If you have underlying issues with anxiety and paranoia, adding marijuana to the mix exacerbates these issues greatly and becomes a poor crutch for dealing with them. I've seen friends and family who smoked 2-3x weekly for a few years develop eyebrow-raising mental problems. So I tend to agree.
Personal anecdote, N=4.
(Yeah of course, alcohol is just as bad, or worse in extreme cases, but people can usually sense the damage being done to them by it afterwards. Pot's effects are internal. It's hard to reflect until it's too late.)
So legalize it and put money into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn’t very hard.
Of course. But look around you. Our governments won't do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I'm more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.
Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.
I agree. But it's not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle. Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.
And alcohol’s effects aren’t?
Alcohol's effects are immediately visible. It's hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.
Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.
I'll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon's drug guy:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.
He sounds like a right vile removed. But me not being head over heels for more vices doesn't mean I'm a strawman for ostracizing others. It's not binary. I will always vote left and progressive to protect the freedoms of others. But I just don't see the social advantage in adding yet more bread and circuses to keep people down, and nor do I see the benefit of throwing more avenues of abuse to people who already struggle with impulse control. I genuinely believe this will end badly, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
If you are a leftist you should be against the criminalization of drug use or drug possession, especially for a drug as relatively harmless as cannabis. Like this really is a no-brainer, throwing someone in jail because they're addicted to drugs doesn't help them in any conceivable way. Drug abuse is a mental health problem and should be treated like one. Get them therapy and addiction support to help them get over it, and stop criminalizing drugs for people who can use it responsibly.
Again, it's not binary for me, despite these increasingly polarized times we live in. No one should undergo the same prison sentencing as rapists just for carrying a potentially addictive and life-altering substance, but we shouldn't also (in my opinion) just open the gates and let this substance into foray of our daily lives.
Hell, alcohol shouldn't be so freely dispensed as it (see: russia's entire history), but we do it anyway. Adding another substance just seems like a step backwards for me.
Should it be legal for consenting adults or not? Sounds like a binary question to me.
we shouldn't also (in my opinion) just open the gates and let this substance into foray of our daily lives
You speak as if legalizing cannabis will suddenly make it available everywhere, but it won't, because it already is everywhere, and it has been for decades. I had no trouble obtaining weed before my state legalized it, and I'm just a boring ass suburban white dude who barely knows anybody. Criminalization has never made cannabis go away, and continued criminalization isn't going to change that.
I appreciate that you're concerned about drug abuse and drug addiction, and those are real concerns that I don't want to minimize, but refusing to legalize it won't solve those problems, because most countries have been doing that for the better part of a century and it plainly hasn't worked. If people want to abuse drugs, they're going to abuse them whether or not they can acquire them legally. But at least when it's legal people won't have to fear going to jail because they got harassed by a cop while in possession, and making it legal reduces the stigma of drug abuse and makes seeking treatment easier to do.
Of course. But look around you. Our governments won't do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I'm more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.
So we should just throw up our hands and do nothing rather than fight for justice.
I agree. But it's not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle.
So? There are systems that can deal with these problems. Addiction clinics, therapy, support groups.
Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.
Why would foam bats be dangerous to throw into a hockey arena? Have you ever been to a hockey game? They wear all kinds of protective equipment. Throwing foam bats at them would probably not hurt that much, if at all. Actually sounds like it would be pretty fun.
Alcohol's effects are immediately visible. It's hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.
Cannabis use is such a menace to society that people who abuse it *checks notes* feel happier the next morning. The horror!
I get that cannabis isn't a completely harmless drug, like most drugs legal or otherwise, but "it's not perfectly safe so it should just keep being criminalized" is a bad take that has an entire history of not working. Legalize it and deal with the problems that crop up. Addiction and drug abuse aren't new problems, we know how to handle them. And for the yet undiscovered health problems that cannabis might cause, legalizing it will open up avenues for research so we can actually figure out its dangers instead of just writing off all cannabis users as (as another user puts it) "mentally fried idiots" or just repeating the same reefer madness nonsense that's been going around since the Nixon administration.
I agree. But it’s not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle. Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.
Are you kidding me? For years I said "I'd stop drinking tomorrow if I could legally buy weed." I was not an alcoholic, though I'm sure I met some overzealous standard for "problem drinker" for a period of time. Within months of getting a prescription for medical cannabis I'd just gradually stopped drinking and also using nicotine, without even much effort.
And I'm not even a heavy user. 3g will last me a month, easy. Yes, I'm just one anecdote, but I've seen plenty of similar stories.
The thing is, they already are. Excessive drinking at a friends house is so normalized here, it's become background. The police might pull you over if you're swerving all over the road on the way back home, but usually they wont. Adding weed to that mix of "normal" background behaviours is going to improve that? I don't think so.
And I'm not saying prohibit all vices. People need their release - of course they do - but rather than encourage new addictions behind closed doors, can't we just make it easier for people to hang out in public at night?
If you have underlying issues with anxiety and paranoia, adding marijuana to the mix exacerbates these issues greatly and becomes a poor crutch for dealing with them. I've seen friends and family who smoked 2-3x weekly for a few years develop eyebrow-raising mental problems. So I tend to agree.
Personal anecdote, N=4.
(Yeah of course, alcohol is just as bad, or worse in extreme cases, but people can usually sense the damage being done to them by it afterwards. Pot's effects are internal. It's hard to reflect until it's too late.)
So legalize it and put effort into treating addictions and mental illnesses. This isn't very hard.
Most if not all cases. Cannabis is objectively less dangerous in practically every way.
And alcohol's effects aren't?
Of course. But look around you. Our governments won't do that, and no political party that could make it to power is pushing a platform like that. I'm more than happy to make kids playgrounds out of concrete if I knew that bandages were free.
I agree. But it's not like Alcohol usage will go down once Cannabis is legalized. If anything, people will use them together in a vicious cycle. Throwing baseball bats into a dangerous hockey arena is never a good idea, even if the bats are made of foam.
Alcohol's effects are immediately visible. It's hard to be an alcoholic and still look at yourself in the mirror happily the next morning. Weed has no such negative phenotype, if anything you will look happier the next morning for abusing it.
This is your brain on the war on drugs. You're talking nonsense.
constructive
Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.
I'll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon's drug guy:
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.
He sounds like a right vile removed. But me not being head over heels for more vices doesn't mean I'm a strawman for ostracizing others. It's not binary. I will always vote left and progressive to protect the freedoms of others. But I just don't see the social advantage in adding yet more bread and circuses to keep people down, and nor do I see the benefit of throwing more avenues of abuse to people who already struggle with impulse control. I genuinely believe this will end badly, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
If you are a leftist you should be against the criminalization of drug use or drug possession, especially for a drug as relatively harmless as cannabis. Like this really is a no-brainer, throwing someone in jail because they're addicted to drugs doesn't help them in any conceivable way. Drug abuse is a mental health problem and should be treated like one. Get them therapy and addiction support to help them get over it, and stop criminalizing drugs for people who can use it responsibly.
Again, it's not binary for me, despite these increasingly polarized times we live in. No one should undergo the same prison sentencing as rapists just for carrying a potentially addictive and life-altering substance, but we shouldn't also (in my opinion) just open the gates and let this substance into foray of our daily lives.
Hell, alcohol shouldn't be so freely dispensed as it (see: russia's entire history), but we do it anyway. Adding another substance just seems like a step backwards for me.
Should it be legal for consenting adults or not? Sounds like a binary question to me.
You speak as if legalizing cannabis will suddenly make it available everywhere, but it won't, because it already is everywhere, and it has been for decades. I had no trouble obtaining weed before my state legalized it, and I'm just a boring ass suburban white dude who barely knows anybody. Criminalization has never made cannabis go away, and continued criminalization isn't going to change that.
I appreciate that you're concerned about drug abuse and drug addiction, and those are real concerns that I don't want to minimize, but refusing to legalize it won't solve those problems, because most countries have been doing that for the better part of a century and it plainly hasn't worked. If people want to abuse drugs, they're going to abuse them whether or not they can acquire them legally. But at least when it's legal people won't have to fear going to jail because they got harassed by a cop while in possession, and making it legal reduces the stigma of drug abuse and makes seeking treatment easier to do.
You're welcome.
So we should just throw up our hands and do nothing rather than fight for justice.
So? There are systems that can deal with these problems. Addiction clinics, therapy, support groups.
Why would foam bats be dangerous to throw into a hockey arena? Have you ever been to a hockey game? They wear all kinds of protective equipment. Throwing foam bats at them would probably not hurt that much, if at all. Actually sounds like it would be pretty fun.
Cannabis use is such a menace to society that people who abuse it *checks notes* feel happier the next morning. The horror!
I get that cannabis isn't a completely harmless drug, like most drugs legal or otherwise, but "it's not perfectly safe so it should just keep being criminalized" is a bad take that has an entire history of not working. Legalize it and deal with the problems that crop up. Addiction and drug abuse aren't new problems, we know how to handle them. And for the yet undiscovered health problems that cannabis might cause, legalizing it will open up avenues for research so we can actually figure out its dangers instead of just writing off all cannabis users as (as another user puts it) "mentally fried idiots" or just repeating the same reefer madness nonsense that's been going around since the Nixon administration.
Are you kidding me? For years I said "I'd stop drinking tomorrow if I could legally buy weed." I was not an alcoholic, though I'm sure I met some overzealous standard for "problem drinker" for a period of time. Within months of getting a prescription for medical cannabis I'd just gradually stopped drinking and also using nicotine, without even much effort.
And I'm not even a heavy user. 3g will last me a month, easy. Yes, I'm just one anecdote, but I've seen plenty of similar stories.
I hope you're right.
So, alcohol is (mostly) illegal in Bangladesh and we have the lowest rate of consumption at about 0.00 L per person/year
Buddy the other option here is not them managing to deal with it, psych health care in germany is abysmally absent, it's becoming alcoholics
The thing is, they already are. Excessive drinking at a friends house is so normalized here, it's become background. The police might pull you over if you're swerving all over the road on the way back home, but usually they wont. Adding weed to that mix of "normal" background behaviours is going to improve that? I don't think so.
And I'm not saying prohibit all vices. People need their release - of course they do - but rather than encourage new addictions behind closed doors, can't we just make it easier for people to hang out in public at night?