LOWERCASEGUY

On 3/3/2024 at 11:29 PM, Tropicalevo said:

The threat to make it illegal is for the recreational use.

Define recreational use.  

Go ahead, I'll wait.  

Think you've nailed down a definition?  

I'm stealing with from Kitty Chopaka but, let's say that I get a recommendations/prescription for cannabis for migraines.  

I am smoking a joint to help me with my migraine pain and take 2 puffs.  

Now my migraine pain has eased and I take a 3rd puff as I rolled a nice sativa that helps me focus and be creative and I need to crank out some writing for work.  Is that third puff medicinal or recreational?  

Keep in mind, I was not prescribed cannabis for focus, only for migraine pain.  

You starting to see how stupid the distinction between medical and recreational is now?  

On 3/3/2024 at 11:29 PM, Tropicalevo said:

Vaping is not the same as inhalers. (and vaping is illegal).

Yes, I admit that inhalers are good - I take two of them for my COPD but this article is about banning cannabis.

I was responding to your statement that said that inhaling anything is damaging to the lungs.  

Remember this?

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Sucking anything except air into your lungs is bad for you.

Given that respiratory therapists administer drugs every day via inhalation, it seems the damage is highly dependent on what is being inhaled, so the blanket statement that inhaling anything is harmful is clearly false unless we also want to argue that even the air is harmful.  And we kinda need air.  🙂

Cannabis could easily be produced in inhaler form.  

If the main concern is lung damage, ban smoking weed.  Make edibles and vaping legal and eliminate all forms of smoking.  

I don't advocate for that but it seems a lot simpler than making cannabis use for "recreational" purposes illegal and throwing people in jail.  

17 minutes ago, Hummin said:

They grew hemp for making products made of hemp 😀 not drugs. They where outnumbered and made illegal by cotton producers. Interesting history, also the more conspiracy part behind it.

 

Cocaine was also legal for a brief moment in tge history 

Is hemp cannabis?  Why, yes it is.  So, what are you babbling about?  

Cocaine was a medicinal product, not just legal.  It was in soda, cough syrup, and obviously used for dental procedures.  

If this was all done completely based on science, most illegal drugs would be legal and many legal drugs would be illegal.  

13 minutes ago, Hummin said:

A good example is world richest and most powerful country being ripped apart by to many individual egoistic selfish needed people. There is no common ground left to oppose all these conflicting forces. 

Please cite your evidence that a causal relationship exists between drugs and what you just described.  Nobody is interested in your personal theories.  If you have research that shows a causal relationship, fine.  If not, it's not welcome in this discussion.  

15 minutes ago, Hummin said:

Back in the days, either you where productice and produced, or you where left behind. Today, you can float through life doing nothing in the western countries and live ok, but for how long? 

Hmmmm . . . well, I've had a pretty successful career and have been smoking weed since I was 14 so . . . jeez we both have anecdotal evidence.  

But let's look at some other deadbeat drug users who have not produced anything:

• Michael Phelps
• Steve Jobs 
• Elon Musk
• Carl Sagan 
• Bill Gates
• Abraham Lincoln, US President, quoted as saying, "Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica."
• Barack Obama 
• Ben Franklin
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Janet Yellen (US Secretary of the Treasury)

Are they all slackers?  I didn't want to get into musicians, artists, etc that are all avid drug users.  

You seem to have a stereotype of drug users in your head that isn't very accurate yet you also seem very close minded to changing that opinion with new information.  

27 minutes ago, Hummin said:

I really do not care, but most people are stupid, and stupid people need guidance, simple as that. 

You seem to like to think of yourself in the group of people that need to guide others but maybe you're the stupid one.  I'm not saying that you are in fact stupid but most stupid people don't think they're stupid either.  You might want to google, "Dunning–Kruger Effect"

The arrogance of your statement is truly amazing.    

1 hour ago, steven100 said:

 

agree absolutely ......  trying to convince that drugs are ok.   😂

First, define what a drug is.  

You know the definitions are completely arbitrary, right?  

Doctors used to use cocaine for medicinal purposes.  Now, doctors can't even possess it.  

Many of the founders of the United States grew cannabis.  Now it's illegal.  

Most drugs that are considered the biggest threats to society all happen to have been enjoyed by minority groups.  Weed, heroin, cocaine, etc were all re-classified as "drugs" as a way to control minority groups who used these drugs.  

Large parts of the world run their drug laws based on the whims of a racist called Harry Anslinger who targeted minority groups in the US via drug laws.  And then because the US was losing the drug war they started, they strong-armed many countries, including Thailand, into joining their drug war.

Anybody that celebrates drug laws is celebrating racism.    

1 hour ago, Hummin said:

You talking about those who is on a inner journey to find and seek their consciousness, and develop themselves with help of drugs. 

 

Im sure you know that can be done without drugs to?

 

No, there is no cure for abuse of stimuli, but we can limit the abuse to a minimum, giving those who need help the help they need. 

 

Not making every possible stimulants available for everyone at anytime. Do you understand the difference? 

 

This is just a politicsl bait same as the other side screaming for harder actions agsinst drugs destruction and use without solving the core of the problem first

I'm talking about everyone, not just those on an inner journey.  

Yes, the guy who goes off into the woods and meditates for a year is trying to alter their state of consciousness but his quest is born out of the same dissatisfaction that makes people drink booze, watch porn, exercise, or get high.  

You're trying to turn what I said into something else.  I'm not saying that getting high or taking shrooms is better than spending a few years meditating on the nature of reality.  I'm saying that both the meditator and the alcoholic are trying to alter their brain but they have different reasons 

But this desire to change our brain chemistry, thus our consciousness, is as old as humanity.  You can go back into human history as far back as there are artifacts and you'll always find beer, wine, shrooms, weed, or some other substance.  

In fact, while I'm not a subscriber to this theory myself, there is a theory that one of the reasons the human brain underwent such rapid expansion in such a short evolutionary timeline is because apes were eating shrooms and the shrooms caused mutations that accelerated our brain evolution.  There are a lot of holes in that theory but the fact that it's even made it this far as a theory means that people wanting to do drugs or alter their brain chemistry isn't some sort of new phenomenon.  

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Not making every possible stimulants available for everyone at anytime. Do you understand the difference?  

And who gets to decide what's best for me?  You do realize that what you're proposing is a nanny state that has to tell each individual what they can and can't do based on . . . whatever some idiot in the government decides?  

Maybe, just maybe, instead of making rules about what people can and can't do, we embrace the fact that something deep down inside every human being craves to alter its consciousness.  

Keep in mind, that almost all drugs are manageable.  You can be a functioning meth addict.  You can be a functioning opioid addict.  

The problem is when the government says they're going to protect you from . . . you . . . and they create an environment that prioritizes penalties over concern over people's welfare.  

The fatality rate for opioids didn't skyrocket in the US until the US gov cracked down on legal opioids.  That forced people who had been tricked into getting hooked on opioids by the doctors and pharma companies to buy heroin (often laced with fentanyl) from street dealers.  

But what if they had just left everyone alone?  What if you could buy pharmaceutical opioids at any pharmacy?  And instead of spending billions of dollars a year incarcerating heroin users, you can use that money to offer people help if they want to kick heroin.  

Your solution sucks.  It's basically you forcing your ideals on me and everyone else.  Much like Bill Murry said, I'm paraphrasing, I find it off that the most dangerous aspect of cannabis is getting caught with it.  

There shouldn't be any drugs that are illegal to possess.  The real issue is whether or not someone can responsibly use them.  And the moment you make the penalty for responsible use greater than the harm caused by the drug, you are a bigger problem than the drug.  Way more lives have been ruined by the war on drug than if they would have just given free drugs to every man, woman, and child.  

3 minutes ago, HugoFastor said:

Hub of assumptions. Lol. Don't feel bad. It was a waste of time, but there will be someone else interested in reading your misguided tirade, just not me. So now you don't have to feel like it was a total waste of time. 

Again, how do you know it was a tirade if you didn't read it?  

When I was a young child, my mother used to take me to my aunt’s house and the boredom was excruciating.  But then I would hear my mom in the other room say, “Well, we should get going” but she kept talking for another 20 minutes.  That’s what listening to you feels like.

Just now, Hummin said:

You are talking about a very limited percentage of population, most people just want to have fun, get wasted, intoxicated or and treat their personal problems, physically or and mental sick and do not get the help they need. 

What percentage am I talking about?  

Show me a country, no matter how barbaric their drug laws, that doesn't have a drug problem.  

If the threat of death can't stop people from doing drugs, maybe the problem isn't the drugs.  

2 minutes ago, Hummin said:

No doubt drug politics have failed, but why do people do drugs in the first place? That is the question,

Hate to break the news to you but humans have been doing drugs for almost as long as humans have existed.  

There's evidence of cannabis and mushroom use going back thousands of years, perhaps even 10,000 or more years.  

The desire to change our state of consciousness is universal and not even limited to humans.  Elephants and monkeys are famous for eating fermenting fruit to get drunk.  Beer and wine were two of the first things humans learned to make.  

I'll refrain from a philosophical deep dive into human consciousness but I do find it telling that you think your state of consciousness is the correct one.  I think any Buddhist or anyone that follows a non-duality sort of philosophy assumes that the world we live in is the dream and that drilling down into the layers of reality is the only way to see what the universe really is.  

Another aspect of this topic you seem to ignore is the fact that you define drugs as the illegal sort.  What Xanax or SSRIs or the countless other LEGAL drugs that it's perfectly acceptable to consume?  

Why is meth illegal but drugs that produce almost the exact same physical reaction but are sold by pharmaceutical companies legal?  

Society needs to get away from the idea that altering one's state of consciousness is somehow a bad thing.   Once we realize that people will medicate themselves one way or the other, then we can work on managing the issues rather than prosecuting people.  

1 hour ago, Jayaroi said:

However cannabis is not addictive

This is an urban myth.  People have a tendency to confuse "less addictive" with "not addictive" because it suits their purposes.  

Here is a paper from the University of Notre Dame.  

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The most popular myth to explore is whether marijuana is addictive. For years it was believed that marijuana could not be addictive and many people today still hold that belief to be true. Current research supports that marijuana is both physically addictive and psychologically addictive.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that one doesn't build a tolerance to weed over time which is one of the three criteria.  And ask any stoner that's ever taking a tolerance break if they have withdrawal symptoms, that's two criteria met.  While you can easily find a third critera in withdrawal from personal/social relationships or having a strong desire to reduce or cut back on usage, continuation of use despite the presence of adverse effects is going to pretty much be on a lot of heavy stoner's lists.  

So, if that's the medical definition of addiction,  we just proved that cannabis can be addictive.

I’m not anti-weed, I’m a daily smoker, however, I am anti-BS, bro-science about weed.  Throwing out easily disprovable information doesn’t help the cause, bro.

Too many people that couldn’t locate the liver in an anatomy book doling out medical facts like they’re doctors.

1 hour ago, Jayaroi said:

nor do young people have so much spare cash to make it for daily use

Ahh, the old, Thais are poor theory.  

You know Thais can grow weed, right?  They don’t have to buy it if they can grow it or steal it from someone who grows.

And nowadays, a lot of Thais make way more than some expats that live here so the poverty angle isn’t as compelling as it might have been 20 or 30 years ago when most Thais were truly in or close to poverty.

You should really read the Thai-language news because there is almost a daily story about this or that shop getting busted for selling kratom juice and cannabis to minors.

Apparently, Thai youth like to mix THC and cough syrup too and they’ve made several big busts for that too.

1 hour ago, Jayaroi said:

I read the concern is young Thais are going to use it.

Nothing you’ve said negates the fact that most medical research indicates that the human brain doesn’t not finish development until around 25 and that cannabis use prior to that can have negative effects on development and cognition.

That’s pretty universal in every market that has legalized weed and even some of the loudest proponents for cannabis say that it’s not appropriate for young people.

Whether it’s addictive or not is not relevant in that context.

Again, I’m not anti-cannabis, I’m highly supportive of it and involved in the business.

But there are plenty of valid reasons to restrict the availability of cannabis to people under 20.

The problem the Thai government has is that given the current status of cannabis, it’s very difficult for the police to do anything.

Weed isn’t illegal.

Possessing it if you’re under 20 is illegal.

But since it’s not a narcotic, the penalties for both possession and selling it to a minor are wrist slaps which isn’t an effective deterrent.

You also need to keep in mind that Thais see the issue very differently than the typical foreigner that goes on social to ask why it’s being made illegal again.

Thais are overwhelmingly against recreational use.  I mean, almost 90% kind of overwhelming (google some of the NIDA and other polls).  The government is giving the people exactly what they’re asking for.

Thais LOVE medicinal use though.  I remember when one of the first cannabis clinics opened (a real clinic in a hospital, not a dispensary), I saw Thai people from every age group and economic class waiting for cannabis therapy.  People would roll up in a brand new Mercedes and the next guy would be on a Honda Wave that was older than the driver.  I saw little old Thai ladies and young people lined up for cannabis therapy.

Even my (Thai) wife is crazy about CBD gummies and takes one with her multi-vitamin every morning.

The real reason they’re trying to roll back legalization is that it happened too fast and too big for most Thais.

You went from this plant being an automatic jail sentence to a dispensary every 100 meters on every street.

Too many shops that went with the stoner graffiti look and catering to the dregs of society.

Mind you, I’m not suggesting all cannabis users are dregs of society, stoners, or any other term that could be construed negatively.  But I can tell you there are shops that cater to different segments of the cannabis market and many of them went straight to the lowest common denominator.

Ironically, the lowest common denominator customers are the drug addicts you claim don’t exist.