To wring silver lining from an election that has left millions consumed by anxiety, cannabis is a good place to start.
Of the five states considering legalizing recreational marijuana on Tuesday, four passed their proposals. Meanwhile all three states considering medicalization voted to permit medical use of the drug, and Montana voted to expand its existing medical marijuana laws.
Over 64 million Americans—more than one-fifth of the country’s population—now live in states where cannabis is fully legal. An unprecedented portion of the public has firmly rejected the Drug War-era relic that is criminalization. And a majority of states now rebuke the federal government’s long-debunked claim that this plant has no medical value.
These are the states that joined the train.
- California passed Proposition 64 with a 56 percent majority. The law allows adults aged 21 years or older to grow, possess, and use marijuana, while installing a tax on both cultivation and retail sales.
- Maine, where votes are still being counted, is projected to pass Question 1, the Maine Marijuana Legalization Measure. The state first legalized medical marijuana in 1999. Under the new law, cannabis is regulated like an agricultural product rather than a drug.
- Massachusetts passed Question 4, the Massachusetts Marijuana Legalization Initiative, by over 7 percentage points. The measure allows the possession, use, distribution, and cultivation by any person aged 21 and older. It also installs a much smaller retail marijuana sales tax than most recreational states.
- Nevada voted yes on its legalization initiative, Question 2, which allows adults aged 21 or older to possess, consume, and cultivate marijuana for recreational purposes. The initiative installs a 15 percent excise tax.
- Florida voters overwhelmingly supported Amendment 2, the state’s medical marijuana legalization initiative, which carried over 71 percent of the vote. The state previously passed the Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act of 2014, which allowed limited access to non-smoked, low-THC marijuana. Amendment 2 defines and expands who can receive medication. The laws permits medical marijuana for patients with cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.
- North Dakota passed its medical marijuana initiative, Measure 5, with over 63 percent of the vote. The measure permits treatment for patients with a wide range of debilitating conditions and allows the Department of Health to expand patient coverage over time.
- Arkansas, in an expectedly tight race, voted to legalize medical marijuana for 17 qualifying conditions. The new law will apply normal state and local sales taxes to medical marijuana sales.
- Montana has been fighting for years in courts to fend off challenges to the medical marijuana legalization measure it passed in 2004. This week Initiative 182 passed with a sizable majority, amending the original legislation to widely expand patient access and provider capacity.
President-elect Trump pledged during his campaign to treat “marijuana and legalization” as a “state issue” and said he’s “100 percent” in favor of medical marijuana. If he holds to his word, there may be no more progress until the mid-term election, but these states can at least count on the federal government to not intervene. For now, this landmark legislation appears to be protected.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.