I don't think that making marijuana legal will stop police from targeting minorities, evidently.
Thankfully it doesn't have to be just "legal" or "illegal", as legal options can vary.
Are you saying that? Never said that. Definitely didn't ever say that. Either of those. I tend to think of people as more thoughtful. I don't think that's the only thing that people take into consideration. But yeah, if it's legal then more people will think it's okay. But now it's an issue that people are admitting to use? Does not compute.
Marijuana was different a few decades ago. They might as well be two different drugs. And those are two different movements. Reefer madness and modern science are about as different as possible. And about two different substances. Not really equivocal.
I don't think that making marijuana legal will stop police from targeting minorities either. It would definitely help, though. It would give the police one less excuse for harassing people in general.
The issue of 1 in 2 admitting to use is to illustrate the fact that, in regards to the notion of "people will think it's safe if it's legal"...who is left to convince, exactly? You had half the country already admitting to using a Schedule 1 controlled substance...can you think of any other illegal drug that comes anywhere close to that kind of outsized social/cultural presence? And if anything drug usage within the general public is usually even greater than what people will admit to in self-reported surveys and things of that nature. So that was pretty much a settled issue long before 2012.
Use in states where marijuana is legal tends to be higher than use in the United States overall, but this difference mainly pre‐dates legalization. Among the 11 states that have legalized it, marijuana use rates in 2011—prior to any legalization—averaged 15 percent compared with the national rate of 11.6 percent. Only Illinois’s was lower, at 11.4 percent.
31 . . . The high and increasing rates of marijuana use prior to legalization (shown in Figure 1) might provide evidence for a cultural explanation behind the recent swell of legalizations: as marijuana becomes more commonplace and less stigmatized, residents and legislators become less opposed to legalization. In essence, rising marijuana use may not be a consequence of legalization but a cause of it.
To the issue of "marijuana is different now"...that too was settled during prohibition. All legalization did was continue a trend line (marijuana, generally-speaking, becoming more potent in regards to THC content) that's been heading in a certain direction since the 80s at least. Legalization did not usher in high-potency marijuana. And it's not really "different", any more than a bottle of beer has a different psychoactive drug inside it compared to a bottle of vodka. So both these ideas, the concept of people thinking that marijuana is a relatively safe drug, and the potency of marijuana trending upward, had long been in effect before the first states began to legalize.
And let me just say, even if we take what you're saying to be true, purely for the sake of argument (that marijuana today is an incredibly potent, potentially mind-damaging drug compared to the kinder, gentler bud of decades past), the old concept of "reefer madness" is still quite relevant. Why? Because Americans had decade upon decade of respected medical professionals and government researchers telling them that marijuana would do everything from cause you to have a psychotic break to (if you were a man) making you grow tits. So thankfully that has made them quite skeptical of the modern day reefer madness hucksters like Alex Berenson, Kevin Sabet etc. That's what happens when you get lied to constantly, it's the old parable of the "boy who cried wolf". The American people were fed a steady diet of complete bullshit and now, with the sudden arrival of the big, bad loco weed that's gonna corrupt the youth and cause everyone to get schizophrenia, they're tragically jaded and cynical! Oh no!
And, btw, CBD today is far, FAR (understatement) more prevalent than it was at any time in the past in this country. The amount of CBD in marijuana 10, 20 years ago? Pretty negligible and I doubt it was going to save you from having panic attacks/paranoia/psychotic break/other "bad time" if you were someone predisposed to that kind of reaction.
