Study: Heavy mar1juana Use Doesn't Damage Brain

I know it was a Freudian slip, but did you really post THE three articles that discuss how bad it is? As in the only three?

Just kidding.

I know better than 99% of the people in this world how bad drug abuse can be. I have spent 16 years, almost half my life, researching the topic in one way or another. I was a drug abuse counselor for years and my opinion is that the drug war is too expensive, does not achieve results, and inflicts massive harm on our society.

I did not blow off your articles, I simply pointed out that there is credible science on both sides of the issue. I believe that MORE science will be the key to understanding what really causes drug abuse and also to reducing and ultimately eliminating recreational drug use. More science is not possible under the current system.

Not true, if you research, you will find several threads that I started in the Rockets Game Moves forum and just today I started a thread about Ozzy at the Hangout forum. I just started posting regularly a few weeks ago, so get used to my presence, I like it here. There are a number of VERY intelligent people here who have the ability to poke holes effectively. I love debating those kinds of people.

Thanks, I do. I have posted about my opinions over the past few weeks on a variety of subjects.

In a way, I am a bit obsessed. I have experienced in more ways than you could possibly imagine the pain of drug abuse. I have heard so many stories from so many people and in my idealistic youth, I was a staunch prohibitionist. As I have matured, I have grown to see that prohibition causes more harm than drug abuse ever could.

I KNOW, down to the core of my being, that a healthcare and education based approach would succeed where a system of interdiction and incarceration has failed. We can get our nation's kids off drugs, we are just going to have to face stark reality before that happens.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I have already started reading. I have a copy of The Expectant Father and am enjoying reading it.

I believe that I am ready, especially when it comes to steering my children away from drugs. I know more about it and have helped so many people give them up that I have a wealth of information to guide me on my way.

I am on this "crusade" because of all of the children who have parents that will not be able to steer their kids this way. I want to put EFFECTIVE barriers between our children and drugs. I know that if we can keep kids from deciding to use drugs until adulthood, they will decide not to use them based on the honest to God truth about the effects and consequences of drugs.

I have seen it happen over and over again with my own eyes.

 

I read what I write several times before I post, which is more than I can say for some people. I pull up stats from wherever I find them, but I document my stats and if you question any of them, let me know and I will substantiate them for you.

I never asked why they were legal and I know it is more trouble than it is worth to ban them, it is exactly the same with drugs. Prohibition is now causing more harm than the drugs themselves. Personally, I believe that the government should regulate, tax, and control the distribution of every chemical in the known world, from Xanax and Valium to alcohol and tobacco, to mar1juana and MDMA.

That being said, realistically I would like to see a policy that allows the states to set their own drug policies in part to find out which approaches actually work best at reducing drug use.

OK, have you read anything I have written other than this thread?

In your "reality," the people that you know who aren't ****ups who use pot DON'T TELL YOU because of your bias.

I don't have any need for mar1juana or alcohol or tobacco (OK, so I smoke a pipe from time to time) or anything else. I use caffeine heavily and I actually WORKED with drug abusers and their families for over a decade, what do YOU know about drug use and abuse?

You only know what the government has force fed you. Sheep.

Go baaaaaaaack to your farm.

 

Exactly. I just posted about that above. Your 5.x number is STILL 20% higher than in 1950 even after the rate has declined for the last decade. Prohibition raises the level of violence in a society by ceding control of a highly profitable industry to criminals.

Ending prohibition will help society in a number of ways having to do with violence.

Police officers can call off the war they are in every day between them and the neighborhoods they are supposed to patrol.

Instead of wasting resources on a health care issue, the police would be free to go after violent and predatory criminals.

Our jail cells would free up to allow dangerous criminals to sit out their sentance instead of getting out early to free up space for a drug user.

Gangs and criminal organizations would lose a primary and major source of income.

As long as we choose to approach this problem violently, we will have bloody, expensive, nonproductive results. If we approach this problem intelligently, we can research and develop a drug policy that works.

 

So you just aren't going to take into account the deterrent factors we have now? (mentioned above)

If the drug war does affect the murder rate, it would raise it by injecting more violence into society, as this chart points out DID happen during the two periods in our history where we tried prohibition.

The chart I have goes to 1997 and I have repeatedly asked you to post your chart so we can use both of them.

I have also asked you repeatedly to explain why the rate in 2001 is STILL 20% higher than the rate in the 50s even after a decade of declining murder rates.

Besides, bobreck, the murder rate is only one in a list of dozens of reasons that the drug war is tearing our society apart. You have not addressed racial disparities, availability to children, or ANY of the violence factors I mentioned earlier.

You are getting bogged down in minutae and details that still don't prove your point.

If you want to prove your point, show me how the drug war is going to achieve its stated goal of a drug free America when it has not significantly reduced overall drug use in the last 30 years. Show me how the status quo is working given that 83% of high school students find mar1juana easy to obtain. Show me how banning ANYTHING in our history has dried up access to that item.

You can't because prohibition does not work.

 

Actually, I am emphatically not for decriminalization because that policy keeps the problems of prohibition, specifically the gateway effect caused by being forced to go to criminals to acquire drugs. I am espousing regulation, which I define as a distribution system controlled by the government and legitimate businesses. That is the only way that we will be able to harness the profits in drug distribution to put those profits to good use.

I could point out much more frivolous topics that would more closely resemble a waste of server space than my threads. I will address the specifics of the threads lower. If I am truly WASTING server space, then surely I will get a reprimand from the moderators or some other communication from someone who actually decides what is a waste of server space. Who made YOU thread police?

This one was my initial foray into posting something serious on this board. It was certainly about prohibition and it is a pretty good statement of my position on the subject.

This one I posted after I found a poll that refuted your contention that Americans are overwhelmingly against reforming the drug laws. That was also a pretty good discussion.

This thread was started about yet another poll I found in my travels on the 'net (actually, my wife emailed it to me).

The scary thing about prohibition is how many different issues are colored by our drug policy. I could start legitimate threads on:

Industrial hemp.
Medical mar1juana.
The for-profit prison industry.
How the Partnership for a Drug Free America is a front for the pharmaceutical and alcohol industries.
Addiction therapy.
Under prescription of pain medication (I rolled that one into this thread, saving your precious server space).
The Higher Education Act.
Global backlash to US imposed prohibition.
Civil wars in Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia.
Innocent lives lost.
Prosecutorial abuse of power.
Police testi-lying in court.
State prison budgets.
The war on hemp foods.
Civil and human rights infringement.
Corruption inherent in prohibition.
Drug testing.
Asset forfeiture abuses.
The failure of interdiction.
The "Gateway Theory."
Economics and drugs.
Mandatory minimum sentances.
The racist application of the drug war.
Needle exchange programs.

The list could go on, but even just that list is a good start. There are hundreds of good reasons to change our drug policy and people are starting to see those reasons. Change is coming and it is coming much sooner than you might expect.

Once, there were some southern plantation owners who were forced to give up a way of life that was unjust and racist. Those plantation owners are now ridiculed and universally derided for their sins.

Another time, some Christians decided it would be a good idea to ban alcohol. That "social experiment" was an unmitigated disaster that raised levels of crime and violence to a point not seen again until the 1980s at the height of the War on Drugs.

This is another racist unjust policy that is an unmitigated disaster.

 

And even after dropping 80-90%, the level of homicides is 20% higher than it was in the 1950s.

Even if crime rates are dropping, it isn't affecting the level of drug use and abuse. Levels of use are flat since the 1970s when this fiasco started, and isn't THAT what this policy was supposed to do? Crime rates dropping probably have more to do with the explosion is law enforcement funding over the past three decades.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/economi.htm

Number 10 reads "In 1999 the United States spent a record $147 billion for police protection, corrections, and judicial and legal activities. The Nation's expenditure for operations and outlay of the justice system increased 309% from almost $36 billion in 1982. Discounting inflation, that represents a 145% increase in constant dollars."

So the drop in overall crime corresponds with a large increase in law enforcement dollars over the same time frame. The most telling aspect of this is that over the same time period, with a vast increase in law enforcement and drug war funding, levels of drug use and availability have remained unchanged. In fact, the drugs have gotten purer and cheaper over the same time span and similar numbers of high school aged children have reported easy access to illicit drugs year after year.

This is an expensive, counterproductive policy that takes innocent lives.

 

Sorry 'bout that!