At least it takes away one reason for undercover German police to annoy foreigners with their “random” drug tests
Oh you can and they 100% will it is still heavily regulated: only a certain % thc and not more than 25g. So they can also do a thc quick test and weigh it. Also there is still the argument which they can use that if you take marijuana that means you do other things so please also take a urine test… What I’m saying is that very eager cops can and will continue to annoy people
Is this real legalization like in Canada, or fake legalization like most other places?
If a tourist can’t buy it from a store, fly to a different city/state domestically with it, and then smoke it at a designated airport smoking area outside the terminal… I struggle to see that as full ‘legalization’.
If you are prohibited from doing all those things, it just seems like a different version of prohibition. Step in the right direction though, sure.
The issues here are largely with the EU which stops it from being sold in stores. For now, possession is legalised and you can have all previous arrests made because you were carrying up to 25g permanently removed from your record. It also legal to grow at home.
In this sense, it is legal for personal use but not for commercial use. To get access to weed, they will be rolling out “cannabis social clubs” in summer in which you need to be a member to be allowed to buy weed. These clubs are not allowed to make a profit. There is a plan to later do some tests with commercial usage but its not clear where that is on the roadmap.
It will be interesting to see if this will have any effects on the EU. I can imagine if more countries want to support the legalization that some hurdles can be removed there.
Then what about the Netherlands where all of that is legal?
Can’t Germany use that as an angle?
It’s actually not legal in the Netherlands, it’s a very strange and frankly kind of bad set up. This is what the other commenter meant with “fake legalization”.
You can read up on it here: https://cannigma.com/regulation/marijuana-laws-netherlands/
Would be cool if they said fuck you to the EU.
People kept worrying about Canada breaking a UN rule but Canada said fuck it and did it anyway.
Would be cool if they said fuck you to the EU.
The British did that and look where it got them
Canada didn’t leave the UN.
The UN and EU are somewhat different organisations.
Fuck, now I gotta buy cannabis from someone name April for it to be legal?
My dealers name is fucking Gus Gutenburg. How many people are even named April in Germany? Probably not a lot. I hate our parliament.
There’s a reason a certain green teenage pizza loving group made friends with her
“Chronic cannabis use makes you stupid, to put it bluntly, and can also cause psychosis,” Thomas Fischbach, president of a German federation of doctors for children and adolescents (BVKJ), told the Die Welt newspaper.
Meanwhile, at Oktoberfest…
The drunken debauchery often leads to fights, aggressive behavior, and bierleichen — so-called “beer corpses,” which is what locals call the many passed out drunks lying on the hill behind the tents.
Overuse of cannabis can cause something called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. You have severe nausea, uncontrolled vomiting, and stomach cramping. It’s caused by your nervous system, so people who have it tend to sit in a hot shower for a long time when they don’t get relief from anti-nausea meds. Luckily, it clears up pretty quick with a shot of haloperidol, and as long as you cut back you can continue to partake.
It doesn’t affect everybody and usually you have to smoke a lot over a long period of time, but I didn’t know about it before and I think people should be aware.
Happy smoking, frients
Of course the counter argument to legalisation was published in “Die Welt”, the right leaning newspaper from the Springer media group. The group which also publishes the Bild Zeitung which plays a big role in the rise of the far right in Germany and has a history of reckless opinion journalism which even lead to the shooting of a member of the student uprising in the past (Rudy Dutschke if you want to look it up). Fuck everything Springer.
I read the translation of Stefan Aust’s book on the Baader-Meinhof and he covers the Rudy Dutschke shooting and also the bit where a Springer editorial praised Savak for beating up students protesting the Shah’s visit to Germany. Called them something like ‘Jubilant Iranians’ if I recall correctly.
Cannabis bad doesn’t mean alcohol good
No, but here he is trotting out the line about Schizophrenia, which is a real risk, but is dwarfed in its societal impact by the downsides of alcohol. I don’t expect he’s said anything at all publicly about the impacts of that though, which would suggest that he’s the talking head that the German press always contact for a negative comment about cannabis every time it hits the news. Especially as this is reported by Die Welt which is an Axel Springer publication.
The link between cannabis and schizophrenia is also supper dubious at best.
Its for the most part based on statistics that a large number of people who go to the ER and are there diagnosed with psychosis have used cannabis.
Schizophrenia is a genetic condition characterized by frequent psychosis. And a significant number of this group experiments with cannabis before onset of schizophrenic symptoms, which often only arise in late puberty/ young-adult age.
There are theories that cannabis may trigger schizophrenia in people that have the genetic sensibility to it. Assuming it would otherwise have stayed dorment (for longer)
But 3 pieces of information are ignored.
First people diagnosed with schizophrenia that did not use cannabis before onset of symptoms share the exact same statistically tendency to start using cannabis later in life as the group that did before, leading to theories of self medication and there is proof of anti-psychotic properties of some cannabinoids.
20% of the general population smokes (nicotine), 80% of the schizophrenic population smokes, its such a well known fact that its a common movie trope. Yet not a single theory about how nicotine effects psychosis exist. Because remember only rare people with a genetic sensibility can develop psychosis and psychotic paranoia is a fear tactic
Psychosis and schizophrenia are not well understood in general, there part of the neurodivergent spectrum which is a modern idea in its scientific infancy, More and more we do understand that the main driver of psychosis (and every person can be pushed into experiencing a psychosis) is extreme levels stress.
I know some other things extreme is related with:
-
addiction to substance abuse of any kind, every time you crave = stress
-
the troubles a (young) person may have that leads to them frequently using drugs to begin with.
The statistics do make sense but relation simply isn’t causation and its shameful that politicians can just misinterpret science like this.
-
That’s not even the argument which was being made if that’s what you’re implying.
Their argument is simply: why is alcohol legal if it’s much more harmful?
But… alcohol should be legal, no? Despite the harm it causes, prohibition simply does not work.
Cannabis can also cause harm (albeit less harm than alcohol) but should also still be legal. And other drugs like fentanyl (arguably) cause more harm than alcohol…but should also be legal.
Prohibition is literally never a realistic solution to any drug or drug problems. Not a single country has ever had success.
I honestly don’t think legalising is the best path looking at SF, California reporting after harm reduction campaign. Maybe empathetic rehabilitation.
empathetic rehabilitation.
From what? Pot addiction? Lmao?
If you have underlying issues with anxiety and paranoia, adding marijuana to the mix exacerbates these issues greatly and becomes a poor crutch for dealing with them. I’ve seen friends and family who smoked 2-3x weekly for a few years develop eyebrow-raising mental problems. So I tend to agree.
Personal anecdote, N=4.
(Yeah of course, alcohol is just as bad, or worse in extreme cases, but people can usually sense the damage being done to them by it afterwards. Pot’s effects are internal. It’s hard to reflect until it’s too late.)
So legalize it and put effort into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn’t very hard.
Yeah of course, alcohol is just as bad, or worse in extreme cases
Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.
Pot’s effects are internal
And alcohol’s effects aren’t?
So legalize it and put money into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn’t very hard.
Of course. But look around you. Our governments won’t do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I’m more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.
Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.
I agree. But it’s not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle. Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.
And alcohol’s effects aren’t?
Alcohol’s effects are immediately visible. It’s hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.
This is your brain on the war on drugs. You’re talking nonsense.
constructive
Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.
I’ll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon’s drug guy:
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.
He sounds like a right vile cunt. But me not being head over heels for more vices doesn’t mean I’m a strawman for ostracizing others. It’s not binary. I will always vote left and progressive to protect the freedoms of others. But I just don’t see the social advantage in adding yet more bread and circuses to keep people down, and nor do I see the benefit of throwing more avenues of abuse to people who already struggle with impulse control. I genuinely believe this will end badly, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
Yay, Germany gets to smell like skunk and be full of mentally fried idiots. Whoop-dee-frickin-doo.
Potheads getting triggered because people don’t support their disgusting habit never gets old.
The most boomer shit I’ve seen on lemmy yet lmao. Reefer madness ass take.
Only cause Lemmy evidently doesn’t have many reasonably-minded folk on it. Been discovering that a lot lately.
I don’t smoke pot, I don’t like the smell, I had edibles like twice in my life, and don’t plan on repeating the experience.
I still think that there is little logical reason to forbid people from consuming, and that it is especially hypocritical to do so while alcohol and tobacco are legal, and freely available.
For the record, I hate alcohol and tobacco just as much and think we should have stuck with Prohibition. No mind-altering substances should be legal.
Have you been watching “Reefer Madness” and thinking it’s a documentary? Spoiler: it isn’t.
