"2 years after legalizing cannabis, has Canada kept its promises?" by Ian Austen New York Times, January 23, 2021
OTTAWA, Ontario — The recreational use of cannabis was legalized in Canada two years ago, and when the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made its legalization pitch to the country, it was stories like Robert’s — a life derailed by a possession charge — that most resonated with many Canadians.
Legalization, the government vowed, would address the inequalities in a criminal justice system where marijuana and hashish penalties and prosecutions — and the lifelong burdens they impose — had fallen disproportionately on marginalized communities, particularly Black Canadians and Indigenous people.
That promise has largely been kept, with legalization essentially ending what Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies race and policing in Canada, called the “heavily racialized” arrests for marijuana possession, but some other key promises, and hopes, that came with Canada being the first industrialized nation to legalize marijuana remain unfulfilled.
The for-profit industry it created has struggled. Pot sales outside the legal system still thrive. Indigenous communities feel their needs are being ignored, and the injustices that came from criminalizing pot in the past have yet to be fully remedied.
Hey, they are still open -- unlike so many other businesses!
Trudeau’s pledge to legalize marijuana was not universally welcomed by Canadians, including some members of his Liberal party, who feared it would encourage use, particularly among teenagers, but the prime minister persuaded his party and many voters with an argument based on fairness and equality.
Buzz words for the mentally-addled!
Legalization, he promised, would ensure that not just the connected and wealthy could avoid a criminal record.
While decriminalizing marijuana possession is viewed as a step toward building a fairer justice system, many charged under the old law are still dealing with the devastating consequences, despite promises of redress.
“We haven’t reckoned as a country with the impact that drug prohibition has especially had on Black Canadians,” Owusu-Bempah said. “Unfortunately, too many of them are being left with a criminal record.”
The legalization effort came with an amnesty program the government said would erase criminal records for possession, but there are barriers to access.
The process, Owusu-Bempah said, is both complicated — with as many as six steps involved — and underpublicized, making it more a privilege for the few than a widely available solution.
They want to give you a fresh start.
While there is no government statistic for the number of Canadians with possession records, a 2014 report by the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a Toronto hospital and research center, put the figure as high as 500,000.
??
They have f**king statistics for everything, and yet they don't have this, they don't have that, blah, blah, blah, public can't see it, blah, blah, blah.
They must think you are all stoned.
As of mid-November, just 341 people had succeeded in erasing their records. There are no fees, but applicants must frequently spend money to travel to the place of their arrest to retrieve their records, and they must be fingerprinted.
Oh, you have to be fingerprinted to have your record cleared?
WTF for?
When Trudeau announced his government’s plans for legalization, investors envisioned tremendous business opportunities as a “green rush” swept the Toronto Stock Exchange and legal players invested millions of dollars in supersized greenhouses.
Two years later, most marijuana producers are still reporting multimillion-dollar losses, and these companies’ executives are overwhelmingly white, according to an analysis by Owusu-Bempah.....
That's capitali$m, sorry.
Related:
That's just over the border, and you will never have to leave the house now:
"Do curfews slow the coronavirus?" by Gina Kolata New York Times, January 23, 2021
The short answer is YES, because according to all the reporting, COV likes the nightlife, it likes to boogie.
With coronavirus infections rising and a contagious new variant threatening to accelerate the pandemic, France has implemented a stringent 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew. Citizens nationwide are sequestered indoors, and businesses must close down.
In Quebec, Canadian officials imposed a similar restriction earlier this month, running from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. It has frayed nerves: Notably, a woman who was walking her boyfriend on a leash at 9 p.m. has argued that this was permitted during the curfew, surely one of the pandemic’s most unexpected moments.
The question for scientists is this: Do curfews work to slow transmission of the virus? If so, under what circumstances? And by how much?
Be sure to mask up, too.
I hope the reader understands why I no longer want to spend the time going through this crap with a fine tooth comb. The distortions and lies coming from the pre$$ right now are so abominable it's hard to quantify in words.
A curfew requires people to be indoors during certain hours. It is often used to quell social unrest — many cities imposed curfews during the George Floyd protests this summer — and following natural disasters or public health emergencies, but curfews also have been used as instruments of political repression and systemic racism. Decades ago, in so-called sundown towns in the United States, Black people were not permitted on the streets after dusk and often were forced to leave altogether.
Now why would the print Globe cut that?
Talk of a COV curfew as the "domestic terror threat" is being rolled out?
Really?
The agenda-pushing garbage is so obvious now it nasueating.
As the pandemic unfolded, Australia and many European countries imposed curfews, on the theory that keeping people at home after a certain hour would slow viral transmission. Usually curfews were implemented alongside other measures, like closing businesses early and shuttering schools, making it difficult to tease out the curfew’s effectiveness.
As if the virus cared and has a watch.
They truly think we are stupid, and it's insulting.
They can laugh at me if they want, but f**k them.
The scientific evidence on curfews is far from ideal. There has not been a pandemic like this one in a century. While curfews make intuitive sense, it’s very hard to discern their precise effects on viral transmission, let alone transmission of this coronavirus.
Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, believes that curfews are, on the whole, an effective way to slow the pandemic, but he acknowledged his view is based on intuition.
“Scientific intuition does tell you something,” Longini said. “It’s just that you can’t quantify it very well.”
(Blog editor is speechless. They discredit themselves with their contradictory BS.
Yup, NOT BASED IN SCIENCE but INTUITION, a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning, NOT SCIENCE, is GOOD ENOUGH -- until they can fabricate the studies to back up their positions)
That is where the printed copy went inside.
Maria Polyakova, an economist at Stanford University, has studied the effects of the pandemic on the U.S. economy. “In general,” she said, “we expect that staying at home mechanically slows the pandemic, as it reduces the number of interactions between people. The trade-off is that the reduction in economic activity especially hurts many workers and their families in the large service sector of the economy,” she added.
So is the curfew worth the price?
She is at a loss to understand the logic.
“Assuming that nightclubs and such are already closed down anyway, for instance, prohibiting people from going for a walk around the block with their family at night is unlikely to reduce interactions,” Polyakova said; moreover, the virus thrives indoors, and clusters of infection are common in families and in households. So one daunting question is whether forcing people into these settings for longer periods slows transmission — or accelerates it.
Actually, clusters are NOT in families or they would have been getting sick long ago.
The amount of lying coming from the pre$$ these days is the worst they have ever been, folks, and that is saying a lot after the last 20 years.
“You can think of it like this,” said William Hanage, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “what proportion of transmission events happen during the time in question, and how will the curfew stop them?”
One study, published recently in Science, analyzed data from China's Hunan province at the start of the outbreak. Curfews and lockdown measures, the researchers concluded, had a paradoxical effect: These restrictions reduced the spread within the community but raised the risk of infection within households, reported Kaiyuan Sun, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues.
Wouldn't that have been there anyway and it would have come from outside the family and brought in!
Media has also been ignoring the Chinese study that shows no asymptomatic spread, too.
Never mind that the PCR tests are useless.
Longini and his colleagues incorporated lockdowns and curfews into models of the pandemic in the United States and concluded that they can be an effective way to reduce transmission, but, he cautioned, models come with a lot of assumptions about the population and how the virus spreads. “Whether you believe that is a scientific rationale depends on whether you believe the model,” he said.
Oh, look, MORE INACCURATE MODELS that just happen to SUPPORT the PRECONCEIVED AGENDA!
If you "believe," that is!!!!
How CRIMINAL!
Jon Zelner, a public health researcher at the University of Michigan, said that there was too little scientific data to know whether curfews are effective, but that such coercive measures rarely work in the long run. “With respect to curfews, I think that it is hard to understand what the positive impact of them is going to be,” he said. “One of the things I worry about with relatively vague or poorly reasoned orders is that it erodes the trust people need to have to follow these.”
The "positive impact" was it GOT RID OF TRUMP because THAT was the SOLE PURPOSE behind this, it now seems!
All of a sudden, blue-state Democraps are calling for reopening and the cases are declining, etc, etc.
Also see:
"The entire University of Michigan athletic department is pausing after several positive tests for the new COVID-19 variant that transmits at a higher rate. The state Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it issued recommendations for the school, although not an order. The school said Saturday night its move followed the positive COVID-19 tests for several individuals linked to the athletic department. The entire department could be in quarantine for two weeks. The 11th-ranked women’s basketball team was supposed to play at home against Purdue on Sunday. That was one of four athletic events the school had scheduled. The men’s tennis team was hosting a tournament while women’s tennis was in Atlanta. The men’s gymnastics event at Nebraska was also postponed......"
I'm told it is being done out an "abundance of caution," and I couldn't care any less about $ports these days.
As for the "trust," well from what I was told, trust, once lost, is hard to restore, and in some cases it will never be won back (hint, hint, pre$$ $hitters).
In countries like Japan, which have a much lower incidence of COVID-19 than the United States, the secret seems to be a population that accepts and follows guidelines like social distancing and mask wearing, “rather than a series of rule-like restrictions” like curfews. That could have happened in the United States, Zelner said, but public health recommendations were “drawn into our broader set of unending cultural and political conflicts.”
The crock of $hit is overflowing at this point, and if only you complied like a good Japanese!
Isn't that why they lost the war in such a devastating fashion?
Maybe this will help dispel some of that Canadian anger:
"Federal marijuana reform looms after Senate flip — and Massachusetts could end up a loser; Local activists, investors, and operators see risks in reforms they’ve long sought" by Dan Adams Globe Staff, January 22, 2021
With Democrats now in control of the White House and both branches of Congress, marijuana proponents say 2021 offers their best chance yet to end America’s longstanding national prohibition on the drug — or at least ease tight federal restrictions on cannabis research and banking for the legal pot industry, but even advocates and marijuana business owners who have long demanded such reforms are eyeing the possibility of their implementation with decidedly mixed feelings.
Yeah, got to get them their cut.
That’s because a liberalization of federal cannabis laws — while it could reduce prosecutions, wipe away old marijuana convictions, and alleviate the many business headaches that come with selling a federally illegal product — threatens to massively disrupt state-regulated pot markets across the country.
In particular, the advent of interstate marijuana commerce, which is currently banned, would explode the economic assumptions behind growing cannabis in states such as Massachusetts.
Here, the alternately humid and cold climate means marijuana plants are cultivated almost exclusively at multimillion-dollar indoor facilities that take years to build and license and which consume eye-popping quantities of electricity and water meanwhile, the world’s best cannabis flower is grown outdoors for relative pennies in Northern California and Oregon, where a production glut has sent prices plummeting and prompted state legislators to consider authorizing exports.
The environment only factors in when it is useful to pushing an agenda, I gue$$.
It's to be ignored when it benefits the powers that be and their agenda.
“It would be ridiculous to require that orange juice sold in Massachusetts be made from oranges grown in Massachusetts,” said Justin Strekal, political director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, who lobbies Congress on marijuana legislation. “Why should consumers in Massachusetts pay a self-imposed inflated cost? There is going to be interstate commerce in marijuana eventually, and when that happens, there will be very, very few people cultivating in Massachusetts.”
The 21st-century SOMA.
An influx of cheap West Coast weed would imperil Massachusetts producers and also various programs that depend on the taxes and fees generated by those companies. At particular risk, analysts said, would be state efforts to create a diverse and equitable cannabis industry after decades of racially disproportionate arrests for marijuana. A pot price collapse would also reverse ongoing economic renaissances in so-called “gateway cities” such as Holyoke and Fitchburg that have welcomed marijuana growers into their long-abandoned mill buildings.
So prices have to be artificially high to support all the Great Re$et work, huh?
Maybe I should start smoking.
SIGH!
Strekal and most other observers don’t anticipate interstate pot commerce beginning for at least several years, however.
Federal legislative reform would have to come first, followed by a drawn-out period of rule making and public input involving numerous agencies. Then, state legislators and regulators — who might face intense pressure to instead protect local cannabis jobs and tax revenue — would have to OK imports and exports.
Indeed, cannabis investors in Massachusetts don’t exactly seem to be bracing for imports any time soon.....
Then why the page B1, above-the-fold scare?
Just f**king with paranoid stoners?
Marijuana proponents say Democrats’ takeover of the Senate has them feeling confident at least some reforms will pass this year.
I have my own curfew, folks, and I don't know if I will be posting anything more today. It was a struggle just to do this.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Marijuana trade group drops lawsuit against state after backlash; Key companies quit dispensary association amid boycott by equity activists" by Dan Adams Globe Staff, January 25, 2021
The largest marijuana business association in Massachusetts has dropped a lawsuit against the state after more than a dozen key members of the group quit or renounced the litigation in the face of a fierce backlash from advocates.
The Commonwealth Dispensary Association, which represents dozens of established brick-and-mortar marijuana companies, sued the state Cannabis Control Commission earlier this month to overturn recently implemented regulations that created a new, competing class of online pot-delivery retailers — and that reserve the licenses exclusively for disenfranchised entrepreneurs for three years.
Marijuana activists and customers quickly responded with threats of an organized boycott, saying the legal challenge was protectionist and struck at a program meant to benefit Black and brown communities disproportionately targeted by police for marijuana arrests.
That criticism apparently stung. Beginning late Friday, a number of CDA member companies — nearly all of which had previously agreed to file and help fund the litigation — suddenly began announcing they were leaving in protest. With the group splintering and support for the lawsuit crumbling among remaining members, CDA’s leaders appeared to have little choice but to withdraw the lawsuit.
Still, it was a stunning turnaround from just days earlier.....
