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ciphergoth comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong
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Marijuana should be freely obtainable from licensed merchants. It would probably be taxed at a high rate, and there should be laws against operating machinery while under its influence. There would also probably be some licensing mechanism to guarantee its purity.
If possible, all individuals currently in prison for marijuana-related offenses should immediately be released.
The resulting savings in law enforcement resources and prison space, and the accompanying increase in tax revenue would be tremendous. In addition, patients in extreme pain would be able to manage that pain at minimal expense using plants which are easy to cultivate, rather than paying exorbitant amounts to pharmaceuticals.
Biologists would be free to research the effects of THC on the human body, which they are currently forbidden from doing. There have been some indications that THC my have tumor-destroying properties -- not nearly strong enough that I should immediately recommend cancer patients start lighting up as often as possible, but certainly strong enough that if not for the legal issues, follow-up studies would have been performed by now.
That is what I, at least, mean by "marijuana legalization". From my epistemic vantage-point it is an easy win and it is astounding that our government continues to get it so blatantly wrong.
Well, I would guess that most politicians know perfectly well that the illegality of marijuana is ridiculous, but they can't say so.
I fear you give politicians too much credit. The implication of this is that politicians are more rational on average than voters. I don't see much evidence to support that theory. The facts seem more easily explained by politicians being on average no more rational than the population as a whole.
I suspect that for large numbers of politicians -- probably the maqjority -- the question of whether a proposition is true doesn't really interest them all that much. They are more interested in whether a proposition will win or lose them votes. If they think it'll lose votes, they won't agree with it, and most lack the intellectual curiousity to care whether it is true.
More rational, no. More informed, yes, necessarily; they receive a constant supply of information relevant to their political decisions, largely from lobbyists and think tanks. It is biased information, but so is most of what the general public receives.
I wouldn't say they can't say so - just that they (correctly) estimate that if they came out in favor of legalisation, there are more people who would stop voting for them (not only people who are against legalization, but also those who would subconsciously tag a politician like that as a "weirdo" or "pothead"), then there are people who would start voting for them.
So it's up to us non-politicians to do the job of repeatedly and loudly pointing out that marijuana doesn't deserve harsher treatment than alcohol and tobacco - not because we're morally superior to politicians, but because we aren't subject to the same constraints.
By "can't say so", I mean "can't say so and retain any power", which to a politician's ears is pretty much the same thing.
It's another example of anti-silly bias. Cannabis legalisation has roughly the same support as banning abortion, but anti-abortionists are treated as proper participants in a live debate, but people who oppose drug prohibition are still treated as silly stoners. No-one seriously tries to answer the arguments against these laws; they just fulminate about "irresponsibility" and "our children" and play the silly card.
If the very slow shift of demographics hits a tipping point on this issue, we could see some fairly rapid change.
Yes. Sometime in the 1990s.
Whoops! Didn't happen!
Support for legalizing marijuana is negatively correlated with age. I could not find statistics by age, but I would imagine that older Americans, being generally more conservative, are more likely to oppose abortion. Voter turnout increases with age, so although legalizing marijuana and banning abortion have similar overall levels of support, banning abortion has higher support among people whose opinions politicians care about (voters).
Does it really decline with age, or did older people form their values in a different culture? It's possible people's values are stable over time but people born a long time ago were more likely to form different values from the ones formed by people born more recently. Has anyone tried to distinguish between these possibilities?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/aw6/global_warming_is_a_better_test_of_irrationality/61ff
Pardon my sloppy phrasing. I did not intend to imply causality one way or another, merely the correlation. I edited the original comment to reflect my intent.
Robert Altemeyer reports a correlation between a likely-related attitude (support for 'traditional' authority) and -- not age, but having children. Continued education has a stronger apparent effect in the opposite direction. But I don't think he directly addresses this question.