Some of the comments are assuming that all those who smoke pot are irresponsible or unable to do a job if they do smoke pot (this includes people who may only smoke at weekends/parties btw)
Especially over the damn zoom time video since they don’t show up for work.
Age discrimination almost certainly goes one way in these cases. That's if you're above 40, and looking to join an early stage start-up, you'll find you're often not a culture fit.
Maybe they've just bought in to someone elses' worldview. But I don't think so.
It's like the difference between a commuter on bike here in the Netherlands (more than 30% of all trips) vs the handful of cyclists in spandex with some fragile unsafe bike wanking about how light their bike is.
One is a cult, where it becomes part of someone's identity, one is just person trying to get to work.
We should have the discipline to realize that the people carrying the flag of anything are the least likely to be true representatives of the thing.
I’m also willing to bet that Cheech & Chong et al. are manifestations of a similarly forced meme, with many industries funding the various ”lazy brainless stoners”.
The exact same pattern can be found from nicotine vapes (the entire ”vape nation” annoyance meme was definitely a graft), and probably a lot of other things.
The point seems to be to control people socially by associating their habits with annoying qualities and fictional negative outcomes, superficially supported by anecdotes represented as scientific truth.
What other examples are there? Am I one of these people in ways I don't even realize?
I would love to be eating a meal with someone who says this, and then have a really fantastic conversation spring from it: Does this help me feel out my own blind-spots better? Is this always bad? Is this always true?
Great statement, well articulated. Thanks!
Like everything, being responsible goes a long way. There are responsible marijuana users and irresponsible ones. Blaming it on the weed is really the lazy part of "pothead" culture.
- the possibility of psychosis or schizophrenia in people 16-35 (https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/step/resources/Cannabis...)
- the same risk that inhaling any combustible has
- overeating
- cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-con...)
For some people the benefits outweigh the risks, especially when practiced in moderation.
And the last I heard, oxygen was "combustible". Inhaling a combustible isn't a health risk; inhaling combustion products might be. But many pot smokers use a vape, set to well-below the combustion temperature for their chosen herb.
Yeah, certainly. I'm not a doctor, but weed makes people eat. Hence it's been used to help folks with eating disorders.
Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-stop-munchie...
Vapes have issues too, which include exposure to heavy metals. By combustibles I mean anything you burn. Again, not a doctor and not a medical scientist so I may be using the wrong words but most people who use weed know these things. Most notably, anything that is smoked will incur a small but sharp rise in blood pressure. If you wear a heart monitor (or wrist watch with one) it's fairly trivial to detect.
Source: https://www.leafly.com/news/health/california-cannabis-labs-...
I also believe such a paradigm shift would largely eradicate domestic violence.
It's also hard to be productive drinking but pot can have the opposite effect.
Edit: Regulate as in drug testing for past use in an employment context, like what the story is talking about.
Yes we do. And it's a cash cow for the government so we're unlikely to stop anytime soon.
My main guess for that special treatment is merely that tobacco and alcohol were global when we started taking care about global health issues, so we left them, but banned any newcomer
That narrative just doesn’t hold up.
Opium, heroin and cocaine were pretty much global when we started taking care about global health issues.
Not consumed by everyone all around the world, for sure, but readily available and consumed nearly everywhere.
Heck, heroin was considered a magical cough syrup safer than morphine at one point. It took nearly 30 years for it to be banned in the US [1][2]
Compared to tobacco and alcohol, it certainly is a young one, but cannabis and hallucinogenic mushrooms hardly qualify as newcomers.
[1]: https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/from-c...
[2]: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bu...
How is coffee different from tobacco? How is nutmeg or saffron different from drugs? How about artificial flavonoid—xanthine concoctions such as Red Bull?
The difference in effect on health is severe, for one? There’s room for more nuance than ”both of these are psychoactive substances”.
It's a new one on me that coffee contains nicotine, the principal addictive agent in tobacco.
The public is largely noninformed about the constituents of coffee and tobacco smoke. Only nicotine and caffeine are ever mentioned, and even scientific articles routinely confuse the effects of pure nicotine and tobacco smoke, and those of pure caffeine and coffee. It is a collective illusion.
I never claimed that coffee contains nicotine: rather, what coffee and tobacco have in common are these Harmala alkaloids, the most abundant of which act as so-called monoamine oxidase inhibitors in humans.
However, some rather unexpected things do contain nicotine: tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and green peppers.
In my country, 'energy drinks' cannot be sold to anyone under 20 (same as alcohol and tobacco) for exactly this reason.
And I don't know if companies do it but I know that monitoring Gamma GT levels of suspected alcoholics is a thing. It is a problem for those who have naturally elevated levels btw.
What is unfortunate is that we don't have a good test for cannabis-related impairment. It is quite reliable for alcohol BAC is easy to test and correlates with impairment, but for cannabis, you don't really know if a person is completely stoned or if he has sobered up.
But yeah, cannabis use is less tolerated than alcohol use, cultural reasons I guess. Plus, it is really difficult to control alcohol since pretty much anyone can turn staple food into alcohol at home.
Alcohol is one of the most highly regulated substances on the planet.
Also, no puritanism here, just facts about how people can use pot and remain completely in control (again, worth pointing out that someone can fail a pot drug test if they smoked it weeks ago)
Are there tests that indicate past use of alcohol or just the ones I'm aware of where the measurement drops swiftly as alcohol is processed?
Same for marijuana; is there an objective(ish) test that indicates current intoxication or only the tests that show use within about a month?
It's one of the most-highly taxed. Not quite the same as being banned nearly everywhere, with many countries having mandatory death sentences.
But I have worked with many frequent users who smoked daily, and their job. They didn't mind doing terrible jobs.
I'm suprised people arn't talking about habitual pot smokers vs. occasional. If used to smoking--it's no big deal.
Same with alcohol. An alcoholic can drive perfectly well at .08, or a bit higher. An occasional drinker probally shouldn't be drinking and driving.
I heard TX takes into account tolerance when prosecuting DUI's.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is though, as I don't think anyone is suggesting that these drivers will actually be high while driving. Rather, they are people that use marijuana recreationally and would test positive for THC, disqualifying them from many jobs (despite the fact that urine THC levels do not corelate with how "high" someone is).
You're hyper vigilant, looking everywhere, your reactions are delayed a little such as that of an 60 year old person, and you're definitely listening to speed "limit" as the maximum, and not as the average.
You are slower to process inputs, you are less likely to consider threats or obstacles as dangerous, to an extent your ability to judge distances is hindered, you are much more easily distracted (highway hypnosis, for example, becomes a huge problem - especially with blinking lights and whatnot), your ability to focus is oftentimes next to zero, causing you to be distracted often by music or other passengers in the car.
Plus, driving slowly in and of itself is a hazard - the "speed rule" exists for a reason. If everyone is going 30 mph over the speed limit on a busy highway, you are more likely to cause an accident by going the posted speed limit than if you were to go the same speed as the rest of the traffic - even though it's technically illegal.
So please, do not use marijuana and drive. Stay at home and watch Money Heist and postmates a McFlurry from McDonalds or something.
No, nobody is an exception. You are not superhuman.
Please stop normalizing this. This narrative makes it harder to change the minds of dissenters and legitimize legalization for those people that actually benefit from it.
The people who have a problem with it aren't going to be able to stop legalization.
You shouldn't do it, I agree.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2021/06/21/crash-rate...
Where did I even allude to this? In fact I implied the exact opposite in my last sentence.
Let us just say you are somehow different. That could be possible, and I do not want to question your experience. So great! You are not impaired.
That is simply not helpful or viable from a policy point of view.
When we regulate, we need legal tests and policy applicable to people in a very broad sense, or what we get is a mess that does us no real good.
I have known exceptions to the rule myself. People who can perform having had booze, pot, other drugs.
Always hard to tell whether their baseline, sober capability is exceptional enough to present normally with drugs on board, or their response to the drug is simply different.
Fair? I think so.
And those people can manage their use, function and pass tests too. Cannabis users cannot and that is a problem we have no easy answers to right now.
Sadly, being the exception to the rule really does us all no good when it comes to policy.
Fact is, barring very few people, using THC impairs that user.
Benadryl does the same thing, and in my State people can get a DUI on Benadryl. Sadly, they can also get one being a little too tired and having failed a THC test because they hit a binger last weekend too.
This is all a difficult problem to solve.
It should deffo be off Schedule 1
However, even a full federal legalization would leave us with the testing dilemma I described above. That might be one reason it is still on schedule.
But, say Feds went full legal. Workers comp would still be a big issue because they cannot determine fault, and best case would charge employers accordingly, meaning most would continue their harsh policy, leaving us right where this discussion started.
Opiates, booze, other things flush out and are testable in ways cannabis just is not. And that is a major league policy problem.
Not to mention that THC's psychoactive effects can be completely blocked by sufficient amounts of CBD and probably other compounds. You can try it yourself. Get CBD drops, ingest 100mg and try getting high. Even the most potent sativa will not work as you might expect.
It's easy to get distracted and then focus on that distraction while high. That's not conducive to safe driving. We don't want people mindlessly blowing through an intersection because they were fixating on how the wind was making the tarp on the truck in front of them flutter.
It is very comparable to being drunk. Some people can in fact handle it, many cannot and severely overestimate their abilities.
So in my completely anecdotal opinion, weed bad, alcohol worse were driving is concerned.
The only good thing was it was at 3AM so there was no one around on a normally busy street to get wiped out.
And your whole attitude of irrational justification of it says you’re probably not capable of making a rational judgement about whether or not you should drive.
I assume you know what the parent comment meant when talking about “data”.
Don’t get me wrong - no one should drive while impaired, period. But offering anecdotes in lieu of data is generally not helpful.
Could be better informed by numbers here. But hard to say because there aren't reliable tests for "high right now", and maybe not for "tired" either.
https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/public-policy/artic...
some of the highest performers I have ever worked with, and pot was a daily for them.
Maybe the question has a different outcome if you're measuring a stadium full of Designers with Adobe Illustrator open, trying to brainstorm how a logo looks?
I know this is unpopular on internet news sites but I assure you that your social reputation isn’t that great if you smoke the stuff generally and that’s not going to change because of the propensity of people to be unreliable or dicks. The only thing that’s faulty is your perception of it.
Everyone was promoted it as harmless. It’s not. I’m seeing lives wrecked.
And yes I know alcohol is bad. But I see less long term damage from that as most people seem to grow out of alcoholism I have know. Cannabis not so much - it becomes the primary thing they live for and around. All conversation ends up on it.
Is cannabis legal where you live? Criminality causes stress and paranoia.
Are you living in a heavily Christian environment? Asking because in heavily religious environments, schizophrenia with religious illusions often occurs as a result of internal conflict between sin-programming and self-perception.
Is cannabis socially accepted or are people forced to choose between cannabis and other people? Social exclusion has in some studies been ranked more stressful than getting raped, so some sort of social PTSD can be expected to develop in these kind of environments to those who get excluded.
As for other points I’m an atheist with zero religious values at all. I have used it myself as well. And I’m in a country in a city where no one gives a crap. I’m about as unbiased as you can get.
As for sins, I’m a pretty big fan of them as whole.
The issue here is with the perception that it is harmless which it is definitely not.
I did get a hypotension episode a few years ago, as a result of starting a new strain a bit over-enthusiastically. But even coffee can cause palpitations, if you drink too much just because you like drinking coffee.
My understanding is that certain high-THC strains are much more likely to give rise to psychological problems than other strains. I'm not aware that CBD as such can result in psychological problems.
Ah, the good ol’ skunk scarecrow.
People have been making various grades of hashish for millennia, with THC content many times that of dry flower — you’d think someone would have noticed if it was more likely to produce psychological issues?
Yet, there is no high-THC hash scare — it’s almost if someone wanted you to avoid good quality cannabis and be content consuming whatever ditch weed global criminal organisations produce.
Hashish is generally made with high-CBD strains (which is partly why hash tends to mong you out more than weed).
It seems there is evidence that CBD moderates the trippy effects of THC, and reduces the propensity of the product to trigger psychotic states in suceptible individuals.
BTW: in my experience, modern weed strains are beaten in terms of hit-per-gram only by the rarest, highest-grade black hash.
There are various types of hashish; the traditional Moroccan screened variety is almost certainly all cultivated indica, but Himalayan charas is almost certainly all landrace sativa.
You have definitely met pot smokers who have, and do live perfectly normal lives because their baseline is better. You probably have no idea who they are.
Well, there's me.
And of course, there's all the people I know who haven't ever used cannabis (I take it you meant me to exclude them).
On the other hand, my experience is that many people with bipolar find it improves their mood.
If you have psychiatric difficulties, then it's not a good idea to mess with drugs that are in any way psychedelic. If you have problems with hypertension, it's not a good idea to mess with caffeine or cocaine.
There are long term pot smokers whose intake is very large but whose tolerance has risen such that when they consume they're quite functional. They are usually easy to spot though...