First from your comments I don't think you have ever been stoned, which btw is completely different than being drunk. From my own personal experience, drink and weed get you intoxicated at about the same rate. The anti-drug crowd have spewing the line that today's weed is an order of magnitude stronger than the weed on the street in the 60s. They are implying that the today's weed potency is something to be feared. As an analogy, a person goes to a bar to get a drink. Does he/she go to the bar tender and order a single drink or the whole bottle? And is he/she really smart enough to know the difference? If you gave a known pot smoker a whole joint and told him to smoke, he would smoke a little bit at a time. If you slipped him some killer sh*t, he would figure out really quickly that it would only take one or two hits to get the job done.
It doesn't matter whether I smoke or not but I think that if it were legal I would. That's my answer...
If someone is likely to drive intoxicated, what difference does the drug make? If they would not then they might take a hit, and stop. If they would not they might have one beer and stop. If they would they might drink 10 Buds and drive. If they would they might smoke a joint and drive. No matter how you cut it studies have shown some stoner is a much safer driver than someone drinking. On the additives issue: if it were legal it would be cheap enough to ingest in other ways than smoking it. So you COULD add stuff to your pot, like brownie mix! Other than the smoke itself there are no health hazards to mar1juana use. On the genie in the bottle point: the genie was never in the bottle. What you've witnessed is 40 years of trying to put the genie IN the bottle. It don't work.
you may be right...but it's not entirely out of the bottle...i mean, you've already heard another brother say if it were legal he would smoke some. i wonder how many others would say the same...and what that would ultimately mean. again..i don't pretend to know! and i'm sorta in the middle on this issue.
I don't really think AB was necessarily saying that he would be a first time smoker if it were legal, just that it's not legal right now so he didn't want to flat-out cite his habits on a public message board. But by the same sense, sure it would spark new users, but it would definitely curb a lot more underage users if it were regulated.
If pot were legal I would do it socially and cut back on beer (my 2 six packs a year habit ). I do not see doing pot more than once or twice a week, with most weeks doing none at all. BTW, brownies are the way to go and leave the smoking to the cancer chemo patients who don't have a choice. My best bet would be that legalizing pot would dramatically impact beer sales (as well as snack foods sales).
mar1juana is also a precursor to relapse with other drugs. Thus making it very dangerous to those who are already addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and other drugs known to have addictive properties. If you legalize it then more people are going to relapse back to the heavy drugs. Any mood altering drug that could lead to dependency is trouble in my mind. We should never legalize it.
PSJ, this means we should make booze and coffee illegal too... and nasal spray and cough syrup for that matter... Definitely cough syrup.
Exactly...at all of my Narcotics Anonymous meetings, I get to watch as former addicts decide they can handle that wimpy stuff called alcohol, and then watch how they never show up to another meeting. Addictive tendencies can be unleashed by any habitual behavior. But some get away with drinking the coffee that's served to everybody there.
as peter tosh would say "legalize it" tax it implement the same constraints as with alcohol put taxes half for education/ the other half for substance abuse programs
Some of the things that have been posted, I don't agree with. I sincerely doubt underage usage would be curbed by legaliztion, unless you think high school kids don't drink or smoke. I also disagree that no one has ever died from weed directly or indirectly. Smoking anything can give you cancer (it's fooking smoke, get a clue). Smoking pot is also known to have effects on your reflexes and decision making abilities, which means I don't want to be on the same road as a driver who is high. Finally, I don't think prices need to be reduced through legalization. Now that we have seen what the market will bear, there is no reason to lower prices. Having said all of that, I voted for legalization, because I don't like the government telling people what to do. How many of you thought a Republican voter like me would say that?
As I said before, any mood altering drug that could lead to dependency is dangerous. That doesn't mean that I would make it illegal. I trust my govenment to investigate and deem the legality of each substance. They are ones we elected to protect us. And they do a damn good job doing it. They protect us from things we wouldn't even consider protecting ourselves from. This is their job. As we assigned them to do it. You guys act as if they haven't thought this through. They have. And they've done it with the assistance of the best possible resources. You can say what you want about our elected officials, but if you ignore the fact that they have done a damn good job protecting us you are ignoring the truth. mar1juana is a mood altering drug that the U.S. goverment has drawn up laws against. I trust they have made the right decision with the information they have. That may one change. But as of today mar1juana is still considered dangerous.
Phi I don't think it is a matter of the government objectively going down the list of known substances and deeming which ones are suitable and which ones are not. If that were the case, the same logic would have to apply to alcohol -- either both would be legal or illegal. I think it's more about the fact that it is an archaic law, spawned by contempt and mistrust about who used it in the first place (those crazy native americans and their spirituality!)
It seems like you may need to get back on it to regain some reason j/k. What I am saying is if you a company has a pound of mar1juana and they could sell it for 'X' dollars. If a company could (and do not think for a minute they would not look for a way to do it) add something to it that would not change the taste or effect it dramtically (diluting it if you will) they would. Those additives generally are the things that are harmful. It was really just a thought nothing major, just my mind churning. Its really a moot point as before they ever do anything about it, it will be drawn out for an extended period of time. If it happened in the next 15 years I would be shocked.
Personally I'm very happy with my billions of my tax dollars being spent every year to arrest, prosecute, and imprison my fellow citizens for distributing a naturally occuring plant that's been cultivated over the years to increase it's yield(think corn, wheat, and every other fruit or vegetable sold in the supermarket). I'm very happy with the government spending my tax dollars on programs that been proven to be completely ineffective(think D.A.R.E). I'm very happy that the government spends millions hunting down mar1juana farmers in kentucky instead of busting crank labs in missouri and washington state. /sarcasm off legalize it, it's less dangerous, less intoxicating, and less fatal than alchohol and would bring tax money in rather than being a black hole in the federal and state budgets.
