The Marijuana Debate
- Thread starter TLDR20
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It's the truth that just happens to be sadly humorous. No, I don't think it is the greatest threat in the world, but it's a current event, and it's a new, huge threat that undermines parents and teachers and law enforcement- straight from the White House.
Think about how much pot was smoked when it was labeled as a "gateway drug", and a terrible thing. All the propaganda films in schools, the TV commercials, "The More You Know" with the flying star on Saturday mornings. Endless rounds of Officer Friendly coming to school telling kids to stay off dope. And still there was always the kid smoking weed, and don't tell me everyone in school didn't know who that one out of control pot head was. He's the one who didn't know when to stop and his speech was slurred and he was last on every test, and he was allowed to graduate because nobody knew what else to do with him. I know I knew one like that at every school I went to (and there were many schools because we were military). Other kids smoked it too, but nowhere near as much as the pot head kid- mostly because of a broad range of psychological deterrents and the illegality of it. That's how much pot was smoked back when it was "bad". Now that it's "ok"?
Did you ever think you would live to see the day when the President of the United States went on record saying it was less harmful than alcohol? While serving in the Office of the Presidency? Because he said it. Yes, the full quote is a paragraph long, and says "I don't recommend it", etc. But you know the part that every kid in America heard is, "hey the President says it's okay, screw my parents".
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TLDR20
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It's the truth that just happens to be sadly humorous. No, I don't think it is the greatest threat in the world, but it's a current event, and it's a new, huge threat that undermines parents and teachers and law enforcement- straight from the White House.
Think about how much pot was smoked when it was labeled as a "gateway drug", and a terrible thing. All the propaganda films in schools, the TV commercials, "The More You Know" with the flying star on Saturday mornings. Endless rounds of Officer Friendly coming to school telling kids to stay off dope. And still there was always the kid smoking weed, and don't tell me everyone in school didn't know who that one out of control pot head was. He's the one who didn't know when to stop and his speech was slurred and he was last on every test, and he was allowed to graduate because nobody knew what else to do with him. I know I knew one like that at every school I went to (and there were many schools because we were military). Other kids smoked it too, but nowhere near as much as the pot head kid- mostly because of a broad range of psychological deterrents and the illegality of it. That's how much pot was smoked back when it was "bad". Now that it's "ok"?
Did you ever think you would live to see the day when the President of the United States went on record saying it was less harmful than alcohol? While serving in the Office of the Presidency? Because he said it. Yes, the full quote is a paragraph long, and says "I don't recommend it", etc. But you know the part that every kid in America heard is, "hey the President says it's okay, screw my parents".
I think I agree with the President on this issue. I don't think Marijuana is more dangerous, or even close to as dangerous as alcohol. And as to the pothead kids, there are also plenty of kids getting shitfaced in school. Kids were even soaking tampons in vodka a few years back, so using your logic we should ban alcohol. Marijuana doesnt have the same effects on things like inhibition, it is less likely to end up causing a long term problem, and there is almost zero risk of overdosing. So comparatively to alcohol I don't think it is as dangerous. I also think labeling a substance a threat that over a 100 million people admit to having used in the past is a little out of touch with reality.
Lastly, the tax money itself is worthwhile to me. Tax that shit at 25%, and then imagine the possibilities. Using the most conservative estimate possible, say 1 million people buy 60 dollars worth of weed nationally per day, which is a low estimate. That would be 15 Million dollars of new tax revenue daily or almost 5 1/2 BILLION dollars a year. Now add that to the decreased cost of enforcement, and allowing people the personal freedom to make choices that impact themselves, and I think you have a recipe for success. Now for shits and giggles lets use the actual statistics for how much tax revenue this could realistically generate. a 2009 study stated that 5.5% of Americans already use the drug, so that is roughly 16.9 Million people. Now lets say they only buy the drug weekly, and again use the 60 dollar per buy price.
Now we are up over 13 BILLION in tax revenue. It seems silly to arrest a 21 year old for having a little pot, when they can go to the liquor store and buy an almost unlimited supply of liquor, which has been proven to be as bad or worse than pot.
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The so called war on drugs has turned into nothing more than a revenue scheme for federal, state, and local governments. What they fail to realize is that by exercising control over the sale of legal marijuana, they can make a hell of a lot more money.
As for gateway drugs, most everyone tries alcohol first...
Hmmm. I don't see the overall use of pot as a threat, but I do think the long term "legal" use would have an adverse effect on the next couple of generations. I've met more than a few burnouts, many former hippie types, and trying to have an intelligent conversation with them is next to impossible.
Do I think kids who smoke pot in high school or college in a more recreational use, tend not to be as bad. Especially after they have stopped smoking for a while and become part of the workforce, started familys, etc. However the other side, the hippie type who smoked daily and views it as a passive resistance (or whatever they want to say to justify it) tend to be very lazy, lacking in logical reasoning and understanding. I've seen this with pain killers and other semi accepted drug use.
Personally, seeing how the hippie generation is now running our country, and know many "still holding on to the 60's" types, the amount of burnouts and unintelligent running around, I don't see this as a good idea at all.
I will agree that alcohol is not better, someone who drinks all the time for many years develops health issues and are normally unrational as well.
From the tax generating stand point I think it makes sense to legalize pot, however, when we are running trillions of debt and deficit, billions of revenue is hardly something to get excited about.
My $.02
Do I think kids who smoke pot in high school or college in a more recreational use, tend not to be as bad. Especially after they have stopped smoking for a while and become part of the workforce, started familys, etc. However the other side, the hippie type who smoked daily and views it as a passive resistance (or whatever they want to say to justify it) tend to be very lazy, lacking in logical reasoning and understanding. I've seen this with pain killers and other semi accepted drug use.
Personally, seeing how the hippie generation is now running our country, and know many "still holding on to the 60's" types, the amount of burnouts and unintelligent running around, I don't see this as a good idea at all.
I will agree that alcohol is not better, someone who drinks all the time for many years develops health issues and are normally unrational as well.
From the tax generating stand point I think it makes sense to legalize pot, however, when we are running trillions of debt and deficit, billions of revenue is hardly something to get excited about.
My $.02
Where should we get the other 99% of the tax revenue needed to pay off our national debt? $13B is a drop in the bucket.
I am not a fan of sin taxes. Either outlaw it, or allow it, but don't tax it because you can get away with it.
TLDR20
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Well the precedent is there for them to tax it. Like I said those were very conservative estimates, 13 Billion could very easily be double that.... And since when was adding revenue to reduce a deficit a bad thing? Because right now, like it or not people are spending money on weed.
Brill
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Come, come now. You know that if the people "give" Congress $1, they will spend $5 "for the people".
TLDR20
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So we are pre-emptively giving up now?
Never.
Tax revenue from MJ legalization primarily goes to the states that legalize it. To a state… a billion is a very big deal - especially if the state is in financial trouble (which most of them are)
Brill
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Once the Feds see the booty, they'll be all over it too so "the big corporations pay their fair share." We'll see price control too via same games as in crude oil.
Not at all: I "give up" every 15 April.
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Weed is a comparitively NEW drug. Alcohol has been in human beverages since at least 7,000 BC by some estimates. From what I understand, marijuana smoking was a very rare thing until the 1960's in America. Before that, it was extremely limited in use, not cultivated in large numbers, and almost always connected in some way to either: (a.) the underground music scene around the turn of the century through about the 1920's, or, prior to that (b.) Native American consumption which is extremely difficult to gauge how much that consumption was, but it's likely it was isolated since there's no record of its mass production in the strata or written record.
What I do know is weed is famous for
(a.) killing brain cells
(b.) erasing random memories for anyone who smokes it occasionally (possibly due to dead brain cells)
(c.) creating kids who lack motivation, desire, or intensity when it comes to ambition / aspiration
(d.) long term increased risk of reduced reaction time, and some studies have suggested long term reduction in ability to stay focused
As for your comparison with alcohol, this is using flawed arguments. One cannot compare alcohol ABUSE problems to marijuana USE. One must compare alcohol use (such as that percieved by the general population as "moderate") with people who use similarly "moderate" quantities of marijuana. This is where the discussion gets difficult, though, since "moderate" is pretty subjective, depending on who you ask. But to compare a homeless degenerate wino in the gutter who's blown out his liver, and has diabetes and no teeth to someone who "tokes here and there", that's not a fair argument. Let's compare the 1 to 3 billion people who drink occasionally, or have a glass of wine with dinner- as has been done since at LEAST 2500 BC by society after society, and compare those MODERATE drinkers to "moderate" marijuana users (for which we admittedly have a much tinier population sampling from which to try and compile statistics.)
For me, it's an impossible task to try and draw any quality analytics out of this fringy kind of discussion. I think we both agree that all kinds of substances that play with brain chemistry can be damaging. But where I would NEVER agree is saying that marijuana is "safer" because, hey so many people I know smoked it, and they're fine. I have to say, I know thousands of people (probably) who have TRIED it, but I know perhaps a dozen or less who actually routinely smoked it for any substantial period of time, (as in FREQUENTLY) and every one of them seems slower, as if it's harder for them to keep up with a conversation. Slightly slower expressing thoughts and ideas. To me, that's bad shit. My theory is weed is a CCCP injection into our society at right around the same time (early Cold War), but that's just a theory for another thread.
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So, yeah, I'll stay quiet on this issue in my day to day life, and let those other parents be "cool" and let their kids smoke weed because the President says it's safe. And I'm going to stick to my old school ways and teach my kids it will diminish their capacity in the long run, and I'll wager that they'll do better for it in the world they're inheriting. I'm betting that the other kids smoking weed are going to end up manning the crappiest jobs, doing poorly in most life endeavors- and for a very specific reason. Once the thought is in their mind that it is "safe", they're not going to have any particular reason to practice restraint of any kind. And THAT's going to cost them.
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Well, you refer to it as though it's a zero sum proposition.
How about lost productivity due to the behavioral changes associated with the popularized consumption of marijuana? Short term ($) gain, but long term societal losses.
D
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Cannabis has been used for thousands of years . You can find evidence of its use dating back to china circa 3000 BCE. As to your list of things you "know" pot does- every single one of them can be applied to alcohol. I won't even get into your theory regarding the Commies trying to destroy American society with the sticky icky. Regarding the "abuse" vs "moderate use" argument you bring up- you yourself are using the long term effects of a heavy smoker when comparing the dangers presented by cannabis and alcohol use. We can all agree too much of anything is bad, I don't think the President is encouraging anyone to become a stoner. The basic fact that no one has ever new recorded as having overdosed on marijuana, while you can easily find dozens of people in a months time who have drank themselves to death, should be accounted for. In that sense, yes pot is less dangerous. And pot users being a smaller population? The UN estimates that 100+ million people use pot every day across the world. Between the US and EU, there have been countless studies on Pot use. And if you do a quick scan you'll find most of those either state pot is safer or they are about equal when all effects are considered.
Regarding the use among teens- where is the uproar regarding teen drinking? Or the president having a beer- isn't that encouraging kids to become alcoholics? If anything legalizing cannabis will demystify it's use and remove much of the attraction for the renegade 10th grader. Couple that with the fact that obtaining marijuana is ridiculously easy for the majority of American teens, and the kids who don't smoke now most likely won't jump off the wagon as soon as you can buy it for personal use.
One thing I'm surprised by is that you seem to usually be calling for less intrusion into the lives of citizens, and yet in this case, you seem be be taking the stance that the private lives of millions of decent cannabis users should be subjected to the social standards and expectations of others. How do you rectify your libertarianism with your obvious opposition to legalization?
Show me LEGIT medical studies from unbiased sources that show it's safe. Everything I've ever seen that was from legit sources, it makes people lose their edge, lose memory, become slower, even in what some consider "moderate" qty.
You're right about me being closer to Libertarian than anything else, but I think you misunderstand where I draw a hard edge. I personally have NO problem with adults choosing to smoke weed just purely on the principle that people should be free to consume whatever they want- harmful or not. That's why even though I personally would never drink 128 ounces of Pepsi, I absolutely hate Bloomberg for trying to ban large beverages.
Where I draw the hard edge is when the President of the United States while sitting in that most esteemed of positions decides to announce to the world that pot is less dangerous than alcohol. We get on here and discuss it like adults. We can do that. We can make decisions that we feel are best for ourselves because we have real world experience- like in my case where everyone I know who smoked heavy pot became a "dope". Your life experiences obviously have not left you feeling that way. I listen to Joe Rogan- a funny, witty comic and personality, and all he does is go on and on about how harmless weed is. We all have come to our conclusions as adults.
Kids, though, are a different story. When the President says it's okay, I'm certain kids are going to hear that little snippet saying it's basically harmless as a glass of wine with dinner (that's what my kids see at home), and they're going to light up.
Just the fact that there are SO many young people going on and on about how fine it is tells me the war for the hearts and mind about the drug has been lost.
For me, there's no doubt it's a harmful substance that in terms of millions of doses per day is on average making our people slower, slightly less sharp, less capable, slightly less competetive and less ambitious. On the basis of whatever that quantifiable effect over millions of doses per day in the general population, on that basis alone, it should be banned.
To put it another way, let's just for the sake of argument say that regular marijuana use (a couple of joints every weekend) over the course of 3 years makes a person 0.05% slower; I don't know how to more precisely articulate this, so we'll just go with that number. Maybe it's not anywhere close to that number. Maybe it doesn't affect reaction time at all, but instead it kills a few brain cells in pockets resulting in the occasional memory loss/failure. The result is that at random interval, some people fail mid-sentence, or mid-thought, or can't recall something they'd learned and otherwise would not have forgotten. Whatever the case, strictly for the sake of argument, let's say it's 0.05%.
Now imagine that instead of people willingly ingesting it, say you caught a van full of (insert ideology / organization / agency here) carrying canisters of an unknown substance that were releasing it covertly into the waters of a given population specifically for the purpose of retarding the people there with the same measurable kinds of results: reduced performance in X metric by 0.05%. Kids, pregnant women, children, etc., all ingesting this substance without their knowledge, but we knew it made them more docile, more friendly, generally develop an anti-war attitude, less combative, and then after weeks of ingestion, they begin to develop a loss of ambition and motivation. They miss school and compromise their decision making. They drop majors involving math and science in favor of "artsy" pursuits, or dropping out of school altogether. If it were XYZ organization / ideology doing it on an unsuspecting population it would be obviously wrong- a terrorist attack.
The dope smoker stereotype is there for a reason. I guess I just never bought the whole Joe Rogan / every comedian on HBO / every musician who thinks he's a genius / hollywood counterculture bit that has preached weed as harmless fun. I bought the "weed kills brain cells" preaching instead, and I can't say I've come across unbiased studies saying it doesn't kill brain cells.
For me, there's no doubt it's a harmful substance that in terms of millions of doses per day is on average making our people slower, slightly less sharp, less capable, slightly less competetive and less ambitious. On the basis of whatever that quantifiable effect over millions of doses per day in the general population, on that basis alone, it should be banned.
To put it another way, let's just for the sake of argument say that regular marijuana use (a couple of joints every weekend) over the course of 3 years makes a person 0.05% slower; I don't know how to more precisely articulate this, so we'll just go with that number. Maybe it's not anywhere close to that number. Maybe it doesn't affect reaction time at all, but instead it kills a few brain cells in pockets resulting in the occasional memory loss/failure. The result is that at random interval, some people fail mid-sentence, or mid-thought, or can't recall something they'd learned and otherwise would not have forgotten. Whatever the case, strictly for the sake of argument, let's say it's 0.05%.
Now imagine that instead of people willingly ingesting it, say you caught a van full of (insert ideology / organization / agency here) carrying canisters of an unknown substance that were releasing it covertly into the waters of a given population specifically for the purpose of retarding the people there with the same measurable kinds of results: reduced performance in X metric by 0.05%. Kids, pregnant women, children, etc., all ingesting this substance without their knowledge, but we knew it made them more docile, more friendly, generally develop an anti-war attitude, less combative, and then after weeks of ingestion, they begin to develop a loss of ambition and motivation. They miss school and compromise their decision making. They drop majors involving math and science in favor of "artsy" pursuits, or dropping out of school altogether. If it were XYZ organization / ideology doing it on an unsuspecting population it would be obviously wrong- a terrorist attack.
The dope smoker stereotype is there for a reason. I guess I just never bought the whole Joe Rogan / every comedian on HBO / every musician who thinks he's a genius / hollywood counterculture bit that has preached weed as harmless fun. I bought the "weed kills brain cells" preaching instead, and I can't say I've come across unbiased studies saying it doesn't kill brain cells.
My cousin's a pot smoking astrophysicist and is probably one of the most brilliant people I have ever met.
Honestly, the dope smoker derptard would be a fucking idiot with any other drug, and would be an idiot without drugs.
Honestly, the dope smoker derptard would be a fucking idiot with any other drug, and would be an idiot without drugs.
I haven't really been paying too much on this but for the President to say marijuana is "relatively" safe or whatever his exact wording was is irresponsible. I base that statement on the the method of ingestion. I don't use MJ but I am assuming most people smoke it. I wonder what the ramifications from a pulmonary stand point on an individual will be down the road? Look at the way we poke fun at old cigarette ads these days. 50 years ago smoking cigarettes was "harmless". I wonder if marijuana smokers will have the same penalty that tobacco smokers are getting under Obamacare?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2720277/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2720277/
