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[PA Comic] Friday, March 22, 2013 - The Emerald Dream, Part Three
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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Have you ever read Penny Arcade... on weed?
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
Marijuana is great though.
I'm guessing they traveled to PAX East earlier than we realize, so Mike's been using the Surface. The lines are slightly jaggy when he uses the Surface.
Then i read this and choked on my funyuns I was dipping in peanut butter.
This seems like a really huge oversimplification of people who use marijuana and want it to be legalized.
Not that I disagree with the rest of your sentiment, which is pretty spot on.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
I think at least some people would argue that this is more of a reason for making weed a fining offense instead of an incarceration offense.
The US incarcerates for way too many crimes to begin with, drug and non drug related.
Maybe you're right. My experience is mostly from talking to folks tabling for NORML at college and folks trying to convince me to come to the Global Marijuana March. I always got the impression that they wanted marijuana legalized primarily for Personal Freedom reasons, and not because of how disastrous the War on Drugs is. When I was briefly involved in Occupy Wall Street, there were always a handful of legalize-weed people in Zucotti Park/at the rallies, and it was always kind of like... what are you even doing here? Your fight for the right to smoke pot is not really capital-I Important in light of what the rest of us are talking about. I dunno, I've dealt with a lot of lefty activists and the majority of them are annoying in some way, but the weed activists were always the most annoying. But YMMV.
You don't care about "issues" with a capital I.
You're just looking for an excuse to fuck with DEM STONERS, MAN! DEM FUCKIN' STONERS, SMOKIN' THEIR POT WEEDS. Fucking with them, with a capital F.
It's a free country, you can get mad at people for doing things to themselves. Big deal.
But don't try to act all altruistic and high and mighty about it.
You are not a better person than them.
You are not a better person for pretending to care about Issues.
SMOKE TILL YOU TOKE
...I smoke weed on the regular, dogg.
I also think weed culture and most "weed activists" are super annoying.
Also, you don't know what I care and don't care about.
it is my gift to you
People generally hang around others of equal intelligence, income, background. Gabe might not look around in his life at present and see any 'damage' that drugs may do. Those that drugs have ravaged usually fall out of our social groupings I've found. Due to my job and social hangout I see those that have fallen to the chemical recreation trap almost on a weekly basis. I understand that many users lead normal, productive lives and dont let weed, or whatever, interfere. I know of several like this.
I tried marijuanna myself twice when I was in high school. Didnt have any epiphanic moment or amazing fun. Never bothered going back.
I see Gabe's story kinda like this:
5 men play a form of Russian Roulette. Five guns in a box, only one has a bullet. The first man picks a gun and pulls trigger. Nothing. He suddenly is overcome with the realization of how precious life is and how this game has taught him how he should grasp every moment of it in sheer joy. It changes his life forever. The second man pulls his trigger. Nothing. He decides that though the immediate experience was exhilirating & scary, this really isnt productive and never does it again. The third man decides that the game just isnt for him in the first place and never participates. The fourth man pulls the trigger and *BLAM*. The fifth man has to clean the fourths brains off the wall.
Gabe might be the first man.
I guess I'm the second man.
I've seen every one of these men in my life.
i just
laughing too hard
can't reply
You could substitute "Games" for weed in this and you'd have the 'video games = killing kids' correlation spewed by the media. If you think weed is to blame for your friend's state, you may want to read up on addictive personalities and mental disorders.
oh look, a rational response, i was expecting nothing but derp from both sides judging by how the thread was going.
This. People with schizophrenia or drug problems tend to have trouble managing normal lives and are often isolated, homeless etc.
Given that 1 in 100 people have schizophrenia, I was initially surprised that they are not as visible a part of society.
It gives the impression that these problems are not as big as they are. They do exist but are hidden from the everyday lives of most people.
I also have a very negative bias against weed because of all the stoners I've met (many of whom would seem to be the mature responsible partakers I am often assured are everywhere) who are like a living gallery of cautionary tales.
If you mean my comment, I was talking about the current trend of blaming video games whenever some nutball goes on a school/mall shooting rampage. That post seemed to be assuming weed was to blame for the friend's behavior when, as glithert said, weed just happened to be the first thing they did due to its relative ease of access.
People who say weed is harmless are full of it too; it's a drug that affects people differently and like anything else, needs to be managed with care.
So do you define any use of a (now semi-legal for them) drug as "abuse"? If you're referring to Gabe's experience, sounds like that was as far from abuse as you can get - got it from a trusted source, used it under controlled conditions by being with someone who he trusted as well.
Not trying to convince you to run out and smoke pot, just really curious about your belief (as I understand it) that any drug use makes someone beneath you and there's something wrong with them. If you haven't read Gabe & Tycho's posts about this topic, specifically how Gabe had what sounds like a similar attitude as you, please go read them now.
Work, school, or home failure to function or meet expectations regarding obligations
Interpersonal problems made worse due to the drug's use
Legal problems as a result of drug use
Dangerous behavior regarding use
Marijuana certainly fits the bill, albeit with a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy regarding the legal aspect. If you think that the three criteria applying to schedule 1 drugs (abuse potential, no medical use, no safe use) make no sense in the terms of the "badness" of the drug when compared to a lot of harder drugs that have lower schedules, you are mostly right, because the schedule system was primarily designed with medical purposes in mind. Marinol, which is purified THC, is actual Schedule III because of its primary medical use to stimulate appetite, even though Marinol, unlike marijuana, has had cases of overdose resulting in death. However, that doesn't mean that there is no sense to the schedule system: marijuana has suffered as a drug from its inability to be adequately regulated as a controlled substance, which is in part due to its ease of production. If you're wondering why alcohol and tobacco don't get such a rap, it's mainly because they got to be institutionalized and more importantly incorporated before the standards were set in place. That's it. They are far worse drugs but it is impossible to get rid of them, and we have distrusted ourselves regarding new substances because at the beginning of the century, cocaine was regarded in much the same way as spice melange, and that ruined it for all future drugs for what looks like the next few centuries.
Marijuana has been shown through the literature to stunt growth in children (with about as much evidence as Adderall has for the same thing) and is a risk factor for the development of psychosis in people predisposed to schizophrenia. It's not a good drug for people suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, or anxiety, because while it can help people in those areas, it has also been shown to have the opposite effect, exacerbating those symptoms. It's not really a wonder drug for the treatment of any psychiatric problem, and its application in pain relief is in that grey area of neuropathic and neurogenic pain, where it sits in the back of a bus crowded with a lot of better studied therapies for that purpose. As a drug, it's really gotten the short shrift, but that doesn't mean it can suddenly start getting special attention. Working with what we've got, it's a really crappy drug medically, much like St. John's Wort, where the only thing that was proved for the latter was that it makes a lot of drugs, including birth control (!) drugs, more ineffective than anticipated with no proven benefit, making the drug overall harmful just because it's not as useful as other drugs with the exact same side effects.
As for people with addictive personalities, addictions and stereotyped behaviors are usually generated to a specific substance or habit. Some people just lose control around video games, others around gambling, and others around drugs. Once your brain latches on to one behavior, it reinforces itself over and over, burrowing a dangerous habit reactive only to that one specific stimulus that triggered it and usually nothing else. It is, like AA says, kind of like an allergy that only occurs in your head, where you become a person forever incapable of responsibly dealing with one or more specific things. Regardless of the law, people with gambling problems should not ever gamble, but that doesn't mean they can't play video games or smoke cigarettes. It's not a problem with a person's overall personality; they just have a specific kryptonite of activity or substance that will forever affect their lifestyle. And like allergies and kryptonite, some people can be loaded with the stimulus all the time and never develop a harmful reaction. Video games can be harmful to individuals on a case-by-case basis, but that is not an isolated fault of the video game or of the person, who most of the time still retains the potential to function very highly in society. Some people can just not stand that combination, and it's really too bad for them.
Any activity or substance that generates reward in a very efficient manner can be addictive. It's hard to draw the line at how efficient something needs to be to be considered an addiction risk, but you can ballpark it with prevalence measures and make a case to monitor or outlaw it based on the estimated epidemiologic harm. That's where science is supposed to come in, and unfortunately we are seeing the effects of people slacking off in that department. Sorry about that. Now that we've got a bunch of test subjects we can monitor over the next few years, we'll get the facts you need, I promise.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Good news! It didn't do that.
Every single person I've seen who relies on drugs for some reason has a non-drug related mental illness (e.g. Bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders). To me, this makes sense, if your experience of reality can change abruptly for the worse completely outside of your control, then anything that gives you control of your experience is going to be incredibly appealing. Would you rather be unable to experience motivation or joy (depression) for several days or be stoned and watching cat videos (at least you'll be happy)? I'd pick the latter, but fortunately I don't have to deal with that choice.
D.A.R.E does people a huge disservice by lying about the dangers of drugs. Drugs are dangerous, but they aren't 100% dangerous in the way D.A.R.E. portrays them to be. This is bad, because healthy people will try drugs, have no problems, they tell all their friends that D.A.R.E. lied, and then people who have mental illness issues try drugs, and start to self medicate with them. I mean, D.A.R.E. even villainizes alcohol, which is legal and something almost everyone can handle.
I think D.A.R.E. would be more effective if it was more honest about drugs: which kinds are addictive, what are their side effects, who is at risk to use them to self medicate, and how to identify and deal with mental illness so you don't feel like you need to turn to drugs.
If you met a stoner who was a cautionary tale, they aren't the mature responsible partakers.
You probably haven't met the responsible ones because, you know, they're responsible and you have a very clear bias against them. So why would someone who responsibly (and secretly) used marijuana tell you?
In my experience, the really responsible users keep it to themselves for the most part and don't use it as an excuse to act all CA-RAAAAZY. A responsible smoker is capable of being productive at work and does not necessarily dress or act the way you might expect them to. In other words, you would probably never ever be able to tell them apart from people who don't smoke.
Such people exist.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
A lazy slacker who is good for nothing would probably be that way with or without marijuana.
To be fair, I'm sure there are people out there who start using marijuana and then they let it affect their work ethic. There are people who do the same thing with alcohol. Yet we would never consider banning alcohol again because we know what happens if we do that. The point is that these people who latch on to a substance and let it affect their daily lives have issues aside from the drug, and banning the drug does not do away with those issues, nor does it keep them from obtaining the drug. So ... what is the point of banning the drug?
Isn't it our responsibility as a society to protect people from that scenario?
Yes, marijuana is also an old drug, but its use did not ever become an integral and accepted part of society.
Food is different as it is an essential for life. Hard to restrict that.