It is all very strange, indeed. The negative social costs of alcohol and tobacco are incontestably greater. And, weed could hardly be more widely available than it is now, despite all sorts of prohibitions.
It is the other way around. The negative social costs of Marijuana are far greater than either. The toxins in marijuana are as bad as those found in tobacco, and tobacco is not a mind altering drug. We simply haven’t seen the effects of marijuana on the body yet because there hasn’t been enough time. I will try to find again the analysis of toxins in marijuana that were in a long article in SciAm about ten years ago. And marijuana is vastly more powerful now through breeding than it was then.
What’s worse, the medical marijuana business is a scam, a fundamental dishonesty, as this article notes. Imagine selling opium (again) in alcohol and calling it a calling medication. Was that a winning and fortunate arrangement? Or selling tobacco because it was calming – as once was the case.
As to the social effects on adolescents – well, this ought to be obvious. Ask any teacher about students who spent their high school years stoned. I saw a lot of those and the results were clear. They learned nothing in class, and the never learned those social skills adolescents need to learn in this formative years. Instead of learning how to negotiate the complex social complications, they got stoned so they never had to face them. The result we can see for outselves: Two generations who do not know how to grow up, two generations who have maintained the self-centeredness, the belief in immediate gratification, the narcissism of perpetual children. Neither tobacco nor alcohol, quite bad enough in themselves, has exacted such a price.
And this overlooks the function of marijuana as the gateway drug that has lead many and many an otherwise promising adolescent into a world that ends on the streets.
A scam is a scam is a scam. Calling it medical is a dishonest as calling illegal immigrants unfortunates who deserve our protection.
Larry
Marijuana is much more dangerous than tobacco:
“Smoking marijuana regularly before the age of 16 causes changes in the brain that can impair a young person’s ability to focus, learn from mistakes and think abstractly, according to a Harvard study”
My wife has MS, and like most MS patients, she has chronic severe pain from nerve pain to pain from muscles that never relax. We asked her MS doctor (world renowned, major MS clinic, etc) about marijuana since a certain TV personality who has MS says it works well for him. The MS doctor said he gets this question asked all the time, and his advice is “NO”. There are valid medical studies that marijuana has real, adverse affects on the brain, and since MS patients already have brain damage from the MS, why would you want to add more?
And of course the medical marijuana issue is just a ruse, a back door legalization, so to speak. And since now possession of less than an ounce of it isn’t even a misdemeanor in California one can consider it virtually legal. If one wants to grow more than the legal six plants all one has to do in CA is get a grower’s license. Seems awfully piecemeal and messy to me. Sort of Episcopalian.
That marijuana, like all mind-altering durgs, is inadvisable, does not mean we have to have national prohibition against it. I believe that if all the self-inflicted personal damage people have done to their lives using alcohol were added up, it would dwarf that of marijuana use. Yet, we found that national prohibition against alcohol served mainly to enrich gangsters and provide full employment for police. Those, plus heavy improsonment of minority youths and high costs in taxpayer money and personal rights to privacy, have been the most obvious results of the War On Durgs.
The most important level of law enforcement is self-government, and there is only so much the police can do, if people are not willing to govern themselves. Churches could probably do more good by teaching people the Biblical admonitions against all forms of drunkeness than by supporting the War On Drugs. I believe the US should allow states to legalize and regulate (or ban) marijuana as the citizens of the states deam advisable from a cost/benefit standpoint.
“Marijuana is benign.” There is NO basis in truth for that statement. It is a negative brain (chemistry, function, cognitive process and ability) altering substance.
Quite oddly for one who came of age in the mid-’60s, I have no direct experience with pot or any other drug, at least not as a consumer or producer. That doesn’t stop me from really liking the plant. And from thinking that prohibition is really, really stupid.
As an agronomist in the early ’80s I was helping certain colleagues cross Afghan and Thai (big leaves and great buds X sky-high THC), along with developping the best fertility programs for growing the stuff. Within three years of Reagan’s “interdiction” of the Mexican stuff — and I’m generally a tremendous supporter of Reagan, to this day — we had domestic plants with nearly fifteen times the THC of the weed previously imported from Mexico. Epic Fail.
Secondarily, all the people previously making good money picking the stuff in Michoacan headed north to capture that same income, triggering the wave of illegal immigration persisting to this day.
Let’s face it; with alcohol and any other substance there are recreational users and there are addicts. Simon Fraser University in BC determined some years ago that 10-12% of the population has an addictive personality of some sort.
[b]They will find a way to get their ‘stuff,’ whatever it is.[/b]
The biggest [i]societal[/i] problems generally come from prohibition, not addiction. I’d make an exception here for meth — rural white folks — which is both tremendously addictive and physically devastating. What I mean is that we should be vastly more focused in what we attempt to stop.
Tell me what there is not to like about simultaneously pulling the rug out from under drug cartels, narco-terroristas, organized crime, and gang turf wars over drug territory?
Prohibition of most drugs creates vastly more social problems than it could ever possibly solve.
The real anti-drug is two loving committed parents who offer their children enough love and encouragement in their young lives that they don’t seek a really crummy substitute, be it financial greed, promiscuous sex, or some badly-stepped-on compound they think’ll make ’em feel better.
Oh, and by the way. Look in your own medicine cabinets, please. Is not a the real problem that by our lives we show our kids that there’s a pill to make everything “better”?
As a former resident of the Netherlands, I have seen their policy of canabis toleration in action. From my experience, it works much better than the US policy of prohibition. Without “pushers”, young people just don’t fall into usage like they do here. Older “hippie” types do use it, but it’s no big deal. On the other hand, “drug tourists” from prohibitive countries are a big problem. They are the addicts; arriving across the border and making nuisances of themselves. For Dutch citizens, things work just fine.
Bart (marijuana plant lover, not user or producer) in Kansas,
The Cure for addiction is to find the REAL Satisfaction of human need, pain, hunger, thirst – which is achieved through worship/union with The Father, Son, Holy Spirit who is the everything our own parents, friends, spouses, substances, obsessions, desires, compulsions, material things cannot be or supply. (Psalm 27:10, Isaiah 66:13, Isaiah 62, Jeremiah 6:16, Mt. 11:29) Only God can satisfy all our needs, give us rest, peace, freedom and joy, only God is real Love, Truth, Life. This is the basis of Christianity and of the 12 Step programs.
I would agree with you most heartily, St. Nikao, though alas the particular dependency you cite is just as often, and probably more often, unhealthy and not holy (aka heretical).
I suppo0se it is too late to dd this again as it was on the other thread. The report from Holland seems to be inaccurate or misleading. Go to Wikipedia/amsterdam holland, drugs and read this tale of social disaster.
First look at the numbers of addicts in treatment centers for total population. Then see that Hollland has become Europe’s drug clearing house. Yes, drug and sex tourism is big in Holland. Look at the numbers. Now ask yourself, do we wish this in the US? Then look at the prostitution numbers and how the state is dealing with trying to restrict it. Then see the damning fact that Holland is a center for human trafficking.
Finally see the problems of trying to draw back from this black hole. They have started by letting the whole camel in the tent, discovered that camel dung is unsavory, and now have learned that you can’t get the camel out except for the nose. Is marijuana a crucial element in this mess? Or is it a harmless recreational drug, bothering no one, unrelated to the hard stuff and the hard core prostitution? What evidence more do you need? This is what happens in the real world when you legalize psychoactive drugs. Is this the course you want the us to follow? I tell you the obvious again: Vice calls to vice, and they all answer. And last but not least, see “Needle Park.” I guess I should add England’s dealing with “gin alleys” as well.
John is right. Imprisoning druggies is ineffective. Prison time is a badge of honor. It would be much more effective if drug sellers were stripped and pilloried in the market place. And repeat offenders whipped. There’s nothing like pain to focus one’s attention. HOw serious can this problem get: See China and the opium wars, and look at what China had to do to break opium’s hold. This is the real world of vice and addiction. When one man goes down this path, others may help him to stop. When society jumps into the water, who is left to throw a line?
The best answer is to reinstitute a society rooted in self discipline and self restraint. This starts with Mum and Dad and extends to Washnington. (Try not to laugh.) A Dionysian society will change only after it has been destroyed. Larry
It is all very strange, indeed. The negative social costs of alcohol and tobacco are incontestably greater. And, weed could hardly be more widely available than it is now, despite all sorts of prohibitions.
It is the other way around. The negative social costs of Marijuana are far greater than either. The toxins in marijuana are as bad as those found in tobacco, and tobacco is not a mind altering drug. We simply haven’t seen the effects of marijuana on the body yet because there hasn’t been enough time. I will try to find again the analysis of toxins in marijuana that were in a long article in SciAm about ten years ago. And marijuana is vastly more powerful now through breeding than it was then.
What’s worse, the medical marijuana business is a scam, a fundamental dishonesty, as this article notes. Imagine selling opium (again) in alcohol and calling it a calling medication. Was that a winning and fortunate arrangement? Or selling tobacco because it was calming – as once was the case.
As to the social effects on adolescents – well, this ought to be obvious. Ask any teacher about students who spent their high school years stoned. I saw a lot of those and the results were clear. They learned nothing in class, and the never learned those social skills adolescents need to learn in this formative years. Instead of learning how to negotiate the complex social complications, they got stoned so they never had to face them. The result we can see for outselves: Two generations who do not know how to grow up, two generations who have maintained the self-centeredness, the belief in immediate gratification, the narcissism of perpetual children. Neither tobacco nor alcohol, quite bad enough in themselves, has exacted such a price.
And this overlooks the function of marijuana as the gateway drug that has lead many and many an otherwise promising adolescent into a world that ends on the streets.
A scam is a scam is a scam. Calling it medical is a dishonest as calling illegal immigrants unfortunates who deserve our protection.
Larry
Marijuana is much more dangerous than tobacco:
“Smoking marijuana regularly before the age of 16 causes changes in the brain that can impair a young person’s ability to focus, learn from mistakes and think abstractly, according to a Harvard study”
http://transfigurations.blogspot.com/2010/11/pot-smoking-changes-teens-brains-study.html
My wife has MS, and like most MS patients, she has chronic severe pain from nerve pain to pain from muscles that never relax. We asked her MS doctor (world renowned, major MS clinic, etc) about marijuana since a certain TV personality who has MS says it works well for him. The MS doctor said he gets this question asked all the time, and his advice is “NO”. There are valid medical studies that marijuana has real, adverse affects on the brain, and since MS patients already have brain damage from the MS, why would you want to add more?
According to the UK govt the social costs of cannabis are lower than alcohol and tobacco http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6455260/Alcohol-and-tobacco-more-harmful-than-ecstasy-and-cannabis-says-chief-Government-adviser.html and from my point of view as a parish priest, I would most certainly agree, though the best policy for everyone should be abstinence from all of them.
And of course the medical marijuana issue is just a ruse, a back door legalization, so to speak. And since now possession of less than an ounce of it isn’t even a misdemeanor in California one can consider it virtually legal. If one wants to grow more than the legal six plants all one has to do in CA is get a grower’s license. Seems awfully piecemeal and messy to me. Sort of Episcopalian.
That marijuana, like all mind-altering durgs, is inadvisable, does not mean we have to have national prohibition against it. I believe that if all the self-inflicted personal damage people have done to their lives using alcohol were added up, it would dwarf that of marijuana use. Yet, we found that national prohibition against alcohol served mainly to enrich gangsters and provide full employment for police. Those, plus heavy improsonment of minority youths and high costs in taxpayer money and personal rights to privacy, have been the most obvious results of the War On Durgs.
The most important level of law enforcement is self-government, and there is only so much the police can do, if people are not willing to govern themselves. Churches could probably do more good by teaching people the Biblical admonitions against all forms of drunkeness than by supporting the War On Drugs. I believe the US should allow states to legalize and regulate (or ban) marijuana as the citizens of the states deam advisable from a cost/benefit standpoint.
Oops. Should be [i]imprisonment[/i].
Do we want big government making these decisions?
Marijuana is benign. Larry can’t point to any objective studies. I could say the same about fructose, which actually should be restricted.
We are generally paranoid about Marijuana. How many people have been killed by smoking it? What do we know about its healing effects?
[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html]Here[/url] is an article linking marijuana to cancer.
Marijuana inhibits brain cancer. It’s a wonder drug that the clean, puritanical people hate.
“Marijuana is benign.” There is NO basis in truth for that statement. It is a negative brain (chemistry, function, cognitive process and ability) altering substance.
Quite oddly for one who came of age in the mid-’60s, I have no direct experience with pot or any other drug, at least not as a consumer or producer. That doesn’t stop me from really liking the plant. And from thinking that prohibition is really, really stupid.
As an agronomist in the early ’80s I was helping certain colleagues cross Afghan and Thai (big leaves and great buds X sky-high THC), along with developping the best fertility programs for growing the stuff. Within three years of Reagan’s “interdiction” of the Mexican stuff — and I’m generally a tremendous supporter of Reagan, to this day — we had domestic plants with nearly fifteen times the THC of the weed previously imported from Mexico. Epic Fail.
Secondarily, all the people previously making good money picking the stuff in Michoacan headed north to capture that same income, triggering the wave of illegal immigration persisting to this day.
Let’s face it; with alcohol and any other substance there are recreational users and there are addicts. Simon Fraser University in BC determined some years ago that 10-12% of the population has an addictive personality of some sort.
[b]They will find a way to get their ‘stuff,’ whatever it is.[/b]
The biggest [i]societal[/i] problems generally come from prohibition, not addiction. I’d make an exception here for meth — rural white folks — which is both tremendously addictive and physically devastating. What I mean is that we should be vastly more focused in what we attempt to stop.
Tell me what there is not to like about simultaneously pulling the rug out from under drug cartels, narco-terroristas, organized crime, and gang turf wars over drug territory?
Prohibition of most drugs creates vastly more social problems than it could ever possibly solve.
The real anti-drug is two loving committed parents who offer their children enough love and encouragement in their young lives that they don’t seek a really crummy substitute, be it financial greed, promiscuous sex, or some badly-stepped-on compound they think’ll make ’em feel better.
Oh, and by the way. Look in your own medicine cabinets, please. Is not a the real problem that by our lives we show our kids that there’s a pill to make everything “better”?
As a former resident of the Netherlands, I have seen their policy of canabis toleration in action. From my experience, it works much better than the US policy of prohibition. Without “pushers”, young people just don’t fall into usage like they do here. Older “hippie” types do use it, but it’s no big deal. On the other hand, “drug tourists” from prohibitive countries are a big problem. They are the addicts; arriving across the border and making nuisances of themselves. For Dutch citizens, things work just fine.
Bart (marijuana plant lover, not user or producer) in Kansas,
The Cure for addiction is to find the REAL Satisfaction of human need, pain, hunger, thirst – which is achieved through worship/union with The Father, Son, Holy Spirit who is the everything our own parents, friends, spouses, substances, obsessions, desires, compulsions, material things cannot be or supply. (Psalm 27:10, Isaiah 66:13, Isaiah 62, Jeremiah 6:16, Mt. 11:29) Only God can satisfy all our needs, give us rest, peace, freedom and joy, only God is real Love, Truth, Life. This is the basis of Christianity and of the 12 Step programs.
Addendum: God is our only healthy holy dependency.
I would agree with you most heartily, St. Nikao, though alas the particular dependency you cite is just as often, and probably more often, unhealthy and not holy (aka heretical).
#13 – you’re absolutely right.
But does everyone who smoke marijuana become addicted? What’s the percentage? Numbers, please.
But until the Kingdom of God happens on earth, let’s try harm reduction, stop spending so much money on imprisoning addicts.
I suppo0se it is too late to dd this again as it was on the other thread. The report from Holland seems to be inaccurate or misleading. Go to Wikipedia/amsterdam holland, drugs and read this tale of social disaster.
First look at the numbers of addicts in treatment centers for total population. Then see that Hollland has become Europe’s drug clearing house. Yes, drug and sex tourism is big in Holland. Look at the numbers. Now ask yourself, do we wish this in the US? Then look at the prostitution numbers and how the state is dealing with trying to restrict it. Then see the damning fact that Holland is a center for human trafficking.
Finally see the problems of trying to draw back from this black hole. They have started by letting the whole camel in the tent, discovered that camel dung is unsavory, and now have learned that you can’t get the camel out except for the nose. Is marijuana a crucial element in this mess? Or is it a harmless recreational drug, bothering no one, unrelated to the hard stuff and the hard core prostitution? What evidence more do you need? This is what happens in the real world when you legalize psychoactive drugs. Is this the course you want the us to follow? I tell you the obvious again: Vice calls to vice, and they all answer. And last but not least, see “Needle Park.” I guess I should add England’s dealing with “gin alleys” as well.
John is right. Imprisoning druggies is ineffective. Prison time is a badge of honor. It would be much more effective if drug sellers were stripped and pilloried in the market place. And repeat offenders whipped. There’s nothing like pain to focus one’s attention. HOw serious can this problem get: See China and the opium wars, and look at what China had to do to break opium’s hold. This is the real world of vice and addiction. When one man goes down this path, others may help him to stop. When society jumps into the water, who is left to throw a line?
The best answer is to reinstitute a society rooted in self discipline and self restraint. This starts with Mum and Dad and extends to Washnington. (Try not to laugh.) A Dionysian society will change only after it has been destroyed. Larry