On Thu, 10 Mar 2016 09:14:16 +0100, Thomas de Groot wrote:

> On 10-3-2016 1:03, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 09 Mar 2016 09:28:50 +0100, Thomas de Groot wrote:
>>
>>> I have followed that with interest. Here (NL) we have been discussing
>>> for decades whether weed should be legalised or not (while the rest of
>>> Europe looked on with disapproving eyes about our semi-liberal and not
>>> too successful experiments about it) without coming to a decision. In
>>> the meantime, weed has been grown into something closer to a hard
>>> drug,
>>> and one might seriously reconsider the initial question yet again.
>>
>> It's kinda a weird situation in the US, because it's legal in the
>> state, but illegal under federal law.  That means that a lot of
>> dispensaries are cash-only businesses because the banks don't want to
>> risk a federal suit for trafficking "drug money".
>>
>> But most in the US these days see weed as no more harmful than alcohol
>> or cigarettes (and some say less so), which does beg the question of
>> why there's a double standard about it.
>>
>>
> The difficulty seems to be the impossibility to really pull weed out of
> the criminal circuit. That is where most of the efforts fail in the end.
> Politicians hardly want to burn their fingers on the issue and - not
> irrelevant - the strength and resilience of the 'under'-world is a fair
> match to the 'upper'-world.

Quite possibly.  There's a stigma for pot users that somehow people who 
drink alcohol or smoke tobacco don't have (though in the US at least, 
tobacco users do have more stigma now than, say, 30 years ago).

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

Post a reply to this message