Reconsider the decision (veto) to legalize weed

[mj2002]

This comes from the following discussion in this thread, which I felt was going a bit off track from what was originally meant to be discussed there. However, this side discussion is important, I believe;

 

Spoiler

 

 

To preface, I have not involved myself in political roleplay in any serious capacity since starting to play on this server. So if I get certain things wrong, then feel free to suggest some corrections. I'm sure there are ways in which this can all be phrased more accurately, but this is more about the big picture, not about specific details.

 

A while back, I believe somewhere in early of 2021, legislation was proposed and passed by players roleplaying as politicians in order to legalize the use of weed/marijuana. A veto was delivered on this legislation, which was poorly received by a lot of players, especially those involved in the process. When you finally get to make an impact, its halted by OOC interference, which is unfortunate. This apparently took a lot of energy out of political roleplay.

 

Reference IC press release from Feb 2021

Spoiler

 

 

 

I was unable to find a publicly available explanation on exactly why this legislation was vetoed at the time. The closest are some explanations in this thread, by players who used to be part of LFM at the time. I don't believe this constitutes the official response, but I'm not sure there ever was one that was publicly available. I just can't find it at the moment.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Beyond that, to the best of my knowledge, the decision was made by management, on the advice of LFM and IFM, to veto legislation that would have legalized the use of marijuana. This was done most importantly to protect certain aspects of criminal roleplay. This is a on the surface a fairly logical argument. Legalization impacts the following activities directly.

 

• Interactions with the weed production script. Weed is grown by players as criminal activity. This is part of supplier roles/schemes/etc. The details don't matter too much, but the point is that if this would be legalized, then it wouldn't be a criminal activity any more, which takes opportunities away for criminal roleplay.
• Sale of weed. As one of the most recognizable of drugs, in the world, buying and selling of weed is an obvious source of roleplay for quite a few roleplayers. Legalize this, and some of these interactions will go away.
• Enforcement of the ban on weed.  In theory, when something is illegal, there is roleplay derived from this when those being tasked with enforcement of these laws come across illegal activity. Cops come across a weed plantation or a drug dealer, it leads to roleplay interactions. Legalize weed, and nearly all of these interactions go away.

 

On the face of it, it therefor makes sense to veto legislation in order to protect roleplay opportunities related to this. 

 

However, I believe that the decision to veto did not take the 'what could have been' situation enough into consideration. There are two sides to every decision. Opportunities lost on one side can be mitigated depending on the implementation of the legislation, or outright gained on the other side. Beyond that, it's too easy to count all opportunities lost as being lost entirely.

 

• Interactions with the weed production script will still take place. How? That depends on to extent of the legalization. They could be legalized production facilities that have pretty strict requirements to follow, or perhaps production remains illegal (as has been the case in certain types of cannabis legislation policies). Either way, a new type of roleplay will evolve on how to handle this. These are opportunities, despite losing other opportunities. Its not by definition a net loss of roleplay.
• Sale of weed, will clearly change, but that doesn't mean no meaningful roleplay can be derived from this. Depending on certain legislation details, it could mean that medical dispensaries will take the place of street dealer when it comes to weed. Over there, a character might be required to get permission from a medical faction in order to actually be legally allowed to buy weed. This will generate a significant amount of roleplay interactions and opportunities that were only rare before.
• Enforcement of the ban on weed is something that will likely suffer, though I have some doubts to as to how often serious IC efforts are made to pursue individual users and street dealers. Therefor, what might be suffering is roleplay that isn't very prevalent anymore anyway. Again this depends on the implementation. If weed is legal, but only under certain conditions, then not adhering to these rules still opens up roleplay for enforcement.

 

Furthermore, it is clear to me and a lot of players that the decision to veto this legislation put a serious dent in the trust political roleplayers have in the ability to pursue their goals and roleplay actually having an effect on the business of the state and city. It becomes less attractive to engage in political roleplay when there's a good chance that your IC effort will be OOCly blocked. To turn this around, revisiting this veto could give a boost of confidence and renewed interest in political roleplay as a whole. This too, presents opportunities to for roleplay for legal and illegal roleplayers alike.

 

In one reply, former LFM administrator @HaveADream talked about the veto and theorised it "likely that it was a one-off case as it just wasn't the right time to legalise it due to the state of the drug economy". Well, the drug economy has changed since February 2021, and perhaps this decision to veto is now also overdue a revision.

 

One last thing to mention from my own insights. I would advise against full recreational legalization and complete open access to the weed growing script, but rather focus on a kind of 'medical marijuana' situation where there are rules and laws to adhere to, which in turn can be broken as part of criminal activity, and in turn investigated by law enforcement. For inspiration, one can visit the Wikipedia page on Cannabis in California, in order to draw from different situations in the past, and pick something that would translate well to the GTA World environment.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_California#Medical_cannabis_legalization

 

 

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

 

 

[Martyn]

TL;DR but I probably agree. I think letting the illegal community run weed dispenseries is going to promote a whole lot more meaningful roleplay than dudes pulling up next to you on a BMX to ask if you want to buy some weed bruh.

[Anders]

Its already legal 

[RecycledGarbage]

As I understand it, weed is legal in so far you will not be punished for carrying <15 grams, but will be punished for having 15 or more grams of weed, eg it is still illegal to sell weed and no real legal way of acquiring weed or at least no way of getting weed through legal channels such as a prescription for medical marijuana. 

Maybe I'd be wrong but I think if weed was legalized, criminals could still try to undercut legal businesses' prices, branch out to create their own business fronts selling weed legally or just move on to selling harder drugs. 

[mj2002]

27 minutes ago, Anders said:

Its already legal 

 

I assume that you mean that it's legal to carry small amounts, and still illegal to produce, right? That's not really what this is about. 

[Mecovy]

Howdy, its me single issue Steve! As someone who's rallied against that decision since it came to happen, here's some thoughts I had on it.

 

First of all my primary goal was not to remove Marijuana from the illegal drug market without providing some form of replacement, nor do I even want to remove it from the illegal market at all (I just wanna be heard by ifm and acknowledged that there is a more efficient way of doing the drug economy). My plan focused on two main parts, at least to move marijuana to the medicinal phase. First, 4-5 contracts would be set up permitting full legal protection to whomever holds it to mass produce marijuana. 3 of these were to be kept aside strictly for illegal rp'ers only, 1 for legal and 1 for best concept. These factories would then be permitted to distribute their product to approved vendors (PHMC, ULSA's pharmacy and any other clinic that speaks to city gov prior and gets correct licensing). The product they would sell to Pillbox and these other clinics would be 2-4x more expensive than the current market rate (taxes). In turn these venues could then provide prescriptions (They would be FORCED to charge) to patients for their legal weed.

 That's a TLDR of the legal aspect of the first step of my plan, now lets dig into how this benefits ILLEGAL(s).

Firstly, these big grow houses will be primed for opportunity to skim product and sell it on for far far cheaper. In kind, marijuana patients who hold a prescription would be pushed to seek out illegal dealers who could save them that 2-4x tax increase per gram. Obviously these warehouses would create major control of Marijuana to a small niche of groups, but that's okay. With this Marijuana would no longer be the primary street drug.

 

Fentanyl

 

Some of you may or may not have heard of what this horrible little bastard is, but to sum it up really basically. It's an insanely effective opiate that is currently being mixed in with people's heroin and such to give it more of a kick, but in reality just makes it lethal. Opiates, thanks to the greed of the United States Government and Big Pharma, now rule the street market from coast to coast of America. Some may have seen the opportunity presented here, others may not have. But we do have a hospital that prescribes opiates. If the server were to add Fent as a street drug, there would be an easy development of tiers to an opiate addiction. In plain English, if you keep taking your prescription opiate, the scripts going to push you deeper and deeper towards needing Fent. This could be done through tolerance and debuffs pushing you to find something more potent or suffer through a couple of days of increasing negative effects (unless rehab can be found and a way to allow that to help a user) until the addiction has passed.

 

This is a very simplified version of what I've been attempting to get anyone from LFM/IFM to hear since around Jan, this to me seems like a very logical and reasonable new way to refresh the drug market and stop us living in the 90s. 

Edited June 16, 2023 by Mecovy

[knppel]

2 hours ago, Anders said:

Its already legal 

No. Same as irl in the Netherlands the law we have is half-baked.

 

What we have is the de facto de-criminalization of possession, and to a lesser degree trade even if this is an absolute grey zone.

 

What's in no way legalized is the necessary mass production of marijuana to supply a public market with affordable priced products- see what others posted above.

[sribvlad]

 I believe this has been suggested a number of times already in the past and always shut down. Make corruption perms more lenient to people who want to RP around drugs if you want to carry weed on a legal char. 

[Miami]

It's legal in California, so I think it should really be up to the IC government to initiate a ballot proposition for California. I don't think this should be an OOC issue at all. I don't think they should be blocked from trying to legalize it OOCly.

 

It's really not that complicated. And if you want to create an illegal route to obtain marijuana through dealers to avoid taxes etc. once it's made legal ICly, then you should do the same for alcohol and cigarettes - they also have a contraband market IRL just like weed. 

 

 

[Zoinks]

Arguably there is more RP to be had within political circles for the process of attempting to legalize weed and then the RP following that of the state adapting to this new bill and shops opening up etc. than the RP of illegal marijuana sales which is usually just the same repetitive process for both buyer and seller.

 

Making it legal doesn't ruin illegal RP - most illegal Rpers I have spoke to complain about the mundanity of selling drugs, particularly something like weed, and the only thing it will effect is the easing in process of testing a character who's joining a faction. Even then, there is nothing stopping them from still trying to sell weed at cheaper prices, or giving them something else like club drugs or pills to off load before moving onto something like cocaine. 

 

There is zero point of senators if their roles can't make any meaningful change. Campaigns are useless because before they even begin, voters know nothing major can come from it, so why bother? This creates a divide in the server where the politicians RP politics and the civilians RP... just apathy. As someone who is currently roleplaying a politically minded character, it is extremely difficult to find someone to have a meaningful political conversation with that isn't in that niche circle, because frankly, no one cares. Making politics matter and allowing us to live in a dynamic, rather than static, iteration of California is, imo, much more important than keeping weed illegal for the sake of illegal sales. 

Running a dispensary once legalization has gone through would be miles more beneficial and profitable to an illegal faction than street sales of weed too. I fail to see any lose scenario here, and even if it would reduce script profit, we talk a lot about this being heavy RP and sharing a strong likeness to California, so we should follow that through in regards to this too I think. 

Tldr; putting limits on significant political change reduces RP more than legalizing weed would.