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Why are we not talking about [Legal Marijuana] in multiple states and now for Vets?
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It is not up to anyone on this forum to prove a negative.
If someone wants to claim the majority of people who want marijuana legalized are a caricature then it's up to them to prove that claim.
It's been years since I've seen a straight up long haired bearded hippy burnout stoner.
For reference, here's the first guy to purchase in Colorado under the new law. Notice the collared shirt and lack of dreadlocks.
I'm only high on bureaucracy and tax-revenue.
I'm divided on this issue. I live in Copenhagen in Denmark and there is an equally or seemingly big demand for legalizing marijuana. It is easy to get if you know the right person. During my time at the university, I ran into the occasional pothead and was okay with them smoking pot. It was their life and their choice. It was still illegal, but nobody was going to rat on anybody. Back then, I wasn't for or against it.
Then life at the university ended and I had to move places. I moved in with a friend of a friend. I had met him a couple of time and he stroke me as a goofy kind of character, but likable enough. However, he smoked pot on a daily basis whenever he would come home from work, and he was simply dreadful to be around. His eyes were blank, you couldn't ask him a serious question without getting a "I don't know" answer all the time and the apartment stank because of the weed.
I later moved out, but that experience firmly planted me in the Against faction of the debate. The method of consumption and the rate at which it is absorbed by your body makes it easy to disguise when you have smoked marijuana (save for possibly the smell). You are still left with a person whose mental faculties are somewhat hampered. To me I find it akin to a person chugging down 5 beers in a row and then meeting up with friends. At least in that case you can clearly tell, and alcohol has a much more visible damaging effect on a long term user. While there are clear differences in effects in the two examples, I feel they are on the same level when it comes to using substances which change your behavior in social settings (and not recreational social settings).
I hope that the power of the social circle weeds out the potential problems when it comes to using marijuana like the decades before with alcohol abuse. I know that my world view has been forever changed by my previous roommate, and I will never view marijuana as a positive recreational substance - only as a medical substance to treat symptoms.
But like I said, it is easy enough to get a hold of if you know the right persons. I don't know what change it would have on the societal level beyond making it more legally acceptable and having that goddamn dreadful pot smell everywhere.
So if your roommate had been an alcoholic, would you be against the idea of alcohol being legal?
Jesus Christ.
Why don't you get your own picture taken by dozens of cameras and published on the internet because I'm sure that nobody could ever possibly find something to ridicule. And I'm sure you never had a zit in your life, right?
This is what pisses me right off about any attempted honest discussion of marijuana legalization. There is always some goose who attacks the easy targets of appearances/work ethic/whatever of the perceived slacker. Because it's far easier to try and make people who have actual, reasoned arguments for ending prohibition look ugly and lump everybody in with the worst of the legalization crowd than it is to debate your position in good faith.
Gotta wonder.
Did you ever try asking him to smoke outside?
Stop being a goose, Josh. I asked a simple question because I saw something I was unsure what was. How the hell do you link that to an attack on him? Did I imply a stereotype in my message below? No? Good then.
He only smoked inside his room and attempted to keep the smell inside by insulating the room as much as possible. That was something I couldn't force him to stop doing since he was living in the apartment before me, and was best-buddies with the owner.
That didn't prevent the smell from seeping out into the rest of the apartment due to drafts.
If my roommate had been an alcoholic, I wouldn't have moved in with him in the first place. As I said, an alcoholic is much easier to spot. A marijuana user is not.
Do you find it so alien to ask a question when you see something you are unsure what is, regardless whether or not it is related to the topic at hand?
Pretty sure it's one of the 97 million medical problems that I've been assured nature's miracle plant can cure.
That may be what you et al. were discussing earlier in the thread. I had a genuine question which was unrelated to that discussion, and then decided to chip in with my own opinion while I was in the thread.
Yeah dude, light up and relax. You are harshing our mellow with your tude.
Guy looks genuinely fucking terrified though.
1) As even those who oppose decriminalisation readily admit, people can and do easily buy it anyway. The stated purpose of prohibition is something that not even its advocates can defend as having succeeded. The actual purpose - to use as legal leverage against minorities, dissidents and annoying non-conformists is tacitly admitted nearly as widely.
2) The social and health cost of MJ use is a minute fraction of the social, financial and health cost of prohibition, even if prohibition actually worked. Which everyone admits it doesn't.
3) The entire basis under which MJ was original criminalised is indisputably accepted to have been based on commercial propoganda (ref: Hearst vs hemp), a heaping helping of racism and outright lies. If weed was a person, it would have received a presidential pardon a couple of decades ago.
something being illegal a priori always causes some harm, simply by necessity of opportunity cost and the harmful nature of anti-criminal activity. punishment is harm
things default to being legal because you have to clear a pretty high bar of the harm dealt by making this illegal is smaller than the harm dealt by leaving it as it is
note that huge amounts of harmful activity is legal
the comparison to alcohol suggests this is a more complicated topic than you think
back when prohibition was legal was a man who was passionate about wine and thinking about starting a vineyard 'just in it for the legal alcohol?'
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.
given that he's still committing a federal crime I wouldn't want to be in the papers that I buy weed, employers are still assholes
I've lived with drug dealers to give me the negative view and my niece smoked up while on cancer treatment to moderate success (better than anything the hospital was giving her) so I've seen a fairly decent range of effects of weed. To me the case isn't that pot is somewhat harmful, it can be, socially. I have yet to find evidence that it actually causes serious health issues aside from the lung damage from smoking it.
Meanwhile I live in the heart of American booze culture and have two serious violent alcoholics in my family so by the standards of our laws it makes no sense whatsoever for weed to be illegal. The worst I've heard claimed is weed legalization might lead to a bunch of intoxicated driving and traffic fatalities, but I've seen no evidence of that even if it makes sense.
it does have harmful effects to the growth and development of young kids and is counterproductive when used to treat anxiety or psychoses (like paranoia).
In the hospital, it can be prescribed not for pain, but for the munchies, as eating, sleeping, and exercise are the three biggest deals for inpatients
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.
seems to be a fair bit of evidence that schedule 1 is completely nonsensical
It's safe to say the "no accepted medical use" part of the scheduling is complete and total horseshit.
IMO this is the only reason there has been a true legalization movement with such steam.
The thing with pot is that there are dozens of cannabinoids that have been identified, and the easiest way to get the effect that's desired from them is to just use the dang plant that's right there. Hopefully through a healthy method like vaporization.
If people could get their regular prescription through a plant you could pretty well bet they wouldn't be going to a pharmacy for them, but as it stands man-made chemicals happen to sometimes be better at certain things than naturally-occurring drugs. Pot is an exception for certain people suffering from certain things.
Man-made, natural, whatever. They're all drugs.
Exactly. But because one can be prescribed one is thought of as evil. And when I referred to man made, I meant all the various anti depressants that have ads like "if you have suicidal thoughts stop using" shouldn't anti depressants stop suicidal thoughts? I don't trust a lot of those. But back to the point, have you heard of Charlotte's web? Not the book, the hash oil that 2 guys are making that is very low in the CBD's that get you high and the CBN's that are thought to be medicinal (I might have these backwards) By processing it the way they are, they are committing a huge crime, but have made a medicine that is probably the best way to administer to a child that is suffering from multiple seizures a day. I just think of the wonderful things that could be if there was real money and real research behind it.
Which is a nonsensical point since I've never claimed it's not complicated nor have you shown anything to indicate what I actually said was incorrect. You've simply wandered off on some silly tangent and aren't making any sense.
In fact, the only thing you seem consistent and clear on is an attempt to perhaps subtly imply that nobody is actually in it just for legal pot. But since that's a stupid position, I'm choosing to believe you aren't making it and are instead just not making any damn sense at all.
Who said they did?
No? No. Substance abuse takes a lot of different forms. I don't know why you think someone abusing alcohol would be easy to spot but not someone abusing pot.
The reality is it could be obvious or not at all for either.
I think it's more disagreement with the implication that "being in it for the legal pot" is somehow not a perfectly reasonable and justifiable position to have. The phrasing is dismissive. Like wanting to have pot be legal so that you can partake in it legally without worry is not a good reason, not like the reasons us noble folk have for all our positions.
While that might not be what you mean it does look similar to what others say who really actually do mean that.
No; you just said, "Not every pot smoker is interested in the social justice part!" as if this was a novel discovery and/or relevant to the topic, and you posted it in order to draw a line of equivalence between a malicious apparatus that is clearly racist in persuasion and a subculture that is, at worst, selfish & apathetic.
It's a tangent from the discussion, I know, but I'd like to know.
No, I posted it in response to someone making claims about the movement being about social justice. Like, go to the last page, that's exactly what was said.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/28806415/#Comment_28806415
It's exactly relevant to the post I was responding to and then right afterwords explicitly say there ISN'T an equivalence between the two. And then you and others threw some silly fit or something about some strawman you invented, as you are doing right now with your silly and unfounded assumptions about what was said.
There are, as I said last page, two separate but overlapping issues involved in the legalize pot fight, the fight about legalizing pot and the fight about ending the drug war. This is the opposite of your claim that I'm trying to draw an equivalence.
I mean, this whole thing started with someone answering the question "Why isn't anyone talking about this?" with the answer "Because all this does is shut up the 'legalize pot!' crowd". It's implications for the social justice side are not well defined or all that robust as of now.
Yeah, I don't see anything wrong with wanting pot to be legal. But it's silly and simply wrong to pretend it's all a social justice crusade based on incarceration stats for minorities and such. I don't think the phrasing is dismissive at all unless you come in to the discussion with a chip on your shoulder about it. It's only dismissive if you believe "why shouldn't it be legal?" is a bad argument in the first place.
I dunno man it sounds like you're simplifying it a little bit. how about we talk about things instead of you saying I don't make sense repeatedly? I am not really sure how to be clearer about this, is my point absurd to anyone else?
who is doing this other than you?
so you don't think it's problematic that black people are arrested at much higher rates than white people even though they use them at the same rate, or that half of our drug arrests are for marijuana possession? What's unclear or ill-defined about either of those?