Ohio police unions stand united against legalization of marijuana

48 prevented fatal accidents sounds great! Now how many accidents would we prevent if we criminalized alcohol?

And how many more if we banned cars?
- If we just criminalized dying, we wouldn't have to worry about fatalities at all.
- It wouldn't be very good for those empty-ish parts of Ohio. Maybe if we also gave everyone a horse.
- This guy fucks
  ... cars!
  !fuckcars@lemmy.world !
Not sure if satire, or bad at history...
- Or maybe times have changed?
Criminalizing any drug just means gifting billions to organized crime and destroying the lives of millions of consumers by criminalizing them. Legalization and a focus on protection of minors, education about drugs, addiction prevention and rehab programs is what improves peoples lives. If you think criminalizing alcohol might be a good idea you should read about "The Prohibition" and how it made the american mafia the stinking rich empire it is.
What should be strictly criminalized is driving under any influence and that is the case in most countries.
Imo also driving cars in urban spaces should be criminalized but that is a different topic.
- Generally speaking I agree with you. I was trying to highlight the simplified moral calculus on display that equates the immeasurable harm that strict prohibition has created to the potential harm of losing dozens of lives. Due to the inherent complications of these questions, neither is unequivocally good or bad, but they're presented as a dichotomy that simply does not exist in reality.
  There are plenty of other ways to go about it, just like we compromised on alcohol a century ago. As a society we agreed that it comes down to personal responsibility, so how is weed really any different? Pointing to the potential harm that legalization could cause while ignoring precedent and common sense is disingenuous at best and purposely misleading at worst.
I doubt strongly their criteria for linking those accidents to pot goes beyond "this person smoked pot recently enough for it to show up in urine".

Of course they're against losing the easiest excuse they have to harass poor and/or ethnic people.

And makes no mention how many fewer people would be in prison if recreational marijuana happened. How many fewer cases would go through the courts. Nope. Nothing.

Now that is very un-American of you to say! Who do think would slave all day in the for profit prisons then? /s

Who would they arrest if marijuana was legal?

Yes... Ha Ha Ha... Yes!

I'd expect no less from #fascists.

So like what's the deal with Ohio? Is dumb their main export?

It's not Ohio, it's police unions fighting to keep arresting people for nothingcrimes. Same response from cop unions everywhere and every time anyone's proposed ending prohibition.
- This is pretty much it. Other than civil forfeiture - AKA legalized literal armed highway robbery of cash - ~~taxes~~ tickets and fines make up a startling amount of the police budget in a lot of places, maybe most of them. And we wonder why they stopped using cruisers and they all have SUVs now. In my suburb, every goddamned one of them - and there's an awful lot for some reason - is driving around in a SUV. The only cop car I've seen around is the County Sheriff.

I usually separate between good and bad cops. Headlines like this don't make it easy though.

I'll make it easy for you, there are no good cops.
- I don´t like cops because they make me uncomfortable and I would agree that probably the majority of cops are assholes but I refuse to judge all individuals in a group based on generalization.