DBWI: The 35th Annual Pot Festival is coming up.

Hey folks. As some of you may know, since it's April 20th, the Pot Festival is being held in many cities and metro areas across the country today. There's a couple of events here in Dallas that are being held that I'd like to scope out tomorrow, and I can't wait to have fun again. But what I'd like to know is, what if marijuana legalization didn't start in 1979(In California, btw; thanks, Jerry Brown.)? What if it had waited until, say, 1999 or even 2012 or something? Would it be gradual as per OTL, or could it be more sudden(like with gay marriage: no state officially recognized it until Hawa'ii did in 1986. By 1999, only a small handful of states didn't, mainly the Deep South, and Utah.)? And might it totally butterfly the festival?

OOC: POD's in 1962 or thereabouts. A more moderate Republican replaces Nixon in '68. Jimmy Carter wins two terms in office instead of just one. Soviet Union collapses in 1991 virtually as per OTL.

CaliBoy1990 said:

Hey folks. As some of you may know, since it's April 20th, the Pot Festival is being held in many cities and metro areas across the country today. There's a couple of events here in Dallas that are being held that I'd like to scope out tomorrow, and I can't wait to have fun again. But what I'd like to know is, what if marijuana legalization didn't start in 1979(In California, btw; thanks, Jerry Brown.)? What if it had waited until, say, 1999 or even 2012 or something? Would it be gradual as per OTL, or could it be more sudden(like with gay marriage: no state officially recognized it until Hawa'ii did in 1986. By 1999, only a small handful of states didn't, mainly the Deep South, and Utah.)? And might it totally butterfly the festival?

OOC: POD's in 1962 or thereabouts. A more moderate Republican replaces Nixon in '68. Jimmy Carter wins two terms in office instead of just one. Soviet Union collapses in 1991 virtually as per OTL.

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It would have seemed hypocristic to ban pot when alcohol, with nearly the same effects, is legal.

The only way to have pot banned would be to make it consumed by the riff-raff.

Johannes Parisiensis said:

It would have seemed hypocristic to ban pot when alcohol, with nearly the same effects, is legal.

The only way to have pot banned would be to make it consumed by the riff-raff.

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Well, it actually was, back in 1938.....but it's now legal everywhere in the U.S., even the Deep South, who put up the greatest opposition up until the bitter end.

OOC: POD's in the early '60s in case you missed it. BTW, an interesting piece of real-world trivia is that, by some miracle, Mississippi actually decriminalized pot as early as 1978.

Well it'll probably be a pretty big deal here in Sweden as Prime Minister Sommestad's government only finally and reluctantly legalized it last year, mostly because a lot of pressure from their coalition partners and youth leagues of course. Public toking is still banned of course, but apparently the Globe Arena in Stockholm is going to hold a big cannabis festival and weed smoking has increased exponentially since pot started being sold in state owned liquor stores (now liquor and pot sores).

If it hadn't been legalized in the US I strongly doubt any of that had happened over here. The US led the way in legalization and I doubt that the whole 420 thing would've gotten any widespread popularity unless if it was kept illegal to this day. It may have become a tiny underground thing among hardcore pot smokers or it could've just disappeared altogether.

EvilSpaceAlien said:

Well it'll probably be a pretty big deal here in Sweden as Prime Minister Sommestad's government only finally and reluctantly legalized it last year, mostly because a lot of pressure from their coalition partners and youth leagues of course. Public toking is still banned of course, but apparently the Globe Arena in Stockholm is going to hold a big cannabis festival and weed smoking has increased exponentially since pot started being sold in state owned liquor stores (now liquor and pot sores).

If it hadn't been legalized in the US I strongly doubt any of that had happened over here. The US led the way in legalization and I doubt that the whole 420 thing would've gotten any widespread popularity unless if it was kept illegal to this day. It may have become a tiny underground thing among hardcore pot smokers or it could've just disappeared altogether.

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Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate, TBH. I mean, I do realize things weren't as bad over there in terms of punishment; you may be old enough to remember decriminalization in 1986(which I only learned about a couple years ago, btw), but still, that's a pretty long wait from that to legalization, TBH.

But then again, the War on Pot did end up being pretty harsh here in the States, especially in the Southeast towards the end of the '60s and '70s(African-Americans were targeted above all others down there, possibly as revenge for the success of Civil Rights).....and that does appear to have been one of the main reasons why it gained so much steam.

EvilSpaceAlien said:

weed smoking has increased exponentially since pot started being sold in state owned liquor stores (now liquor and pot stores)

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Yeah, go Sweden!
Your western neighbour still lags behind as usual, but soon we'll probably be able to get high on our tall mountains and munch delicious herring in our fjords.
What are you going to call Systembolaget(state monopoly store) now?
System-pot-laget?

I'm hoping for a change from Vinmonopolet(the wine monopoly) to Weedmonopolet!

If not for legalization in the U.S, the Norwegian movement for legalization would be dead in the water.

Perhaps if you butterflied away Leary vs. US, which ruled the Marijuana Tax Act as being illegal. Reagan beating Unruh in the CA Governor's race might help too.

Trust us Brits to do it the hard way! True it was decriminalised in 98 after Blair won his landslide and legalised in 03. However first Brown, and then Darling milked it as a cash cow and then some! Of course if we thought that was bad then Osborne raised the taxes to be even higher than those on alcohol and tobacco! Despite this the uptake of hard drugs does seem to have entered a nosedive despite all the doom and gloom merchants predictions.
However if the US hadn't done it I can't see Blair even decriminalising let alone legalising.

Orville_third said:

Perhaps if you butterflied away Leary vs. US, which ruled the Marijuana Tax Act as being illegal. Reagan beating Unruh in the CA Governor's race might help too.

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Makes sense to me, TBH. Jesse Unruh was a decent middle of the road moderate(leaning socially liberal, and ran a little to the right economically) while Reagan was a former New Dealer turned hardcore economic rightist, who alienated a shitload of Golden State voters with his poorly thought out Medicaid rant. Unruh was also one of those on the Board for Drug Law Reform, and he helped create the bill which loosened restrictions on marijuana in 1979, effective on April 1st of that year(which was introduced in '77 by a liberal Congressman from Colorado, though I forget his name at the moment). His winning the race really helped, I think.

OTOH, I'd wonder how Southern conservatives would react with a delayed Leary v. United States; do remember that many were still smarting from the loss of not just Jim Crow, but that of openly-sanctioned minority voter repression and certain other forms of reactionary social control mechanisms, including the "anti-miscegenation" laws. Unfortunately, after the OTL ruling, there were a large number of angry protests and even a few riots across several Southern cities from Tyler, Texas to Wilmington, N.C. and back again, most heavily centered in downstate S.C. and Mississippi, and over 60 people lost their lives during that one week of February, 1977(although it was apparent even in July of '76 when the case originally went to court that it didn't have a good chance of standing).

Lindseyman said:

Trust us Brits to do it the hard way! True it was decriminalised in 98 after Blair won his landslide and legalised in 03. However first Brown, and then Darling milked it as a cash cow and then some! Of course if we thought that was bad then Osborne raised the taxes to be even higher than those on alcohol and tobacco! Despite this the uptake of hard drugs does seem to have entered a nosedive despite all the doom and gloom merchants predictions.
However if the US hadn't done it I can't see Blair even decriminalising let alone legalising.

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True. I do think it could have happened earlier if Tony Benn had won the '90 elections, though; he was well liked, and had come out in favor of decriminalization in the '80s(which didn't harm his popularity much). After all, New Zealand decriminalized in 1976 which full legalization across the country in 1982, and it wasn't even discussed much at all down there until the end of the '60s.