Amazon is pushing for more defense contracts: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-industry-seeks-bigger-role...

To do that you need engineers who can hold a security clearance. To hold a security clearance you can't violate federal law despite what your state laws say is legal. I think this is about more than warehouse employees.

They push so heavily in their press release[0] and their lobbying letter[1] about how this "disproportionately affected communities of color". I'm sure that is true, and it's an important problem.

But I'm almost certain this has nothing to do with Amazon's true reasons for doing this: it's just a great way to frame it as them caring about something that comes as a nice byproduct of increased profits for them. I find that pretentiousness a bit gross!

[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-is... [1]: https://assets.aboutamazon.com/3e/53/014acc0843c3b6d5c12b06d...

I wish they'd do this in the UK. At the moment we have a real naked emperor situation where more and more anti-drugs legislation gets passed to appease the ridiculous "Vernon Dursley" characters that the focus groups think make up most voters, but in reality pot is common enough to be seen as on par with speeding or pirating MP3s to most well-adjusted people.

It's time the legal reality reflected objective reality here. Legalisation is now consistently out-polling prohibition, it's an open secret that prohibition has been a litany of failure by every objective measure, yet for some reason our politicians are like the Japanese holdouts in the 1950s still hopelessly fighting a war that was lost long ago. It's time we told the remaining hysterical moral puritans to get back in their boxes and finally adopt a sensible policy towards the legalisation of cannabis. If pure polling won't make this happen, maybe corporate lobbyists will do some good for society by accident.

I really think pot should be legal...but I find the smell of smoked pot so rancid I wish their would be a big push to move away from that form of consumption. Want to get high? Go ahead, just don't light a stink bomb off as you do

So many people are looking for selfish motives here, or even (because it's Amazon) sinister ones. I doubt they're sitting in a board room twirling their mustaches and cackling about the chaos they'll sew once they control pot distribution. I do believe they're doing this to make more money: my reasoning is that that's what for-profit companies do. But, just because it's Amazon doesn't mean you have to oppose this. Try to imagine a massive corporation lobbying for legalizing marijuana twenty years ago, and take the win!

Well now that cannabis legalization is useful to our corporate masters with their lobbying tentacles deep in the digestive and reproductive tracts of our elected and appointed officials then it's a fait accompli.

Of course, Amazon must develop all expanding consumer markets given the ease with which it can enter them. Amazon will make billions and quickly became the market leader if it becomes federally legal.

> "We've found that eliminating pre-employment testing for cannabis allows us to expand our applicant pool," Amazon senior VP of human resources Beth Galetti said.

As soon as I read that headline I figured this had at least something to do with it.

I wish people were more suspicious of these mega cult corporations. Amazon is not doing this or anything out of some kind of warm spot in their frozen corporate hearts.

Just like when the internal Amazon emails revealed the cynical reason that Amazon, and likely all other corporations, support "diversity" is that diversity causes disunity, disorganization, and weakness among the workers that then do not unite and form unions or have any demands or unity that can create leverage over the corporate masters.

I don't know why Amazon supports pot legalization, but we know why Amazon supports diversity and it's not for reasons that their Department of Propaganda broadcasts to the masses, so it seems extremely unlikely that Amazon would have somehow had an epiphany to not be a typical psychopathic corporation.

I think it is a good idea. I have often suspected the alcohol and tobacco lobbies have demonised Pot for years and are, in part, responsible for the harsh Pot laws we endure. When I compare the deadly legacy of death sown by alcohol and tobacco to the more or less non existent death rate due to Pot it makes me wonder why we have these laws - if not such a concerted lobbying effort by these lobbies. As for me, I do not drink or smoke Pot(or tobacco), but I do suck nicotine 4Mg tablets from Walmart 2 per day - keeps me thin, no other apparent effect. These nicotine inhalers (Juul, etc) that ended up doing lung damage and killing people would have been OK if they went with care and evaluated before release, so it was only nicotine you breathed. The added chemicals did the killing, just like it is the tar and chemicals in combustion smoking that kills you. Then the millions of people harmed by the police and prison systems for alcohol and Pot offences - remove the Pot offences, wipe that slate clean, empty the prisons of Pot offenders, clean their records, fully expunge that past..

I hope the government acts on this imitative. The states that have approved Pot have shown already that Pot is not a problem at all.

If you want an idea for corporations are going to act politically, check out libertarianism.

Basically: Anything that can be commercialized should be legal. Social things: Meh, whatever, really.

Brave New World gets one more step closer. We can soon rename pot to soma.

A lot of people would need to work less if not paying for addictions. Encouraging more pot use is good for those who depend on labor.

To be honest most of the fascination with pot is the fact that it's illegal and you are not supposed to smoke it.

Governments around the world should think long and hard before legalizing it because as soon as they do, people will move to the next thing. Maybe something that it's both illegal and won't cause much harm such as cocaine and party drugs. Still more harmful than pot though.

For sure there would be a sudden spike if you could buy pot at Whole Foods, but I'd be surprised if 1 year after legalization there are huge differences vis-a-vis the current regime

The way I see it , alcohol is the layer0 . People use it to lower their own inhibitions and also groups as a whole to lower the group's inhibitions.

Once a substance that can perform the aforementioned function is provided and legal, everything else becomes a contest for people trying to one-up each other.

And I think pot is included in it, but also cigarettes and all the other drugs.