from Hacker News

German Bundestag Passes Cannabis Legalization

by 2-718-281-828 on 2/23/24, 2:48 PM with 222 comments

  • by WirelessGigabit on 2/23/24, 5:03 PM

    And still to this day if you get caught with weed in Belgium they put you in front of a judge who is going to berate you for smoking a joint once per week.

    There are still random police checks checks between Maastricht and Belgian cities on the other side.

    Same with public transportation. Many times, when entering Belgium, cops get on the bus with a dog to see if you have weed on you.

    And this is the same country that allows people to drink a beer while driving home from work.

  • by tempodox on 2/23/24, 4:14 PM

    So it becomes technically legal, but they put so many obstacles in your way that buying illegally will hardly lose attraction. Cannabis dealers won't go out of work any time soon.

  • by brodo on 2/23/24, 2:59 PM

    It's a big step and still a compromise. Let's see how this whole non-commercial approach works out. I know some people who don't want to get into growing and don't want to join a club.

  • by ulrischa on 2/23/24, 4:21 PM

    This map shows where you actually can consume cannabis in Berlin, taking into account the distance rules to schools etc. https://bubatzkarte.de/#10/52.5242/13.3553

  • by sva_ on 2/23/24, 2:59 PM

  • by pantalaimon on 2/23/24, 3:10 PM

    relevant for HN: The Joint Routing Protocol: http://darklab.org/jrp.txt

  • by caeruleus on 2/23/24, 6:23 PM

    There's a nuance to this that I haven't seen mentioned so far:

    With this law, Cannabis will be removed from the list of scheduled drugs and turned into a simple prescription drug. It will be a lot less complicated to prescribe medical Cannabis.

  • by TillE on 2/23/24, 3:20 PM

    I've read so much hand-wringing German coverage of this issue, and while sometimes comparisons are made to other countries, it's almost never mentioned that cannabis has been legal for half of the US population for years now, and the sky hasn't fallen.

    The system set up by this law is extremely dumb, but at least small home grows are legal, and the government is still exploring a path to commercial sales that would be compliant with EU law.

  • by faeriechangling on 2/23/24, 6:20 PM

    As legalization goes underway we’re now aware of how smoking and vaporizing seem to be linked to endothelial cell damage and heartattacks, probably not great for potency either. Marijuana is not a safe drug nor the panacea it’s marketed as. We also seem to be seeing higher rates of addiction to marijauna, despite it being nominally non-addictive.

    Only thing which appears relatively safe is oral consumption over inhaling.

    All the same, it’s really not THAT dangerous a drug and criminalization is senseless and a total farce. All the problems legalization causes combined pale in comparison to how dumb criminalization is.

  • by qwertyuiop_ on 2/23/24, 4:39 PM

    Now the Alexanderplatz is going to stink to high heavens.

  • by eqvinox on 2/23/24, 5:05 PM

    "fun fact": if someone is for whatever reason opposed to an association growing cannabis somewhere near where they have any kind of "influence" — they'd just have to get something resembling a public playground or public sports installation there. I'm willing to bet that this is gonna be how conservative local authorities force out cannabis growing.

  • by haswell on 2/23/24, 4:45 PM

    I think that on balance, legalization is a good thing. Certainly it should not be illegal when alcohol is legal.

    At the same time, I'm about 30 days into quitting entirely after realizing that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with it. I'm experiencing intense anxiety, dark thoughts, and have struggled with the intensity of REM rebound. My resting heart rate immediately went up about 15BPM on average as my body starts the process of finding its new equilibrium.

    I first started using it "medicinally" to cope with poor sleep and depression. It actually helped lower my anxiety (with the right strain). It suppresses REM sleep and dreams, which was beneficial since my dreams tended to be part of the reason I had such poor sleep. For a time, it was incredibly helpful, and it helped me establish some better habits and process some difficult things.

    But over time, it crept into more and more parts of my life. I never went full "wake & bake", but found myself wanting to use it earlier and earlier each day. When I did use it recreationally, I started to feel the pull even stronger. It started to majorly impact my short term memory, and I started noticing myself forgetting important things while exploring a new relationship. I started to feel like it was no longer beneficial, and decided to quit. And that's when I realized how hard it was to quit. I tried and failed multiple times before finally building enough willpower to actually do it. And there's this part of me that still worries that I'll fall back into it when things get hard. For better or worse, I'm dealing with some really difficult situations in my life and I'm staying away from it anyway. This gives me optimism, but damn, I didn't think it would be this difficult.

    In many ways, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far with legalization. This is not to imply I think it shouldn't be legal, but that the culture around it and the public messaging hasn't really caught up with the reality of the potential for harmful use. The public is well aware of the downsides of alcohol use, and there are well-established methods and institutions to help people deal with alcohol addiction and recovery. If someone is an alcoholic, the public understands the severity of this addiction, and recognizes the challenge that such a person faces in staying sober.

    But people who are addicted to cannabis often have a hard time convincing people that this is a real issue. The fact that it's not physically addictive in the same ways as alcohol and other drugs has led to the misconception that the addiction potential is not real and that the difficulty of managing it is not real. The warnings that "using this can be habit forming" don't seem to convey the reality of what it feels like to form that habit, and how hard it can be to break it. Growing communities like /r/leaves and /r/Petioles tell this story over and over.

    I think that the extremely high THC strains, and even higher THC concentrations in concentrates and cartridges has a lot to do with this. The stuff people are getting these days isn't your hippy uncle's weed, and while the public consciousness is calibrated on the relatively harmless stuff, the stuff that people are using all day looks nothing like that.

    All of this to say: be careful. I have had some incredibly good experiences with it, and I think it helped me open my mind. It helped me through a tough time. It's also really enjoyable. But it has a much darker side than many people realize, and it took me far to long to accept that I might be one of the people who can't have a healthy relationship with it. And the fact that I'd had a "take it or leave it" feeling about it for years lulled me into a false sense of security. The slide towards maladaptive use happened gradually and took awhile to notice.

    I hope that with the continued movements towards legalization, there is also an increase in public awareness and support for people who get themselves into trouble. More focus on the safety concerns of high THC strains and harmful use. More growers who focus on medicinally useful products vs. just chasing the highest THC.

  • by aChattuio on 2/23/24, 5:48 PM

    FYI: the German discrimination was/is so strong that you will lose your driver license when they catch you with weed nearly independent of the amount and location (Saturday park big city)/no car in sight

  • by rvnx on 2/23/24, 3:06 PM

    Curious to know what impact it will have on criminality.

    If dealers are making lot of money from cannabis, and the state removes that opportunity from them, then they may switch to more disturbing businesses.

  • by jenadine on 2/23/24, 8:43 PM

    And can you drive a car a couple of days after taking weed without losing your driver licence?

    In Germany, the limit of THC in the blood while driving is almost zero, AFAIK

  • by slashdev on 2/23/24, 3:38 PM

    I don't use cannabis, but I wonder how much cannabis, alcohol, television, social media, etc sap energy and drive from people in general. At a societal level, is that partially responsible for the decrease in entrepreneurship? How could we tell?

    Less entrepreneurship means less innovation and less jobs and less tax revenue, it's bad for society overall.

  • by m3kw9 on 2/23/24, 3:45 PM

    The issue with cannabis as a social thing is that it tastes and smell bad, worse than cigs.

  • by rileycantread on 2/23/24, 3:03 PM

    bluntsmökenzeit

  • by reneberlin on 2/23/24, 5:11 PM

    I personally prefer "woman on weed" much more than those on alcohol. But i think that wasn't the topic at all :)

  • by weinzierl on 2/23/24, 3:09 PM

    EDIT: After checking what has passed, everything I wrote seems to hold up.

    Source:

    https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/service/gesetze-...

    I've not looked into what exactly passed, but the proposal was joke. Even more so, it was joke regardless where you stand on this topic - and that's quite an achievement.

    The proposal was constructed in a way that it technically legalized, but in a way that I'm sure will be of no practical relevance.

    According to the proposal, to buy legally you had to be a member of a registered club, so no anonymity.

    The club could only sell what it produces (three plants per member) and could only have a restricted number of members. The club can sell at most 50 g per month, it needs an addiction prevention officer, it cannot be near a kindergarden, and so on. Very bureaucratic, so these clubs will be exactly as popular as intended.