You don't have to go and look on social media, just come here to HN and say "perhaps weed is not completely safe and we should research whether it could damage the brain" to get downvoted
Maybe none of them are reasonable, but there sure are a lot of them. I've met a lot of people who think consuming cannabis is more healthy than not consuming it. I think this is becoming a more popular viewpoint and might even become a mainstream belief in a few years.
Health cults have taken over. My theory is that so many people feel powerless in many aspects of their lives, and they fall back on diet and exercise and snake-oil supplements as one corner of life they can over-compensate on.
There is certainly some evidence for health and even psychological risks, but none that I am aware of for "brain damage", which is why you are likely to be downvoted.
For instance, 80%+ of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes. Do cigarettes cause psychosis and schizophrenia, or do schizophrenics seek out nicotine due to their schizophrenia? It’s not that simple.
(one of these reasons was dietary: MAOIs have bad interactions with the amino acid "Tyramine", found in aged foods. However, Tyramine content in food has dropped dramatically since the 70s, and this is no longer a significant concern)
I’d guess there’s orders of magnitude more smokers than schizophrenics, making it seem unlikely smoking is a primary driver, though I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
I hear 80%+ of all perpetrators of sexual violence engage often with porn, but suspect that if porn drove sexual violence, its rates wouldn’t be decreasing. Most heart attack sufferers drink water within days of their cardiac event. All lottery winners have lottery tickets...
Myself I like to err on the side of caution, since my country has free healthcare which means I have to pay for the mistakes of others, so I don't want them making mistakes in the first place. They should feel free to smoke all the weed they want and become psychotic drones in the fucking Congo
Everything has some risk, and the anecdotal evidence is that weed does not affect the vast majority of adults in a way that would result in additional healthcare needs.
No. They are generally safe and people NEED to get around to live. They don't NEED to get high though.
>cycling also be banned? How about alcohol?
Yes, definitely. Both things are risky and bad. But that would be hard to achieve. Since weed has never been legal (at least here), things can go on the way they are.
> I am certainly not as sharp as I used to be
It's called turning 30 :-)
I do think that there are probably quite beneficial uses of drugs, but probably not in a ludic way as most people prefer to use them.
I think if lawmakers actually wanted people using drugs for the effects then drugs would be legal, I would argue they instead want the ability to arrest and incarcerate people at will.
The market for cannabis is so undeveloped and unstable that it seems unlikely that such marginal market growth tactics would see as much return as they do in more established markets.
People are getting savvy to bots (used here to mean all variety of inauthentic social media accounts). The one-track tweets approach doesn't cut it anymore, you need a modicum of authenticness. That's why we are seeing Deepfake profile pics and much more effort going into fleshed out bot accounts, getting friends and followers, and multifaceted story feeds.
It's a classic infiltration technique. Get in, silently grow your roots under the radar, before deploying the payload.
Here is my pet theory: many politicians have historically opposed cannabis use because they believed cannabis use makes people lazy and believe widespread use of cannabis could suppress economic productivity. This is the sort of believe that could be challenged with evidence to the contrary; currently several states have legal cannabis and in doing so are putting many beliefs to the test. If/When fears relating to economic suppression are dispelled, some politicians who once opposed it may decide they no longer care.
Or y'know, this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/03/23/nixons-d...
1. Corporate interests want to reduce hemp use for oil and material to help their dino oil products
2. People buyin that its bad
3. Politicians use it as a way to think people are bad
4. One generation later and the reason is whatever is most expediant.
I believe that 80+% of politicians today that oppose legalization do so genuinely because they grew up being told it was bad and a gateway drug. And they're too ignorant to consider the Nixon quote or that their government has always been bought and paid for to maintain a status quo
That's fair, and makes the most sense, I suppose
It reminds me of when the Israeli spooks were selling toys in shopping malls in 2001 (rounded up after 911 and memory holed)[1]. Maybe it's just RJR ramping up to sell actual weed everywhere, but it sure is creepy.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel...
Where they THC cookies, they'd probably make the plane flight a lot less uncomfortable with a lot of people. I'd wager they're trying to cell CBD to people who hate flying and are willing to try anything to make it less unpleasant. That their products are ineffective, at least in this application if not in general, kind of takes a backseat.
https://web.archive.org/web/20011124022514/https://www.washi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20091229000739/https://www.nytim...
Merry Christmas, obsessive Fortran dude!
Personally I do think laxer drug laws are a good thing. Those that want to get high will always find a way so it’s better to regulate the market than push it underground.
I mention this because many of the strongest "let's decriminalize (or even legalize) all drugs" commenters have similar backgrounds. Comfy financial situation and room to experiment with the peace of mind knowing that they have people to help dust them off should they get a little sloppy with their drug use. These people can afford to take a week to enjoy an ayahuasca resort, follow it up with a beach vacation and a little MDMA, then return home to a daily bowl of weed to relax from their hard month of partying and pop a couple addies to get focused and pull an all-nighter on their new web app. They can financially and mentally afford to use drugs as mood and mental enhancers. Loads of people who aren't so comfortable use drugs to numb the rough edges of life. Having been on this site for over a decade, I've seen loads of comments that make many users here seem completely out of touch with what average people go through--many HN users on another plane of existence.
I think a considerable number of people who promote drugs everywhere have good intentions, but they don't really consider the effects for most people. The aspect of being locked up for drugs does do a lot to tarnish lives, but the mere act of having easily available mind-altering substances is also enough to ruin the lives of many.
Those arrested are then affected for the rest of their lives, their criminal history hurting both their social and economic future. The fact that the rich know they are able to get away with it is proof that there is a separate legal system and that legalizing marijuana should be done. I am not arguing that pot cant be detrimental but its very much in the same ballpark as alcohol.
There are people currently non violent offenders spending decades in jail for selling marijuana, something that those same people from comfy backgrounds are now getting rich from. The genie is out of the bottle, its far less detrimental now to just legalize it federally, apply rules similar to those applied to alcohol and let all non violent marijuana offenders out of prison.
Society often looks at people through an odd lens. A rich white guy sitting drinking a couple of scotches at night is approved of, a group of black guys sitting around drinking a couple beers is reason to call the police. Marijuana prohibition does nothing but entrench this view.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/sentencing-reform/...
I came from Canada where drug offenses of all kinds are penalized much less harshly than the US. Even in cases of addiction, the social safety net to deal with it is much better: free hospital stays, free counseling, cheap college, better employment insurance, etc.
Effectively, everyone in Ontario can be considered as privileged as the people in your example in terms of leeway given even though I've never been given 10 million dollars for a phone app. We made that decision as a society and since I left the government has started selling marijuana: www.ocs.ca
So when talking about lives being ruined, we have to start asking if the cure of prohibition is worse than the disease of addiction.
How is this relevant? Many of us who support decriminalization do so because of the impact it has had on less fortunate communities. Those who are privileged should be using their privilege to help those communities by promoting decriminalization.