Politicians constantly talk about stopping the illegal immigrants that are coming from Mexico, but putting a wall has never and will never be a solution since the reason why so many displaced keep coming across the border is mostly to escape the crime, corruption, inequality, and violence of they have to live in their home countries. The worst part is that most of these terrible things is that happen in third world countries are rooted in constant subversion by developed countries, primarily the US. I feel like since we caused this (even if in part) we should help stop it now, even if we didn’t publicly admit guilt to save face.

So, how do we do it? Do we straight up invade Mexico and go on a full out war against the cartels like we did against Osama Bin Laden?

If not, why not? And, is there anything that can be done?

I would like to keep things civil. Please, let’s keep this respectful as I know this is a tough issue and there is anger on both sides of this issue.

  • @Hazor
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    11 months ago

    As an aside, and having nothing to do with your thoughts or arguments, I’d like to take a moment to communicate that the common talking points of “it’s a plant” and “it’s natural” regarding marijuana should come with massive asterisks, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that cocaine and heroin come from plants too. And that there are synthetic THC-related products which aren’t generally distinguished from the actual plant products in such discussions. There are also highly concentrated THC products, such as oils, which are pretty inarguably incomparable to using the plant as it occurs in nature.

    So, we can nitpick about maybe banning concentrates and delta-8 and whatnot and maybe only legalize the plant in it’s natural form, right? Well, that brings us to another point: modern marijuana strains have been bred to have a THC content dozens of times higher than what occurs in nature, as well as a dramatically lower relative ratio of CBD (CBD counteracts some of the bad of the THC, by my limited understanding, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion), so calling it “natural” now is more than a bit misleading. It IS a plant, but so are poppies (from which we derive opium/heroin), coca (doesn’t even need processing to get the cocaine), and belladonna (deadly nightshade, from which we derive digoxin), and, well, nobody here is arguing that those are safe to consume on the basis of their being or deriving from plants.

    Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

    • conciselyverbose
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      211 months ago

      The only thing that matters is that (in adults) it’s very clearly demonstrated by abundant research to be perfectly harmless.

      In and of itself, the lack of harm makes it impossible for you to be a redeemable human being if you want to tell a consenting adult that they can’t have it.

      That’s ignoring all the evidence supporting benefits.

      • BraveSirZaphod
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        111 months ago

        Perfectly harmless is overstating the case. It is undoubtedly much less harmful than alcohol, but there are still some detrimental effects.

        Of course, there are also significant, much more so, detrimental effects to soda and to sitting down. There’s a level of risk for which society has solidly decided that the choice is up to the individual, and marijuana undoubtedly should be in that category, but we shouldn’t pretend that there are literally zero negative effects.

        • conciselyverbose
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          211 months ago

          It’s not. There’s no evidence for any harm of any kind from THC or the other psychoactive ingredients in adults.

          Smoking, specifically, yes, but there are many, many other ways to ingest it, and smoking is most common in large part because of the backwards ass laws.

          It’s not like alcohol, where the desired altered state is exchanged for fucking up your liver, kidneys, etc. It doesn’t do any of that, even with extremely heavy use.