Nevada becomes fifth US state to allow cannabis sales for recreational purposes

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world-0/nevada-cannabis-marijuana-legal-recreational-weed-sales-pot-shops-buy-legalised-a7817871.html

by omilu • 9 years ago

174 97 9 years ago

independent.co.uk

chimeracoder• 9 years ago

To anyone who's confused by the title: the law was passed in November (by ballot referendum), but it went into effect today, with the first recreational sales. (Medical marijuana was already legal in Nevada).

By contrast, Massachusetts also legalized marijuana on the very same day - and by an almost identical vote margin - but Bay State legislators are still contemplating whether to let the law take effect at all, and it's unclear if and when recreational sales will actually become legal.

0x005ab01c• 9 years ago

This is going to come in handy for the upcoming Burning Man event, although there it's going to be difficult to define what a public space is and what not.

gkop2• 9 years ago

I'd go further and say this could have a dramatic impact on the vibe at Burning Man. Marijuana has historically been one of the least popular recreational substances at Burning Man, because the smell is hard to disguise. If marijuana is treated more lightly now by Nevada authorities, I'd expect it to become more popular at Burning Man, and take "market share" away from other substances.

Curious what the expert Burners among us think?

int_19h4• 9 years ago

If people really wanted weed, why not consume it through edibles? No smell to disguise there.

wyclif2• 9 years ago

Innocent question from a non-Burner: why would anyone attending Burning Man care about the smell of marijuana? The event is held in the desert. And judging from what I've heard and seen about it, most of it is outdoors.

mnm1• 9 years ago

Ironically, that's one place where it's still going to be illegal since those lands are all federal lands and patrolled by federal forces.

c22• 9 years ago

Burning Man happens on federal land, so I think this is probably still a no go.

pcunite• 9 years ago

This, after being told over and over again in school how bad (I specifically remember marijuana being mentioned) drugs were for you.

dvt4• 9 years ago

Marijuana isn't not bad for you, though. It's not like alcohol (or tobacco) is good for you, but it's still legal.

coralreef• 9 years ago

Semantically, everything is bad for you. Fruits are high in sugar, the sun gives you cancer.

arikr3• 9 years ago

Am I missing something:

People aged 21 and above can now buy up to an ounce of the drug at a time and use it in their homes if they have a valid ID in the western state, which is famed for the hotels and casinos in its largest city Las Vegas.
The millions of tourists who visit Nevada cities every year are expected to make nearly two of every three purchases from retailers, who began selling pot early on Saturday morning.

It requires a Nevada ID but they expect tourists to make two thirds of the purchases?

wtvanhest• 9 years ago

Valid ID in the Western State means that the Western State accepts the ID they have, not that it is an ID from the Western State.

Similar laws apply to buying alcohol

tvon• 9 years ago

Valid in the state does not necessarily mean it was issued in that state.

arikr3• 9 years ago

Ah, thanks.

dmh2000• 9 years ago

the article is wrong. Nevada ID is not required. Only proof of being 21 or older.

willstrafach• 9 years ago

It is not wrong, but maybe poorly phrased. It just means an ID which Nevada considers valid, not that it was actually issued in Nevada.

csa• 9 years ago

I would read this as an ID (e.g., even from a different state or country) that the state of Nevada considers valid.

intopieces• 9 years ago

Source article targets U.K. readers, "in the western state" is just a phrase used to orient readers to the general location of Nevada.

velox_io• 9 years ago

Thank you, but Biggie & Tupac brought the East/ West coast divide to attention 20 years ago.

It does annoy that here in the UK, the only licensed use for medical Marijuana (Sativex) is to treat MS. This has to be a better option than using strong opiates such Fentanyl for people like myself.

spilk• 9 years ago

I don't know where they expect tourists to actually consume the stuff, it's not legal in public and I can't imagine casinos are too thrilled about people lighting up in their hotel rooms, even in rooms that are already designated as smoking rooms.

grogenaut2• 9 years ago

I was there in March. Every. Single. Hotel. Floor. Reaked. Of. Pot.

jonknee2• 9 years ago

Las Vegas is the single most friendly city in the country to smokers, I’m sure the hotels will be fine.

UnpossibleJim• 9 years ago

I don't even smoke/eat pot and I'm happy this is going through. It's just a mire of confusion that tobacco and alcohol are legal, while a relatively harmless drug is federally illegal. You can't even do medical research on MJ as the laws stand. Mostly because of a backlash against a counter culture who didn't support a corrupt set of government officials and a textile industry that doesn't even produce in America, anymore. I'm (obviously) American, but this propping up of a legacy of corruption and convenient morality is just infuriating...... sorry. Rant =)

cmahler7• 9 years ago

Reasons it's still illegal

1. Pharma lobbyists

2. Private prison lobbyist

calgoo• 9 years ago

And the DEA.

ttoinou2• 9 years ago

Why wouldn't public prisons be a lobby of itself ?

kevinnk2• 9 years ago

The biggest funders of the anti prop 64 campaign ("Adult Use of Marijuana Act") were private individuals and police unions.

refurb2• 9 years ago

Any example of the pharma lobby caring? I haven't seen anything.

iaw• 9 years ago

3. Correlation between liberal politics and those who smoke. (see Richard Nixon)

adventured2• 9 years ago

2. Private prison lobbyist

That should say: government prison lobbyists. See: how government police & prison lobby groups have fought against pot legalization for decades. They have far more money and influence than the private prison industry (and that was 10x more the case 10+ years ago, when the private prison industry was hardly more than a pebble).

Those with the most to lose from pot legalization in terms of money, are government employees. The extreme majority of all the people put in prison during the US prison boom, went into government prisons staffed by government employees, and were arrested by government employees.

The war on drugs was a government program, that benefited the government by dramatically increasing its power and scale in just about every possible way. The private prison industry was tiny before year ~2000 (and it's still a small minority of the racket, which still mostly benefits the government).

The government prison complex is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. All that profit extract goes into the pockets of the government employees (and to a lesser extent, government contractors that build prisons etc).

Show me the labor cost of all the government employees related to the prison system (including the unnecessary police/arresting-related employees) over the last 40 years, inflation adjusted. Here's a hint: it's over a trillion dollars and makes the private prison money look like a joke.

CoreCivic is worth $3 billion and does $1.8 billion in revenue. That's equivalent to the salary & benefits of about 20,000 cops. There are two million (that's 100x the size of CoreCivic) people directly or indirectly employed by the government prison system, including 1.2+ million that are employed by state & local law enforcement agencies.

The income & benefits for those two million workers that are feeding off the government prison complex, is worth at least $150+ billion per year.

Politicians also love the government prison complex. It supports their power by making sure taxes remain artificially high, which keeps their slush funds higher, and they can basically build jobs in their voting districts with government prisons.

mc32• 9 years ago

Me too.

I think for most young people it's obvious that cannabis should be legalized and regulated like other "vice" substances like tobacco and alcohol. I'd stop short of wanting to legalize "hard" drugs, but I would like to see a focus on addiction treatment rather than virtual criminalization of the addicts --I'd still be for criminalization and controlled distribution of drugs that can have immediate deleterious effects on people's health, wellbeing and functionality. Alcohol, while dangerous, unfortunately is well ingrained in society, so even though it qualifies as dangerous, it might have to remain an exception, given it would be hard to extirpate (see prohibition in the various countries and its lack of success).

vostok• 9 years ago

With the inevitable trend toward public healthcare, I just hope that we're able to tax these kinds of products. I don't want to pay higher taxes just so we can provide extra medical treatment to people with alcohol/red meat/tobacco/marijuana habits.

int_19h4• 9 years ago

Why should personal consumption, or possession with intent to consume personally, ever be criminalized? No matter how harmful the substance is to the person, the basic principle of bodily autonomy (you know, the same one that dictates abortions to be legal) applies here.

The only reasonable exception I can see is substances that alter behavior in a way that's likely to endanger other people (e.g. those that induce aggression). Ironically, though, alcohol would be relatively high on that list compared to most everything else.

davidw• 9 years ago

I don't smoke/consume either and I have to say it's working pretty well here in Oregon. More tax revenue for the state, fewer people in jail and so on.

egwynn• 9 years ago

I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address.

Put another way: am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer?

throwaway93745• 9 years ago

am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer?

Yes, you are missing one thing: you classify "locking up millions of people" as a cost. For those who created and are perpetuating this practice, it is considered to be a benefit, not a cost. Consider private prisons, for instance: they would go bankrupt without such policies. Consider also that it is overwhelmingly black people, or hispanics, who go to jail on minor pot-related charges. A fundamental purpose of these policies is to provide the ability to lock up millions of colored people. Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult.

The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Yes it's expensive for the taxpayers, but the racists in power consider the price tag to be worth it.

tacoman9872• 9 years ago

I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but I love that we both used throwaway accounts to respond similarly at the same time.

DanBC• 9 years ago

Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult.

I dunno, the traffic tickets that pay the bills for some counties seems like a good fit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm

Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.
The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.
Claire Bolderson investigates how widespread the practice is and considers the impact on relations between citizens and the authorities that govern them.

orangecat• 9 years ago

The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism.

Women are consistently less supportive of legalization than men (e.g. http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-suppor...). I've never heard claims suggesting that women are more racist than men, but this is consistent with women being more receptive to "for the children" arguments.

tacoman9872• 9 years ago

Racism can be used to justify a lot of senseless, expensive actions...

Freak_NL• 9 years ago

The ban on the recreational use of marijuana isn't based on a cost/benefit analysis. It's just something that remains law, because trying to repeal it is not politically beneficial (yet), and potentially career-limiting for a politician.

I suspect that the sunk-cost fallacy (or similar flaws in human reasoning) plays a role as well. Decriminalizing something after it has been highly illegal for decades means coming to terms with the fact that that policy was wrong and a waste of tax payers money — i.e., if it wasn't, why repeal those laws? That's not something policy makers like to do (consciously or otherwise), because of a fear of how it will reflect on them.

rayiner• 9 years ago

The "gateway drug" myth.

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

"I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address."

Many people are deathly afraid of illegal drugs, including marijuana.

It may seem to some people today that marijuana is "obviously harmless" or much less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, but that view has only relatively recently become at all widespread. Remember fear-mongering films like Reefer Madness, government anti-drug propaganda ("Just Say No" campaign, "DARE", etc), media sensationalism, politicians equating drug use with crime, and so on -- these things really got people in to an anti-drug frenzy, and marijuana was just one of many drugs in the firing line.

Such moral panic is far from over. It's still going strong against the boogyman drugs of the day: meth and heroin (or the so-called "opiod epidemic"). If you get riled up about the dangers of those drugs, you can perhaps understand how some people used to feel (and still do) about marijuana (and about alcohol, for that matter, which was also prohibited at one point before becoming legal).

thatcat• 9 years ago

deathly afraid

The difference between cannabis and every other drug is that there are 0 reported deaths, making the arguments related to physical harm far more questionable than those that appear in the current moral panic over frequent opioid deaths which are obviously harmful.

aphextron• 9 years ago

I’ve never been able to understand how the anti-weed interests have been able to rationalize the astronomical costs of enforcement and punishment for so long. Even if I went out on a limb and said, “well, it’d suck if TONS of people smoked TONS of pot ALL of the time”, then I’d still be skeptical about whether that’s a problem worth spending billions of dollars (and locking up millions of people) to address.

It's entirely a generational issue in the US. People were fed decades of paranoid nonsense about marijuana from the DEA and other federal agencies, and as a result it was seen as a "dangerous narcotic" like heroin or meth. People who grew up actually using it and knowing people who use it, however, saw through that. And those people are now in power and voting.

koolba• 9 years ago

Marijuana smokers will still face fines of up to $600 if they light up in public places, including casinos, bars, restaurants, parks, and concert halls, and driving under the influence of the drug remains illegal.

Anybody know if that includes when you're in your hotel room or just on the open casino floor? If so, does "non-smoking room" apply to marijuana as well?

dhruvrrp• 9 years ago

It's not being treated the same as tobacco or alcohol. The article says it's legal 'Only in a private home, including yards and porches.' It's prohibited in casinos, bars, restaurants, parks, concerts and on U.S. property, from national forests to federally subsidized housing.

nullstyle• 9 years ago

The key to paranoid consumption in casinos and hotels is the e-cig style vape pens. They're very inconspicuous and I've had many a craps session now where no one has batted an eye while I puffed on a vape pen every now and again. If you're spending money and being respectful, people in the hospitality and resort industry don't give a fuck.

edit: pro-mode paranoia for in-room consumption brings a smoke buddy, febreeze, and a generous tip for house keeping into play.

ryanlol• 9 years ago

edit: pro-mode paranoia for in-room consumption brings a smoke buddy, febreeze, and a generous tip for house keeping into play.

Or request ozone generators outside the room. This seems surprisingly common.

icpmacdo• 9 years ago

You can eat it anywhere.

ozzmotik2• 9 years ago

forsooth!

_raoulcousins• 9 years ago

Come to Seattle! The fine is only $27!

jonknee2• 9 years ago

And is still just a conceptual idea, no one gets fined in the real world.

prodmerc• 9 years ago

I can't believe so much money was spent on this shit. Unlike alcohol, cannabis is less addictive and way more pacifying, it doesn't make people violent, at worst it makes them dumb, unmotivated and complacent - just like alcohol.

There's literally no reason to it being banned if alcohol is still legal. It's a better replacement, too.

I smoke every now and then, to relieve stress. I just go to sleep, I don't like the high and unlike alcohol I can still follow through on that thought of "nah, it detrimental" when I have stuff to do.

Alcohol is like "one drink, man, you'll be good" and then it's all downhill because one drink leads to half a dozen. Every. fucking. time.

system16• 9 years ago

The reason is that it justifies huge budgets for narcotics enforcement agencies across the country, guaranteed numbers of inmates, and employment for thousands to enforce it all.

abledon• 9 years ago

See "13th" on Netflix.

SeeDave2• 9 years ago

Really, really mixed opinions because you are totally right when it comes to alcohol, but I can't completely agree with your perspective on Marijuana.

Neither are entirely healthy or can demonstrably lead to long-term positive outcomes if consumed by individuals under the age of 25 or so. These are not nutritive vitamins by any means.

That said, the long-term effect of jailing African-American or Hispanic teenagers for minor possession or sale of inconsequential quantities is probably far worse.

It's a real toss-up, in my opinion, so all I can say is this: completely and totally legalize Marijuana, but impose strict penalties (5+ years in jail, $xx,xxx fine, etc.) for anyone who provides or sells to anyone under 21, and intensely harsh penalties (10+ years in jail, $xxx,xxx fine) for anyone who provides or sells to anyone under 18.

symlinkk• 9 years ago

Do you have sources that detail the negative effects on people under 25? I ask because I have smoked almost every day for about 2 years, I'm 23, and I'm worried.

arikr3• 9 years ago

There are good reasons to do it correctly, at least.

Marijuana legalization isn't all good.

Legal cannabis seems likely to be much better for people/countries/states than cannabis being illegal, though there are some downsides.

See:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2016/11/amer...

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6218695/case-against-pot-legal...

antfarm• 9 years ago

From the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie: http://www.upout.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Vintage-Nevada-...

Nevada becomes fifth US state to allow cannabis sales for recreational purposes

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