marijuana
 

serious question now and this is a private forum so it should be safe to ask.

how many of you smoke?

Disaster recovery is definitely looked at a lot differently. ;)

I was in amsterdam this summer, man, that's a ve-e-e-ry nice place... :)

get up, stand up....
stand up for your rights...
get up, stand up...
don't give up the fight

Nope, I don't smoke at all. Although I life in the Netherlands with Amsterdam right around the corner.
I personally think we are way to tolerant to drugs. Ganja is a drug and it should be baned.

i used to a little bit but dont anymore.

this is something i feel quite strongly about, i think people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they dont hurt anyone else, in my opinion alcohol is a much worse drug than cannabis, if i was walking home late at night i would much rather see a stoned person than a drunk person because whats the stoned person gonna do to me? there not gonna attack me like a drunk person would.

there was a thread about cannabis a few weeks back granted it was quite a stupid one but i have seen worse(*remembers thread about sk8guitars new pants*) but it was closed for some unknown reason, yet there have been many threads about alcohol and probably caffiene(sp?) that were not closed. if the mods close this thread i would really like to know why as in my opinion there is nothing wrong with it.

Re: marijuana
 

Private forum? Seems very public to me...

Jamie...

Never tried it........never will.

So are alcohol and nicotine, but you don't see governments waging wars on beer and fags. You don't see government forces burning vineyards, or raiding breweries. Alcohol and cigarettes kill way more people than drugs. I say they should be banned too. In a democratic world, you can't go around banning everything that might be harmful to the public, you have to allow self-determination for the masses.

I agree with flapjackboy. We should be responsible of our acts, not the governement. Yet it shouldn't be sold to kids younger than 15 or something at least. That's nasty!

Moreover, how is it possible not to smoke and listen to reggae at the same time, what do you say aizkorri ;)

Preacherman don'T tell me,
heaven is under the earth,
I know you don'T know
what life is really worth
it s not all that glitter is gold
alf the story 'as never been told!!
so now you see the light...
you gonna stand up for your right!!

grow your own, http://overgrow.com/edge

and this is a private forum so it should be safe to ask
/General isn't a private forum by any std's I know of, and posing it as a "serious" question doesn't exempt it from getting ripped anyway.

I personally think we are way to tolerant to drugs. Ganja is a drug and it should be baned.
Yes, and nicotine, and caffeine, and alcohol and any public signs of religious or political expression, and the general notion we could have a "Clean, Green Earth" and, of course, "World Peace"...
The effect of suppression just makes anyone looking for a fix go underground. This makes tracking, prevention etc etc harder and in the end only fills dealers pockets cuz prices will rise. And isn't it true banning only makes for a bigger kick?..

this is something i feel quite strongly about, i think people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they dont hurt anyone else / In a democratic world, you can't go around banning everything that might be harmful to the public, you have to allow self-determination for the masses.
Well, this is something I do feel strongly about as well. The phrase "people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they dont hurt anyone else" is a hollow one and totally void of meaning.
It is only used to by those who are ignorant of the facts and by those who need to justify lack of responsability, misbehaviour and abuse as if it is an unseparable right or part of one's "individual expression". Yes, you can retort it's not my business and you know your limits anyway, but the problem is many don't know their limits and many don't want to behave responsably anyway.

AFAIK all substance abuse influences and deteriorates the mind and body, and the effects are more grave when part of a unhealthy lifestyle or can very suddenly appear like in cases where people have a latent deficiency. Compare it with scanning random ppl with a strobe light to see who's got epilepsy. Substance acceptance also is influenced by variables not under your control be it internal (for instance mood) or external (for instance peer pressure). Anyone who has used drugs will testify that under influence perception can change considerably, and any perception of selfcontrol does not reflect the actual state. That's what I mean "as long as they dont hurt anyone else" doesn't mean shit.


In other words, if ppl can't (be arsed to) respect and control themselves, then I expect them to be a hazard to/in the presence of others. If you are going to base your view on drugs on the fact you think sloshed ppl will attack you and druggies won't without knowing the deeper effects of drugs, then I can tell you from experience it's an understandable but erroneous opinion.


Wrt closing that thread and looking at what LQ benefits from having/allowing drug related threads: I don't see any. I personally do question if tolerating, promoting or even glorifying drugs usage is appropriate content for a site that caters to a wide audience with a guesstimated lower limit of like 11 yrs.

no way... ;).

The question is, where do you put limits. You could could use the same arguments to legalize heroine, cocaine etc. And you know, just a few day's ago I read somewhere some politicians proposed legalizing xtc. Can you imagine that!
By saying "we might as well legalize it because people will go underground to get the stuff", you are, in my opinion letting the criminals win.
As for alcohol and tobacco, they are the worst enemy a person has. I would advice you people to stay away from these things.

Certainly not. If it's legalised then the government can control it far easier than they do now. Having a legal product would cut crime because the criminals would not have a market for their product. The government could generate tax revenue and use it to help people who end up addicted to harder drugs. The police would have much needed resources freed up to tackle other crimes. In fact, other crime categories would see a reduction too, with legal, tightly controlled safer products produced by companies licensed by the government. You would not have to go to some dodgy dealer to get your cannabis, you would be able to get them next to the cancer sticks.

If you remember, several states in the US tried prohibition for alcohol and that failed miserably. To properly win a "war on drugs" we need to take control away from the criminals. The only way to do that is by legalisation.

I plead the 5th ;) but I really don't feel a thread like this is necessary on an open forum. Regards.

Militant anti smoker here. I saw way too many GI's die as a result of being stoned. And some I considered friends.

Michael

strong supporter. alcohol is much more dangerous than marijuana. im sorry endorphin that you saw people get shot because of it but alcohol would have made it worse, and alcohol is legal. not that i know if this needs to be here. but i guess it tells us something more about or fellow linux users.
if you want to make a difference then help support norml. together we can enlighten the publics view.

by the way, you should go to norml and look up your state laws. interesting to know.

Multiple Sclerose , Cancer , AIDS , Fybromyalgiae , Rheumatism.......
'nuff said.

i dont get it.

Sufferers of these illnesses are lobbying for the legalisation of cannabis as it is the only thing that blocks the pain these illnesses cause.

That's different. If people have these illnesses and they need that stuff to relief the pain, then that's ok. Megamieuwsel, as you are probably aware, you can get marijuana at the drug store these day's, if you have clear medical reasons.

Not just a medication against the pain : Also against some other symptoms like lack of apetite and insomnia.

The biggest benefit of THC as a medicine is : aside from becoming a little Drowsy and apathethic , there are no negative side-effects.
Try to find a "regular" medicine , that can live up to that.

Another point in pro of legalisation of canabis : Did you know , that the Netherlands , worldwide viewed as the bastion of Canabis , with it extremely liberal politics towards this drug , has one of the lowest percentages of canabis-use in the western world.
Only Finland and Switserland(Another so-called "Pro-Ganja-country") score lower.
The USA , with it's "War On Drugs" , scores about twice as high (pun intended)....

Just another excuse for anti american idiots to attack our country, if you want to smoke pot why not move to those countries? I know pot smokers and they are the most defensive people i know, and that comment about not having any side effects is rediculous, uuhhh try killing brain cells.

I am against any legislation regarding victimless crimes. From Drug usage to prostitution the only ill effect on society from these two examples is the fact that our legislative system makes the users into criminals. <br> Fact is it would be far more effective and economical to treat those with an addiction illness, than to try and stop the supply of a product or service with limitless demand. Greed is king and as long as there is money to be made someone will fullfill the demand.<br> Oh and yes I smoke. But no I don't get high and drive, or try to fight battles. There is a time and place for everything.

I recently quit smoking (cigarettes, I don't do drugs) on my birthday... and I must say it feels quite nice. The urge comes every now and then when I'm bored but I try finding some things to do.

I also think that alcohol does more harm than drugs, but that doesn't make drugs any less dangerous. However, the reason I say alcohol does more harm is that its readily available in stores as opposed to drugs which can't be sold openly due to laws and regulations.

Banning them all? I know some Muslim countries which does. I too live in a Muslim country (and a Muslim myself) but Malaysia doesn't ban all these things because we do have non-Muslims in Malaysia and in come of their culture drinking alcohol is a norm, if not something that they must have in certain occasions. As for cigarettes, this is where I think the government "talks cock"... increasing the taxes for tobacco-products but at the same time a cigarette company sponsors our local soccer league. Not to mention the hundreds of Marlboro ads on our F1 racing circuit.

And I don't believe that "marijuana high" is harmless, it harms the economy because a stoned person could have done something more productive. It's also a waste of brain cells. And before preaching to me that "at least it doesn't harm others" argument, wait you have children of your own and then tell me if you'd like to see them smoke pot.

Well , that appears to be quite a popular argument amongst the "Canabis-bashers".
I have yet to see any scientific report , backing it up.
Note : having a labrat stuffed with enough THC to kill an elephant doesn't count. That kind of research is highly "agenda-prone".

Another note : I , personally , do NOT use Canabis. Just for the record , mind me.

from the norml site:
oh and that place with the legal marijuana, had like the worse drug use any where but when they legalized marijuana and made stiffer penalties on the other drugs( the bad ones, abominations) they ended up with one of the lowest drug use rates anywhere.

while waiting for the lockdown, :D i'll just say that as some posters already noted, alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands of more people every year than marijuana. and yet alcohol and tobacco are "naturalized" in western culture, so much so that the situation can almost be compared to those who use windows. it's like a mass brainwashing that normalizes alcohol and tobacco use/abuse even though those substances are lethal, while the same enculturation villianizes marijuana even though it is essentially harmless. recent research suggests that marijuana might even play a role in protecting the brain.

ScientificWorldJournal. 2002 Mar 9;2(3):632-48.
Cannabinoids on the brain.

Irving AJ, Rae MG, Coutts AA.

Cannabis has a long history of consumption both for recreational and medicinal uses. Recently there have been significant advances in our understanding of how cannabis and related compounds (cannabinoids) affect the brain and this review addresses the current state of knowledge of these effects.
<snip>

Cannabinoids may also be protective against neurodegeneration and brain damage and exhibit anticonvulsant activity. Some of the analgesic effects of cannabinoids also appear to involve sites within the brain.

These advances in our understanding of the actions of cannabinoids and the brain endocannabinoid system have led to important new insights into neuronal function which are likely to result in the development of new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of a number of key CNS disorders.

Interesting thread so far...

Record:
Don't smoke. Never have. Never will. Never done ANY illegal drugs, ever.

Debate:
I'm for it for the following reasons:

* Better control
* Allow taxation (hell, get your hand in the jar! :D )
* Get room in jails for REAL criminals (when a 'baby raper' doesn't have room in prison but a toker does, something is definitely wrong).
* The belief that it would become far less abused if it was simply legalised (from those who just smoke to rebel)

Reasons I'm against it:

* Damn people are stupid when they are high.
* Damn people are stupid when they are high.
* Same reason I'm an anti-cigarette smoker, it performs no (for the average person) beneficial function, it stinks, it causes more harm than good (the only "good" would be the high I'd suspect, again, for the **AVERAGE** person)
* Damn people are stupid when they are high.
* It's definitely over-rated in several portions of the music industry, I'd simply like to see what they come up with if it got legalised ;)

Cool

I've had my fill of it, now when i do it i'm just staring into space, all it does is ruin what would otherwise productive day. On the other hand if my old friend's would to invite me to bob marley fest, or to a 311 concert, or out to pizza, i'm all for it.

We have a situation these days where more and more police time is being spent on dealing with drugs and drug-related crime, to the point where in the not too distant future, drug-related crime is going to be all that the police deal with. The "war on drugs" is a battle that you cannot win because as soon as you put one scumbag drug dealer behind bars, there's another five ready to fill the void. The truth of the matter is that most people who end up on the harder drugs start out smoking cannabis, but end up getting talked into trying other stuff by their dealer. The old "first hit's free" deal.

Yes, cannabis in some circumstances [i]is[/] a "gateway drug", all the better then, to remove it from the dealer's grasp by legalising it. If people no longer have to go to a dealer to get cannabis for their joints, they're less likely to be introduced to harder drugs. The drug dealers lose a large percentage of their profits, the government is able to generate tax revenue, the police workload is greatly lifted, prisons bewcome far less crowded, violence outside pubs and nightclubs will go down considerably...

I could go on, but I think my point is made...

the stereo type of people being stupid when they are high gets on my nerves.
i mean i know that all forms of media potray it this way, and many people do act stupid but i propose that the people who act stupid are the ones who are either a)new to it and just doing it to be cool or something b)people that arent that smart to begin with.
ive seen a lot of both types i call them all pudding heads.

in my youngers days marijuana helped in making me a bit less productive and i could of fit into the 'pudding head' type somewhat. but now that im older and more mature i lead a very productive life, i do not get stupid when i smoke and in fact doing my math or computer science homework high is a lot of fun. weeee. but in high school i usualy just sat around and did nothing. so i do strongly believe that maturity is needed with marijuana so the same laws as alcohol should be in effect. or stricter. like 26 or something. or you have to take a class and be liscensed to buy it.

......... just stay away from LSD - the people who make/produce that stuff want locking up for a long time..........

yes, you should stay away from all man made drugs or drugs that need refining before being used. stay natural.

Uhmmmm.....
Opium is basically "all natural".
Not exactly something , I'd advise consuming ; Talk about becoming unproductive....

"All Natural" is definately NOT a safe-guard ; The poison of the blue-striped Krait is "all natural".
It kills you within a minute.....

Well, let's face it, Opiates are still used in medicine today. Morphine is still used as a painkiller and is essentially a pure form of heroin. (Diamorphine)

In fact, opiates are relatively harmless to the body. The reason behind most heroin deaths are due to the stuff it's cut with, not the actual drug itself.

Heh...
I know that.
I just meant : I don't advise its use for leisure-use , whereas I don't see any objections in using marijuana for that.

On Heroin ; tried it (once , oral consumption ; no needles for me) , and I definately can't understand what kind of "kick" people get out of that stuff ; all it does (aside from painkilling) is numbing down your emotions to the point of non-existance.
Kinda scary , actually.(If I could be scared at all , that is , but that's another story alltogether....

Well, if you go back to Victorian England, before recreational drug use was illegal, you had opium dens and stuff like that. The drug quality was pretty much guaranteed, because the opium dens wanted your repeat custom. I suppose the modern day equivalent would be "shooting galleries". The point is that as soon as you make something illegal, you hand control of it over to the criminals. You then get the situation where you have unscrupulous dealers cutting the pure product with god knows what. Far better for it to be legalised so that control can be given back to the government and a limited number of licensed companies.

That's the way to deal with drug dealers, take their market away from them. If a heroin junkie knows that he can get a safe, dosage controlled fix from his local chemist at a price that's not extortionate, the drug dealer is out of business, the junkie doesn't have to resort to crime to feed his habit, he/she doesn't O/D because the fix he bought is at a fixed dosage in a tamper proof package. If you want to smoke a joint, you buy them from the tobacconists or the supermarket, next to the Embassy No. 1's, again, the dealer has no market and you are getting a product produced under strictly controlled conditions.

opium is natural, but i would consider that to fit in the 'refined' category because as far as i know( could be wrong) you dont just go pick a bud off the plant and smoke it.

Nope : You squeeze it (the fruit , that is) and smoke the juice.
But smoking the fruit as a whole would have a similar effect. (Tried it , don't ask...)

I think you're stretching the concept of "refining" a tad too far IMO.

Bunch of dope smokin hippies ;)

To quote Neil from "The Young Ones"

"Oh, yeah, that's right, everyone pick on the hippy." :D

key kev, don't be dissin :p

I couldnt have put it better myself, drugs do more damage when theyre illegal.
Think of the poor cancer patients that have to buy a bit of grass off a heroin or crack dealer just to alleviate their chronic pain. Now thats just wrong :confused:

I'm 23 and I've been smoking since i was about 15. I'd also like to note that I'll be graduating from coolege with a B.S. in CSC soon, so that's to all those "druggies lead a dead end life" type of people. :D

Of course, I only smoke occasionally, and don't do stupid crap like toke up before going to class or doing something serious! Marijuana is just like alcohol, but the fact is, and this comes from years of usage, you tend to have more control over yourself after smoking, say, 10 bowls than you would if you drank about 10 shots of tequila!

I really wish the US gov't would ease up on marijuana, because the only issue I've ever had with it is having to deal with criminals in order to buy some. :(

Geez, I'd expect better from this group. Drugs are an EXCUSE, anybody that says different is full of it. Beer == ugly wakeup call? Only if you want it. LSD...Psycho drugs make you insane...only if you want that excuse. The sick truth is that people act how they're expected to. You took PCP? You'd better bite some chicken's heads off.

I'm not saying they're good for you...in fact, they are a mild poison. On the other hand, the reason most are illegal is because some putz used them as an excuse to act like an a$$holio.

Whoa, look's like i started a bush fire here. I mean, basically that if you can smoke it and be productive, good and "go on with your bad self" as they say.. but if "smoking 10 bowl's" or however they say it doesn't do anything to you, then, why smoke it.

Oh and i'm not sure that's approprate language, i was offended.

you know, this thread has inspired me. i looked a little bit and saw that two of the schools in my state have norml chapters. so i think im going to try and start one at my school. should be fun.

:D

Alcohol is for a hole\s, figuratively speaking of course!
Attachment 15019

I don't want to derail this thread, considering it is likely to get yanked anyway, but I have to say it did make me think. I was considering the argument that thousands of animals will eat cannabis growing in the wild. Then I started wondering if animals commonly eat poppies and/or coca or any other medicinal plants. Then I started thinking of how my cats and dogs will eat grass when they have an upset stomach but are also capable of eating and drinking things I wouldn't think of touching, all the way from truly disgusting things that would probably kill me (if only from retching to death) down to muddy water. I, otoh, prefer a grass extract for upset stomach and Muddy Waters on my sound system.

The upshot of this is that now I am wondering just what mechanism(s) help animals comprehend what substances are safe and which are dangerous, that we seem to have lost. Obviously they can't detect some kinds of poisonous pollution in water, but they are quite good with plants. Why is that and how does that work? Is heightened sense of smell the only reason? and if that's so, how is it that some dogs can apparently detect some forms of cancer in people?

See? I don't need cannabis. Free Association? Check!