We should not be celebrating marijuana use
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Part of moderation is a recognition that nothing is endlessly good or bad. Working is good, but working too much is bad. In fact, working too much is the reason people crave a stress release and go binge drinking after work or on the weekends.
Outlawing cannabis — or other substances used for similar purposes ignores the fact that the present state of society doesn’t work for the people who need a “break”. You won’t change the fact that people aren’t coping with whatever issues they’re having fitting into the mold of the model citizen.
Instead, those people will be marginalized and pushed into the fringes of society where they lose respect for the rules and land in the prison system — which has a very poor track record of reintegration. Alternatively, they pursue other things that are legal but are equally or more self destructive.
If you’re scared of substance abuse potential, then you should be ten times more scared that our social contracts are becoming so aggressive that it’s a problem, and we’re merely treating the symptoms with prohibition.
I get that it's not for everyone, but I don't get the impulse to try and restrict others from doing these things. Like, I don't really get why people would sink so many hours into video games, and to be honest I think it's kind of a waste, but I'd never try and ban anyone from doing it.
We're all on this rock for a couple of years and then we're gone forever. Let people spend that time enjoying themselves how they like.
The horror of thinking the sun is going to explode. The horror of thinking the people that care the most about him are going to kill him. The horror of thinking there's faces in the sidewalk. The horror of thinking aliens visit him and attempt to abduct him. The horror of thinking he gets messages from the aliens via the static on a TV. The horror of thinking he's married to someone else who doesn't know who he is. The horror of not being able to look after himself or work. The horror of him being homeless in another country because the system there failed him. I could go on for hours.
I know several others since the legalization of pot who induced schizophrenia in themselves in adulthood. Overeating? Consider yourself lucky.
It turns out there are risks both ways. A black market makes crime and causes violence. A completely open and unregulated market can create problems for at risk people including the issues your step-father experienced.
There is no perfect solution. There are just ones that do the least harm.
The problem is the lack of accountability and access to solutions within Western countries. IMO, if cannabis can be made so readily available on a legal basis and easily accessible, the treatments for schizophrenia must be too. The risks generally aren't highlighted, only the benefits of cannabis are. The media would have you believe it's a wonder drug with no dangerous side effects.
He ended up coming back from Canada where his family live to live in the UK again because he couldn't get access to a specific monthly injection he needed for his schizophrenia. Lived in the street for about two years in Canada, until his delusion led him to commit a crime, and he agreed to stay in a psychiatric hospital for x time. After which, they simply released him into the street again...
The lack of viable, affordable, healthcare in the US is a tragedy of huge proportions that scales far past just drug abuse itself in to pretty much every part of our lives for the people that live here. The fact so many of us live in fear of losing our jobs because we're at risk of dying if we do is a joke for a country as wealthy as we are.
As an outsider looking in, whilst the UK's NHS isn't in a good place right now due to mismanagement and underfunding, I can't help but feel that in a land of many billionaires, healthcare should be means-tested in its pricing, or there should be an equivocal for the NHS.
This'll be an unpopular take on HN, but what is it going to take? Government intervention? Wealth caps? Heavier taxation over x for the mega wealthy? Heavier pricing for the mega wealthy? If people can accrue billions in personal wealth and sit on it then there's a problem.
Access to healthcare shouldn't be limited by money. Society would be more productive if it were well. There would inevitably be less crime too.
The UK risks losing the NHS as-is. It's terrifying for most folks. No health insurance required to access it. Sure, you may wait for help, e.g., there's a six months waiting list on entering titration for ADHD meds, but access to the same private healthcare provider is there via the NHS, and the waiting list is generally no different than if someone were to pay for it out of their own pocket other than an additional week or so as part of the "Right To Choose" system to be referred.
> Moreover, separate data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission show that only 92 people were sentenced for marijuana possession in the federal system in 2017, out of a total of nearly 20,000 drug convictions.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/weighing-impa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/live-updates/ge...
With that said, you've evidently ignored the plentra of police cam videos out there that show that "Cops are real pricks quite often", and suddenly the cop harassing you for drugs is now arresting you for assaulting an officer, in which you're going to jail for unless someone else happened to film it because juries believe cops almost all of the time.
I also know plenty of people who haven't had any mental issues from it, but the risk is definitely there.
The first time it happened, my step-father jumped into a river to "escape capture by aliens". Had a family member not swam out to him, he'd have drowned.
Likewise, he totalled a car with others in it during a psychotic episode. Again, he shouldn't have been allowed to drive, but the laws at the time did not prevent him from doing so.
I find that hard to believe. You could probably correlate many mental facility intake patients with those that ate yogurt for breakfast. This is ignorant fear mongering.
Eg: as laid out in [1] which deserves a thorough and close reading.
There's little evidence that cannabis induces (causes) schizophreniform psychoses in people who aren't already at risk of developing such conditions already.
( Eg: A study modelling trends in the incidence of psychoses in Australia did not find clear evidence of any increase in incidence following steep increases in cannabis use during the 1980s
And that's from a thirty year look back in a country of 20+ million with extremely comprehensive public health records and cheap accessable professional docters and access to medication )
There's ample evidence that cannabis and schizophreniform psychoses go hand in hand in a self reinforcing spiral that leads to no good end.
( Numerous examples cited with the paper [1] ).
Like most drugs it's one that's best avoided until full maturity and fully avoided if there are any signs of onset psychoses otherwise relatively harmless in moderation and with an eye to actual effect.
[1] Cannabis use and the risk of developing a psychotic disorder World Psychiatry (2008)
Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver were halved by Prohibition, and didn't return to pre-Prohibition levels until the late 1960s. Similarly, per-capita alcohol consumption dropped to 30% and then plateaued at about 60-70% of pre-Prohibition consumption, only returning to pre-Prohibition levels in the 1980s.
Prohibition worked. But arguably it was too expensive, and certainly inconvenient. OTOH, national Prohibition turned out to be much stricter than originally intended; the 18th Amendment was originally sold to the public as way to ban hard liquor, not beer and wine, permitting Congress to harmonize state laws which primarily banned the former, not the latter. The ban on beer and wine was a turn that most didn't expect. If Congress' Volstead Act hadn't been so extreme or if SCOTUS hadn't interpreted the amendment so loosely, we might still have the 18th Amendment.
Cannabis use is not a virtue. It can be responsible so that the negatives are less than or equal to background negatives from the rest of life, though, similar to alcohol and other ingesteds.
While cases of Jake Foot went through the roof, tens of thousands died from drinking alcohol the government intentionally poisoned, crime increased, and the Mafia profited heavily.
I'm all for people choosing for themselves what they should or shouldn't do with their bodies, and it seems like the more people try to force others to adhere to their own moral hangups the more it just brings suffering
The war on drugs caused far more harm than it did good.
Jake Foot was caused by a change of ingredients to Jamaica Ginger, which had been a popular cold remedy in America for over 100 years. It was caught almost immediately. And while Jamaica Ginger, along with many other patent medicines, was indeed a popular alternative to hard liquor[1], it was also consumed by many Americans (quite possible a majority--it was the Nyquil of the 19th century), including children. Only a single dose of Jamaica Ginger was required for paralysis or even death, and this why children were among the many victims. There were other cases of organophosphate poisoning around the world, some much worse, that had nothing to do with Jamaica Ginger or Prohibition. Jake Foot is just another story popularized in support of the mythology of Unintended Consequence in which anti-government conservatives, and now liberals, love to revel.
You also greatly exaggerate the number of methanol poisoning deaths from the infamous government-sanctioned liquor adulteration scheme.
All-in-all, the number of deaths in both cases don't seem to exceed the number of reduced deaths from cirrohsis alone, let alone all the other alcohol related deaths. It's difficult to exaggerate how much Americans drank prior to the institution of Prohibition, and more importantly the extent of the public health catastrophe that had long been unfolding. (And the peak came well before Federal Prohibition as state Prohibition laws had already become common, so looking back merely to the 18th Amendment doesn't properly capture various causes and effects.) There's a reason the country passed a constitutional amendment, which is, to say the least, not something that happens regularly; it requires an uncommon degree of political consideration and agreement across the population, testifying to how significant of an issue it was.
But, as I said, Prohibition as enacted may indeed have been too expensive. Not because in a simple statistical sense there were more net deaths from Unintended Consequences(TM) (which is almost certainly wrong), but because it had the effect of changing the demographics of death. Increased criminality resulted in more highly publicized random deaths of bystanders who might have never touched alcohol. As with terrorism, the archetypical example, people respond in an exaggerated manner to things which they feel they have no control over. As has been shown time and again, the middle class is more than willing trade the well-being of the poor for improvements in their own quality of life; and that exchange can happen both when prohibiting something but also when permitting something.
There are other lenses with which to view this. Prohibition was at its heart a feminist movement designed to and arguably quite successful in reducing spousal abuse and economic impoverishment of the household.
To say "prohibition doesn't work" is trite and easily falsified. There are all kinds of cases where prohibition works like a charm for its intended cases. Take, for example, drug trafficking in Singapore. The question is whether the result is worth it, and very often the answer to that pivots on a qualitative analysis, not quantitative. But people want to avoid qualitative analyses because it requires making moral arguments which are much more difficult to justify, so you end up with a bunch of junk quantitative "science" to justify a position, and that tactic is just as available to "bad" people as it is "good" people.
[1] See this article from 1900 about a group of woodsmen who overdosed on Jamaica Ginger: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/04/16/101... Maine banned the sale of liquor in 1856.
Maybe you went to a different type of school than me, but from my memory no one ever took the 'drugs are bad, mmmkay' speeches seriously. The visiting anti drug crews were taken even less seriously. And my school was one of the more respectable ones in an affluent area.
It hurts my heart to say this, because I personally genuinely HATE smoking. I grew up in a smoking household, and instead of becoming a smoker, I went right to the other side of the spectrum. Gave my family hell for it. Really hate smoking of any kind. I also have a crap sense of smell now, but I can smell a smoker a mile away, and I hate the smell.
but I don't want it to be illegal. When it's illegal, it still happens, but all the profit goes underground and just makes everything worse. I'd prefer it was all legally produced, regulated, legally sold, taxed, etc etc.
Then we just follow the Australian / New Zealand playbook for reducing smoking, which has been incredibly successful. (2 Side Notes: 1) Australia is dropping the ball on vaping, which sucks. 2) I wish they'd do the same sort of thing with gambling too. )
People generally don't like to be coddled by their government. They changed the laws in their states to allow them to make their own choices (and deal with the consequences).
Nobody chose to be homeless, nobody chose to have an eating disorder as a teenager, nobody chose to have a society that it incredibly obese, etc these are all conditions largely created as a consequence of the externalities of others actions chasing their freedoms: others decided to buy lots of investment properties and drive up prices beyond middle class affordability, others decided to photoshop and post their selfies to create toxic body standards, others decided to openly consume incredibly sugary food and increasingly normalized obesity.
We live in a community, we’re not atomized individuals, and how others behave DOES affect us. The freedom to create a shittier society for everyone is no freedom at all.
So reduce freedoms to make us safer? Maybe stop people having that extra pizza slice or smoking that cigar?
You're implying that the government is competent enough and not corruptible enough (via lobbying) to take this on.
Evaluate the quality of the public US education system, the health system for it's citizens (especially the non privileged wage earner), the national debt (of ~ $31T), the judicial system that has caused overpopulated prisons and even simple stuff like the responsibility of taking care of combat vets.
The handling of the pandemic (the lies, collusion with the media companies to suppress opposing views/questions of assumption) have made a lot of population think twice before trusting the government (irrespective of political party).
Not a good track record and does not inspire confidence.
Now I do agree that the points you brought up are blights on society. A lot (of the population) seem to be swayed by commercials, have massive financial debt and lack basic critical thinking skills.
However I can't see regulation by the incompetent as the solution.
I live in Michigan and IMO legal cannabis products are too cheap. Stores will run deals where you can get vape carts for less than 10 dollars. 200mg THC bags of gummies go for $5 somewhere in town almost all the time. Actual flower and pre-rolls aren't quite as cheap, presumably because they can't be made from shake and other waste. At these prices, $20 could keep me high for a week straight (admittedly I'm a bit of a lightweight), which is absolutely not the case with booze, even the cheapest bottom-shelf fortified wine. I think there is a lot of room to raise taxes on these products without fueling the black market.
I don’t care if people use some drugs. I have some edibles of my own in my fridge right now. What I care about is normalizing vices and pretending like it’s just a matter of individual preference when it obviously affects the rest of society at large (and makes life worse).
Not like we have done with cannabis though, that obviously would be a disaster.
But I do think some wise well regulated control and dosage with some form of monitoring or limitation would be very much less costly in terms of dollars, lives saved, health and social disruption.
We ended up in a logically dissonant state because that's just how politics and culture work. What's most galling, IMO, is when people today defend this obvious dissonance, such as in San Francisco where leftist politicians will defend both narratives in the same sentence with a straight face. Worse is when they do stuff like ban mentholated cigarettes with the express intention of saving the black community from itself, while opposing any proposed restraints on the sale or consumption of marijuana as oppression of the black community. There's so much dissonance there it boggles the mind.
There are ways to harmonize the disparate treatment of cigarettes and marijuana in our new, normative culture so that marijuana use is afforded more laxity relative to cigarettes, but too many seem to be bought specifically into the fallacious logic of the original campaigns.
https://dot.state.wy.us/news/drunken-driving-fatalities-doub...
I feel it is racist and presumptuous for a bunch of ugly Americans to sully Patrick's good name by doing nothing but wear gaudy trash and get rip-roaring drunk. It's disrespectful to actual Irish people. It is a level of parody and mockery that would be met with violence if it were used against a protected class such as Blacks or LGBT.
I am, in fact, a teetotaler, and I belong to an Irish association that promotes temperance and we practice total abstinence from intoxicating drinks. I took inspiration from my pastor, who was a member and spoke of his experience. It is not a great sacrifice for me to give up alcohol, but it was a pleasure to drink sometimes, and so I offer it up for those who can't stop. Every time I see a drinker on the street, or an abandoned Steel Reserve at a bus stop, I stop and recite our pledge-prayer for them.
I feel that drunkenness and intoxication ruins lives and steals innocence. I believe that marijuana can be useful and has a place in society, but I also believe that it can be abused, and I don't much enjoy being exposed to a constant flow of secondhand smoke of any kind (my downstairs neighbor seemed to have a regular pot habit, and so my bedroom would fill daily with smoke, and I'm sure I had a contact high. This interacts poorly with my meds.)
Drunk drivers ruin holidays for many people. I try to stay off the roads, as a pedestrian, during peak-drunk seasons. A girlfriend once insisted it was perfectly safe to drive while stoned. I'm not so sure.
Maybe it's wrong to celebrate the guy at all since he supposedly went around driving out Irish pagans and destroying their culture and religion, but personally I suspect most people aren't thinking much about the man or what he did or didn't do, and are mostly just looking to enjoy themselves while spending a moment thinking about and celebrating Ireland and Irish people which is actually pretty nice. A decent number of us ugly Americans came from Ireland after all and we've come a long way from "No Irish Need Apply" to "Let's all have fun and celebrate Irish people!"
People shouldn't need to have much excuse to celebrate and have a good time however they decide to do it. St. Patrick's day is a good enough excuse for me. American's aren't generally very aware about other countries and their culture so when a lot of people think of Ireland what comes to mind is often Anything Green, Shamrocks, and Leprechauns which I get is a bit clumsy and reductive, but there's no hate behind it, so I don't see any need to choose to be offended by it. We've got plenty of other things that come from a place of hatred and fear to get offended over.
> I feel that drunkenness and intoxication ruins lives and steals innocence. I believe that marijuana can be useful and has a place in society, but I also believe that it can be abused
I think that everything has a place and can be abused. It seems the risks with alcohol are much higher, and a lot of people have had a bad time with it, but many more enjoy it and even enjoy occasionally over-enjoying it. Intoxicated people should stay off the roads though. Most of us have enough transportation options that it shouldn't be hard to take a train/bus, call a friend, or summon an uber. Driving while intoxicated is just selfish and dangerous
I've yet to see any evidence that this happens in the USofA .. I've only been exposed to decades of US reporting on gross caricatures of imagined "Irishness", grossly offensive attempts at mock Irish accents, and little actual knowledge of Irish history, the Gaeilge language, literature, etc.
Mind you I'm an Australian offshoot of Fenians imprisoned in Fremantle (a thread amoung a rich tapestry of other characters) so I have no deep insight into the second and third hand Irish of the US other than the obvious observation that it's not a good look from afar.
If you get the chance you should try going to a St. Patrick's Day parade in any major city sometime. You'll see it everywhere.
> I've only been exposed to decades of US reporting on gross caricatures of imagined "Irishness", grossly offensive attempts at mock Irish accents, and little actual knowledge of Irish history, the Gaeilge language, literature, etc.
gross caricatures of imagined "Irishness" and grossly offensive attempts at mock Irish accents are a big part of how America celebrates Ireland for sure! Many Americans couldn't even point out Ireland on an unlabeled map, they aren't going to learn Irish Gaelic anytime soon, but that doesn't stop them from doing their best with what they have. We don't get a lot of exposure to Irish culture normally, but photos of the parades held in Ireland don't look much different from the parades in NY or Chicago (although I do note fewer flags and more leprechauns).
America isn't much better with most other cultures assuming they get any attention at all. I'm sure folks could choose to get offended at our clumsy attempts at celebrating Chinese New Year, the Day of the Dead, or Oktoberfest too, but I really like that we try to incorporate holidays from around the world and give other cultures at least some consideration. I think it's great to see Ireland getting some love at least once a year in the states and while you won't see it being widely reported in the press, I wouldn't be surprised if the annual reminder that Ireland exists doesn't inspire some to take a deeper look at Ireland's people and culture once they've sobered up.
We've got several neighbours about who were born, educated, and worked in either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland before coming out here to Australia (a number former security | police as we (W.Australia) offered assisted passage to migrate for work) and for them it's an odd thing seeing others several generations removed celebrating an imagined Brigadoon (albeit Irish rather than Scottish).
Still, as you note, photos of crowds here look much like photos of crowds there so it's hard to see any issue .. still I imagine that celebrating Ireland in Ireland by Irish people must differ in some manner from not that.
Americans are mostly ignorant of Pope Night, but some have heard of Guy Fawkes. Pope Night was Guy Fawkes Night imported to early America. Anti-Catholics would raise funds, take to the streets, and wreak havoc against anything in their way. George Washington himself finally abolished Pope Night, because he noticed that it annoyed the Canadians quite a bit, and Canada was a valuable ally (not to mention American Catholics as well) so he told all the Brit-Protties to knock it the hell off. So Guy Fawkes stayed in the UK and continues to burn every year, on schedule.
Anti-Catholicism is frequently referred to as "The Last Acceptable Prejudice", but there are plenty of acceptable prejudices for the politically correct, and a nation full of poor, oppressed white Catholics with funny accents is ripe for the picking.
Mexicans get it too, on Cinco de Mayo. Perhaps there is more sensitivity because they're side-by-side with us.
It'd be more like white families celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. by reciting the "I have a dream" speech and marching because that's all they know and associate him with, while others object that he's become an offensive caricature because actually he had a complex life and was more than just a civil rights leader and people celebrating ignore that he had many speeches and also spoke out a lot about class issues, not just race issues.
There are plenty of offensive stereotypes about Irish people, but we don't bring them out for the holiday. They're largely forgotten in the US.
Of course the whattaboutists are correct: alcohol has the same impact, but for some reason the myth persists that heavy weed use isn't dangerous.
You can't sleepwalk your way through 30 years of life and be a sharp normal person with a regular life and good thinking and personal management skills.
I'm also over 50 and have friends from high school I smoked with years ago as a teenager that took a different path with regards to usage and it's very much as you state. No overdoses, no tragedies, no schizophrenia, nothing dramatic. They just don't have their act together and are, as you state, damaged. And they missed out on a lot of life.
For the record I think marijuana is fine, possibly even useful or beneficial if used very sparingly and irregularly for most people. But decades of habitual use, which some people apparently will chose, does seem to produce less then ideal outcomes.
It's good to get a different perspective sometimes. It's good to become less judgmental. It's good to let go of the unimportant obsessions and ambitions of life sometimes and concentrate on the little things.
But it also has many downsides, which don't need enumerating. Anyone who has been around it at length or used used regularly knows this.
Here's my observation:
Most people who smoke a lot of weed should smoke much less, or none at all preferably (at least for a long period). They might find their lives improving and their thinking cleared up.
On the other hand, people who preach about it with cherry picked stats and alarmism, and are in general uptight assholes who focus mostly on getting ahead in life without considering the nature of life or the perspectives of other people much at all should be encouraged to take a few bong tokes or gummies on a regular basis. This might apply to the author of the article, not sure but seems it could.
It's very good for clearing those conditions right up.
I tried pot a few times but the sluggishness and dissociative effects (Delta-8 & 9 THC) were too much. Smoking a joint or hitting a bog, and inhaling microfines without even the filter of a cigarette, seems inherently unsafe. In college, there were some students who were basically addicted to weed because their intake was extreme and they were constantly jonesing whenever the (student) dealers in the dorms went home for vacation. With life experience, you can pick up on people who have ruined their brains with certain drugs because they exhibit patterns of ticks and odd behavior.
Lab-grade CBD, delivered sublingually in a tincture of precise dosage, is for me calming without any other effects other than occasional mild tiredness. Topical CBD is an absolute scam because of the low quantities, high prices, and unsuitable delivery formulation. Buying purified CBD, getting a microgram scale out, and mixing in a stable carrier oil is the lowest cost and most effective way to go.
These opinion pieces are probably paid for by the beverages industry.
Those 510 vape cartridges get you blasted, but they do so in an interesting way. Whereas smoking the leaf contains a weaker concentration of THC, it also contains other compounds which act as adjuvants. In effect, if you smoke the leaf itself, you get more subjective effect per mg of THC.
Vape cartridges overcome the disadvantage of not having adjuvants by simply providing more THC. That stuff is like ~89% pure THC, whereas you'd be looking at only about 20% THC in your typical blunt. In other words, they compensate for being less efficient at getting you high by being more efficient at delivering high doses of THC. The net impact is that you get a subjectively higher high, but get there by way of a disproportionate increase in the amount of THC it took to get you there.
This matters, because THC concentration is directly linked to the frequency of side effects, as well as the degree of tolerance you develop for the drug.
Vape cartridges not only make you sort of immune to getting high from smoking (in effect, addicting cannabis smokers to harder stuff,) but also deal more damage (or stochastically speaking, lead to terrible outcomes more often.)
Worse, from a UX perspective, they are a brilliant dark pattern, disguising how much you've consumed (the drawdown in vape fluid for a vaping session is often fractions of a milliliter) while also making the experience 'smoother' (cf. menthol tobacco cigarettes.) Compare this with a blunt, which (a) often has to be rolled, providing a nice little speed bump on the process, and (b) is often unpleasant to overconsume (cough! cough!) and (c) must often be consumed outdoors (lest you hotbox your home) and (d) provides a vivid, visible, compelling measure of how much you've consumed.
This is all quite serious; at higher regular doses, weed more frequently causes all sorts of horrible effects, which can range from depression to emotional volatility (yes, really -- you wind up being dependent on it to stay emotionally level) all the way up to psychosis, as someone else here was pointing out.
Here in Canada, legalization, I think, has been terrible for a lot of vulnerable people. The correct approach would have been decriminalization without legalization.