is an appropriate standard, as the same standard cannot be applied to any other commodity traded widely.
If you consume something or do anything on a small scale, you don’t run into trouble. It’s no one else’s business. If you start mass producing something to distribute to others, there are regulations pertaining to said practice.
The anarchist side of me would say that government has no right to impose regulations on any transaction between two consenting adults. Reality would say that regulations exist for literally every other form of commerce in our society.
Why would drugs be an anomaly?
If we’re talking about the state recognizing ones right to produce and distribute drugs as a business, that is, for all intents and purposes, legalized.
I’m not having a debate about the etymology of words here. I’m talking about the practical implementation of allowing drugs to be produced and sold, in contrast to prohibition.
If that’s what you mean by decriminalization, then we agree. But the term “decriminalize” is not used to describe that.
I’ve lived in a country where marijuana was decriminalized for a period of time, as well as formally legalized years later. They are absolutely not the same thing. The same thing applies to prostitution.
Therefore, based on actual real world precedent, simply decriminalizing drugs is not the target we should be aiming for, unless you see it as a stepping stone, or unless you’re simply living in an anarcho capitalist fantasy land.