For those not familiar with US society, this is huge. Mississippi is generally regarded, true or not, as a conservative state, perhaps even reactionary.
Its government was a staunch defender of slavery, the later Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation, Negro voting disenfranchisement; the last to repeal alcohol prohibition; still frequently challenging abortion rights; among other such.
Mississippi is kind of a belle weather for how Southern conservative governments will lean. That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
This was a voter-led initiative and the state legislature tried to ignore it in last year’s legislative session. The governor was not a fan either. There were some other leaders who tried to challenge it in court. So I wouldn’t make that strong of a claim that you’re making…it’s still a tough fight here and very conservative. In good news, the vote for the initiative was like 70% for it.
> That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
They did not legalize marijuana. At least not in the context of what legalizing marijuana means in 2022, which I think should be that you can walk into a marijuana store and buy marijuana like other states.
The important part being that cops can still bust you for simply having marijuana or buying marijuana, or even suspecting marijuana. Which was the big problem in the first place.
> That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
Doubtful! The state legislatures in these states are generally more conservative than the population and are generally against these measures. In Wisconsin for example there is currently no chance of legalization because the state legislature is gerrymandered within an inch of its life for some of the most radical republicans in the country, despite the fact that generally the state votes for democratic representatives at the federal and state level.
>That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
I highly doubt it. And at a Federal level it will never be legalized. The Biden administration has no plans and the folks involved are just playing games and never had any intention of fulfilling their promises.
Mississippi currently takes the right to vote away from 10.6% of it's voting age population (worst in the country), and 16% of it's black population (3rd worst in the country), due to past felony convictions. And there are many ways to earn yourself a felony in MS, often for things that wouldn't be elsewhere.
While there are both legal and legislative attempts to change it, as of now:
Mississippi currently has no provisions for re-enfranchising those with a past felony conviction, other than by a direct act of the legislature or governor for that specific individual (which is very rare).
Steal $1,001 of stuff when you're 18 and you'll likely never get to vote again in your life even if you never have another encounter with the wrong side of the law.
When will we start seeing legislation forbidding employer discrimination against legal cannabis users in the form of drug tests?
No one cares if you've had a drink over the weekend, on your own time, as long as it's not affecting your on-the-job performance. Some companies have parties where alcohol is served, and going for drinks after work is quite common.
Yet so many companies require you to take drug tests before you get hired (and some have regular on-the-job drug tests), to prove you haven't used cannabis in the last 30 days -- even in states where it's legal, and even if you have a prescription for it.
This is obvious discrimination, and I hope one day the law recognizes it as such and forbids it.
Pennsylvania seems to have started pushing towards that in the middle of last year:
"On Aug. 5, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held for the first time that Pennsylvania's Medical Marijuana Act (MMA) allows an employee to sue his or her employer for taking an adverse employment action based on the employee's status as a certified user of medical marijuana."[1]
The biggest barrier here is testing, IMO. There is no reliable way to tell if you are under the influence of marijuana _right now_. The only way an employer can guarantee you are sober while working (to shield themselves from liability) is to give a traditional drug test.
Are there reliable ways to tell if you are under the influence of other drugs other than alcohol? Can a similar test be provided for opiates, hallucinogens like DMT and other substances? Cocaine won't show up after a few days, but MJ will show up for weeks after usage.
The key issue we have is that there are somewhat accurate-ish tests to check for acute and past alcohol usage, as well as defined impairment levels, but for THC we have neither breathalyzer-style tests nor impairment level standards. FWIW it's not even clear if blood should be tested for active THC, for byproducts or waste products.
That makes dealing with MJ impairment a bit of troublesome for companies... I agree that there should be no mandatory drug testing for a lot of employers that currently require one, but everything involving machinery should be allowed to have stricter standards.
> If you can do the job it shouldn't matter (and it's none of their business) if you're using a drug.
The thing is, there is no such thing as "can do the job" for operating machinery. We do have thresholds for allowed impairment from alcohol - e.g. in Germany it's if you cause an accident or show impairments of any kind with > 0.3‰ or get caught even without symptoms (aka random stop-and-blow) with >0.5‰ gets you an infraction ticket under §24a StVG, everything above 0.5‰ gets you a criminal DUI charge under §316 StGB.
These are pretty much generalized thresholds established over decades of research, and even then these lack fairness - as someone used to a liter of vodka a day will be walking straight if he only has 1l of beer, whereas your average random person won't be able to drive safely after the same amount of beer. And someone who has had only six hours of shit sleep, there is no detection at all assuming the data recorder of the truck shows that the driver has not operated it in the last 11 hours. But: it's the best we have.
For weed and other drugs, we don't have any kind of data to base a decision like "can you operate a vehicle/machinery" safely on, there is absolutely no way or standard to test for the physical ability to drive in any way and "self-assessment" of impairment state will always be notoriously unreliable. That is the problem.
I get it for machinery, but I got tested when I got a SWE job a few years ago at a BigCo. Like yes I get that you have a portion of your workforce on the ground and you need to drug test them, but come on I'm some dude sitting in his living room coding, I don't think safety is applied the same way in my "workplace"
By the way in some countries where medical marijuana has been legalized it still is practically impossible to get a prescription (because all doctors are radically conservative and don't believe in medical marijuana) and even for those lucky to get it prescribed it can be 2-5 times the price of high quality black market weed.
Australia is the poster child of this, and it's not because of "radically conservative doctors", it's because the government makes both doctors and patients jump through a series of narrow hoops to qualify.
Australia is also a fairly conservative country in many respects, so these requirements (which are definitely conservative sounding) don’t surprise me.
I got to tour that place in high school! Lived across the street for a while from the guy who ran it, too. They were hardcore evangelicals, his son tried to burn my D&D books one time. Fascinating place, definitely worth the visit, don't lean on the fence and remember they'll walk you past sniffer dogs on the way out.
>There are also those who really want a recreational marijuana program that could lead to more people smoking and less people working, with all the societal and family ills that that brings.
Wow, they really want to keep the liquor, tobacco and pharmaceutical industry going as long as they can. There are a lot of professional workers that smoke marijuana, business owners, successful artists, etc. The devil's lettuce might not be for everyone, but how can these people be anti-vaccine mandate (pro-choice) while still trying to prevent marijuana legalization?
My understanding, from knowing someone close to these political circles, is that there is a conflict between the religious faction and the individual-liberty faction. So whenever that gets resolved, we will see further movement on that front.
>The devil's lettuce might not be for everyone
It’s not for me. Neither is alcohol. Doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal. I don’t get why other people have this attitude about keeping things illegal simply because they don’t personally get enjoyment out of it.
> but how can these people be anti-vaccine mandate (pro-choice)
The context of “pro choice” referring to abortion is not the same context as “pro choice” referring to vaccinations.
Abortions do not affect anyone else, certainly not physically relative to the woman going through the pregnancy. Infectious diseases do affect everyone else. Using the term to equate the validity of the two positions is incorrect and misses the reasoning.
Do arguments like this withstand any scrutiny? Recreational marijuana isn't some crazy idea anymore. Are families falling apart in states that have legalized pot?
So, how long until we get a proper hemp paper industry? As the legal issues wane, it seems like the only remaining obstacles to higher quality paper at a lower price are industrial process and marketing issues. Seems like an industry ripe for disruption.
IDK, in countries where industrial growing of (low-THC) hemp is a thing and hemp gets used for manufacturing products, it is not "higher quality paper at a lower price", it's still a niche product for specific uses (e.g. as cigarette paper) because it's not cheaper. IIRC growing/harvesting/processing of the fiber is quite similar to linen, and so the resulting product costs are comparable to linen cloth, not wood pulp paper; industrial hemp gets used in ropes and bags but gets only limited application as paper even if it's fully legal to try.
Processing hemp for fiber is an absolute bitch; and the market for the fibers isnt big enough to create a market for the processing equipment which could make the fiber cheaper and grow that market and...
Dunno what might kick it off make it viable: new boll weevil, perhaps.
Did you see they also changed the flag? Never thought I’d see the day. When I was a teenager growing up there, there was a big conversation about the flag (don’t remember why), and it seemed at the time impossible that it would ever change.
Readit News
Its government was a staunch defender of slavery, the later Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation, Negro voting disenfranchisement; the last to repeal alcohol prohibition; still frequently challenging abortion rights; among other such.
Mississippi is kind of a belle weather for how Southern conservative governments will lean. That Mississippi of all places legalizes marijuana means that it will probably be legalized in all 50 states within a year or two.
Context on the state leg last year: https://mississippitoday.org/2021/03/22/medical-marijuana-an...
And the court case: https://mississippitoday.org/2021/04/14/mississippi-supreme-...
That this was a grass-roots initiative makes it more durable. It also means challengers can use it as a wedge issue, at the state level and federally.
They did not legalize marijuana. At least not in the context of what legalizing marijuana means in 2022, which I think should be that you can walk into a marijuana store and buy marijuana like other states.
The important part being that cops can still bust you for simply having marijuana or buying marijuana, or even suspecting marijuana. Which was the big problem in the first place.
Never mind, I see that it's decriminalized only for 1st offense and under 30 grams, but pretty harsh otherwise.
Doubtful! The state legislatures in these states are generally more conservative than the population and are generally against these measures. In Wisconsin for example there is currently no chance of legalization because the state legislature is gerrymandered within an inch of its life for some of the most radical republicans in the country, despite the fact that generally the state votes for democratic representatives at the federal and state level.
A wether is a castrated sheep/goat.
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I also wanted to honor and acknowledge the non-reactionary political and social forces working and living in Mississippi.
I highly doubt it. And at a Federal level it will never be legalized. The Biden administration has no plans and the folks involved are just playing games and never had any intention of fulfilling their promises.
A bottle of good Spanish wine, claimable somewhere in Central Europe, if you win :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether
Dead Comment
I’m betting $1000 that OP has never stepped foot in Mississippi.
“Negro voting disenfranchisement”?
National averages are 2.3% and 6.3%.
https://mississippitoday.org/2020/10/19/study-11-of-all-miss...
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While there are both legal and legislative attempts to change it, as of now:
Mississippi currently has no provisions for re-enfranchising those with a past felony conviction, other than by a direct act of the legislature or governor for that specific individual (which is very rare).
Steal $1,001 of stuff when you're 18 and you'll likely never get to vote again in your life even if you never have another encounter with the wrong side of the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/01/mississipp...
I mean, you could take the time to refute the "analysis"...?
I say this having grown up in Alabama and gone to university in Mississippi.
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No one cares if you've had a drink over the weekend, on your own time, as long as it's not affecting your on-the-job performance. Some companies have parties where alcohol is served, and going for drinks after work is quite common.
Yet so many companies require you to take drug tests before you get hired (and some have regular on-the-job drug tests), to prove you haven't used cannabis in the last 30 days -- even in states where it's legal, and even if you have a prescription for it.
This is obvious discrimination, and I hope one day the law recognizes it as such and forbids it.
"On Aug. 5, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held for the first time that Pennsylvania's Medical Marijuana Act (MMA) allows an employee to sue his or her employer for taking an adverse employment action based on the employee's status as a certified user of medical marijuana."[1]
1: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/marijuana-drug-tests-a...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/26/why-amazo...
That makes dealing with MJ impairment a bit of troublesome for companies... I agree that there should be no mandatory drug testing for a lot of employers that currently require one, but everything involving machinery should be allowed to have stricter standards.
> If you can do the job it shouldn't matter (and it's none of their business) if you're using a drug.
The thing is, there is no such thing as "can do the job" for operating machinery. We do have thresholds for allowed impairment from alcohol - e.g. in Germany it's if you cause an accident or show impairments of any kind with > 0.3‰ or get caught even without symptoms (aka random stop-and-blow) with >0.5‰ gets you an infraction ticket under §24a StVG, everything above 0.5‰ gets you a criminal DUI charge under §316 StGB.
These are pretty much generalized thresholds established over decades of research, and even then these lack fairness - as someone used to a liter of vodka a day will be walking straight if he only has 1l of beer, whereas your average random person won't be able to drive safely after the same amount of beer. And someone who has had only six hours of shit sleep, there is no detection at all assuming the data recorder of the truck shows that the driver has not operated it in the last 11 hours. But: it's the best we have.
For weed and other drugs, we don't have any kind of data to base a decision like "can you operate a vehicle/machinery" safely on, there is absolutely no way or standard to test for the physical ability to drive in any way and "self-assessment" of impairment state will always be notoriously unreliable. That is the problem.
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https://www.auscannabisclinics.com.au/find-medical-cannabis-...
Only the refillable prescription containers are 2-5 times the price. ;-)
https://news.olemiss.edu/federally-funded-marijuana-turns-50...
Well, it's still Mississippi.
>The devil's lettuce might not be for everyone
It’s not for me. Neither is alcohol. Doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal. I don’t get why other people have this attitude about keeping things illegal simply because they don’t personally get enjoyment out of it.
It is utterly absurd there is not more a push to legalize at the Federal level.
The context of “pro choice” referring to abortion is not the same context as “pro choice” referring to vaccinations.
Abortions do not affect anyone else, certainly not physically relative to the woman going through the pregnancy. Infectious diseases do affect everyone else. Using the term to equate the validity of the two positions is incorrect and misses the reasoning.
Dead Comment
Why is hemp paper competitively lower priced and cheaper than normal paper? Could that also apply to cardboard?
Dunno what might kick it off make it viable: new boll weevil, perhaps.