Not your father’s marijuana
Here are some cautionary tales about the strength and possible danger of legal marijuana edibles, whether they be sold as medical marijuana or in states like Colorado which choose to legalize general marijuana sales:
Last year, the poison center run by Bronstein received 126 calls concerning adverse reactions to marijuana. So far this year ”” after pot sales became legal on Jan. 1 ”” the center has gotten 65 calls. Bronstein attributed the spike to the higher concentrations of THC in marijuana that has become available.
Although millions of Americans have used pot without becoming violent, Bronstein said such behavior is possible depending on the type of hallucinations a user experiences. Toxicologists say genetic makeup, health issues and other factors also can make a difference.
“With these products, everybody is inexperienced,” Bronstein said. “It’s the first time people have been able to buy it in a store. People need to be respectful of these products.”
I’ve witnessed this firsthand, because I know people who use medical marijuana and I’ve observed its incredibly strong effect when ingested. Back in the 60s, marijuana was almost always a lot weaker than today. But apparently, officially sanctioned and state-controlled marijuana can be a lot stronger even than the current crop of illegal marijuana, which was already stronger than in the past:
The two recent deaths [in Colorado] have stoked concerns about Colorado’s recreational marijuana industry and the effects of the drug, especially since cookies, candy and other pot edibles can be exponentially more potent than a joint.
There’s no question that other drugs—including prescription drugs—can and are abused in dangerous ways. The same is true of alcohol, of course. But from what I’ve seen of legal marijuana edibles, they are uniquely positioned to have maximum appeal to children, and also to be unwittingly over-consumed:
Twenty-six people have reported poisonings from marijuana edibles this year, when the center started tracking such exposures. Six were children who swallowed innocent-looking edibles, most of which were in plain sight.
Five of those kids were sent to emergency rooms, and two to hospitals for intensive care, Bronstein said. Children were nauseous and sleepy, and doctors worried about their respiratory systems shutting down…
“One of the problems is people become very impatient,” Bronstein said. “They eat a brownie or a chocolate chip cookie and they get no effect, so then they stack the doses and all the sudden they get an extreme effect that they weren’t expecting.”
Plus, chocolate candy just plain tastes good. The marijuana-laced ones look so innocuous, just like a Lindt truffle. So if one is good, why not a few more? But these things pack a mighty, mighty wallop.
I enjoy smoking weed but stay completely away from edibles. They are unpredictable, the effects are quite different from smoking, and in my experience can be unpleasant and quite long-lasting.
I will confess that I grow my own, just one female plant (I pull up the rest after the blooms form, to indulge 6 or 7 times a year. What I grow is nothing like the highly potent weed that fuels the market today. The legal market needs to place limits on THC content and make it cheap enough to discourage the black market. Otherwise, there will be many more tales of woe.
weed on market today and in california dispensaries varies hugely in quality / potency. the idea that pot is stronger today than in the 60s is largely an urban myth perpetuated by people who dont know much about pot, who dont smoke it, and who echo drug warriors’ talking points / scare case. those who are uncomfortable with weed, including worried parents, have some reasons to be, but increased across the board potency is not one of them. lots of skank and schwag out there.
The recent deaths here in CO are very distressing. I haven’t seen details on how much the suburban dad who shot his wife ingested (and if he was on anything else), but she mentioned the marijuana edible to the 911 operator (so to her it was noteworthy/an explanation of his behavior).
However, the vacationing WY college student seems to have made a very easy mistake: he purchased a single cookie that contained 6 1/2 doses. Selling a single cookie and instructing the buyer to break it in 6 pieces is crazy & ensures that many of the purchasers (or someone who is given/finds the cookie un wrapped) will consume way too much pot. As a CO resident am I very concerned that my kid may be given a pot-laced cookie/gummy bear/lollipop as a prank (this already happened at CU last year).
People will abuse it, acccidents and deaths will go up, and then there will be mothers against stoned drivers or similar organizations, and they will regulate it better or out of existence again.
Personally, I haven’t used it in over 20 years. The effects weren’t what I had remembered in earlier times. I just got dumber than usual and laughed at my own jokes, which most of you know to be bad enough when I’m sober.
I heard California is razing and confiscating privately grown weed. I suppose drugs aren’t enough to control the populace, you also have to control the marketing of it to make the big bucks. Yeeland must be jealous.
berkeley class of 1967
That may be its own counter point, that title.
But whatever, regardless weed just makes people dumber. And dumb people are easier to herd along as livestock, to a certain extent. Youths tend to experience most things more vividly than when they grow older, but their emotional capacities (in two cases I’ve seen) are frozen at the age they take pot. So a 15 year old taking pot, will still have the emotional control of a 15 year old, even when they are 35 (I’ve seen it personally at least once).
We are reminded to eat slowly. The brain is 20 minutes behind the stomach. We are stuffed long before we know it, easily eating way too much when not being careful. Whether the content is highly caloric, or hallucinogenic.
I went to college in the ’60s and did my share, or more, of drugs at the time though I haven’t partaken in years. I stopped smoking pot not only because I outgrew it but it just became too damn strong. It went from getting a nice buzz from a full joint to being knocked out after two hits.
Yes FOAF, I agree. Whatever the THC count of the hydroponic strains of weed that dominate the market here in London, they certainly have a far, far stronger effect than anything grown in a greenhouse.
I also get the impression that people smoke in much greater quantities. Alcohol is often used as analogy for cannabis but it strikes me that phones are a better comparison. When I was 21 I had a shared payphone in the hall of the house where I was living. I couldn’t take a selfie with it, but the signal never broke up unless I ran out of coins. So I suppose I could say it’s an urban myth that phones have become more convenient. What I’m driving at is that all drugs are a social as well as a chemical experience, and the social experience is where the difference lies.
Back in the day I also talked to people who had grown in countries where cannabis and cannabis use was indigenous. They explained that where they came from cannabis was not associated with sitting around in a circle talking about Albert Camus. They said that nobody in Britain became violent on cannabis because there just wasn’t enough cannabis available for anyone to get that stoned.
Marijuana prohibition has been one of the sillier chapters in our country’s history. It’s a damn plant, all you need is a seed to grow it, and it grows pretty much anywhere. Trying to stop its use is futile. It would be like banning beer, if there were rivers of beer everywhere. You might as well ban clouds.
Thankfully, the dumb pot laws won’t be around much longer.
The number of lives “ruined” by smoking marijuana is dwarfed by the millions of lives, families and communities ACTUALLY ruined by having people made into blacklisted felons for doing something that isn’t wrong. What the drug warriors have done and the victims they have created are moral stains that will be on our nation’s conscience forever.
Kustie,
Don’t you care at all about the kids in the ER because of brownie overdoses?
You can’t overdose on a pot brownie.
I would say that the dangers of a child landing in the ER because of an automobile accident is “orders of magnitude” greater than the danger of a child “overdosing” on a pot brownie, except that you can’t divide by zero — which is the number of children who have ever, will ever, or could ever, overdose on pot brownies. The sugar in the brownie will kill you before the pot ever would. And no, we shouldn’t ban automobiles either.
The overriding danger I would warn about in regard to a situation where a person takes his child to the emergency room because they ate too many pot brownies, would be the danger that you look completely silly to the people on the hostpital staff, and that they laugh at you behind your back.
The kid? Chances are way greater that the kid will die in a car wreck on the way home from the hospital than from a “pot overdose”, which is about as likely as having to go to the ER because you were gored by a unicorn.
I’m all for it if it lowers the price!
Um, what was the question again?
Most people cannot learn things via logick or reading. They can only learn through putting their hand in the fire (experience) or having the Left’s boot smashing them in the head (emotion).
In many ways, arguing about drugs is useless. The question is whether we kill the government or the government uses pot to make more sex slaves.
The legalization experiments in Colorado and Washington are a good thing, IMO. My libertarian instincts have been for legalization of all drugs, because I believe that they will always be a problem whether legal or illegal. When they’re legal, the problems are out there for all to see. Only then will there be a movement to deal with the problems in a manner that makes sense. Criminalization costs a lot of money and spends too much on punishing self destructive behavior. If people want to destroy their lives by misusing various chemical substances, should we let them?
The question comes down to how responsible society should be for the self destructive activities of the citizenry. Alcohol provides an example. It’s legal and is destructive for many people who abuse it. When people commit crimes while under the influence, they are punished, as they should be. But we don’t criminalize its use even though it destroys lives. Interestingly, the primary treatment unit is AA, a volunteer organization made up of alcohol abusers. The public information campaign against smoking tobacco, a self destructive habit, has been very effective. Yet no such campaign has been taken up against alcohol. Interesting, no?
Can/should society help prevent self destructive habits? Should society help people who have self destructive habits? Or should we write them off as lost souls and only seek to limit their affects on larger society? Those are the questions that alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and other destructive substances bring to the forefront. Criminalizing addictive behavior does nothing to deal with the problems of addiction prone phumans.
Well, as a member — with voting rights and street cred — of the Berkeley Class of 1967, I’d say that we got the basics of many things wrong to the detriment of ourselves and the nation, but we did manage to get a few things right.
Marijuana and food are two of these.
“Back in the 60s, marijuana was almost always a lot weaker than today. But apparently, officially sanctioned and state-controlled marijuana can be a lot stronger even than the current crop of illegal marijuana, which was already stronger than in the past…”
FOAF wrote: “I stopped smoking pot not only because I outgrew it but it just became too damn strong.”
The vastly more potent pot of today is not caused by state sanction or control. It’s yet another case of The Law of Unintended Consequences. Back in the 60s and 70s, low-quality weed was imported from Mexico and Columbia. When the DEA blocked much of this smuggling, domestic production increased, spurred by shortages and increased prices.
Except the folks growing it here–in California, Oregon, Hawaii, etc–became extremely scientific about the process, carefully breeding potent strains and meticulously tending to each plant. Which makes perfect economic sense since dealers much prefer to transport and sell product that’s 1/20th the volume of crap weed, and much more expensive per ounce.
So the end result of the US Government’s efforts were to replace the crap-weed of the 60s and 70s with the vastly more potent weed of today.
It’s not even that complicated. Growers who care about their product are just growing better weed. Same as foodies do with food. And microbrewers do with beer.
Gary, I don’t think you’re correct about why dealers are selling better weed. It has nothing to do with the government. It has to do with simple economics and supply/demand. Their customers just want better weed.
There is plenty of the old dirt weed for sale still, it’s just that most pot smokers don’t want it because it’s terrible.
Today’s weed is no different from today’s tomato. Both are the product of painstaking effort to cross cultivate and get a better product.
Kustie the Klown:
Of course you can overdose on an edible pot product (candy is an especially good candidate for it because the pieces are so small and yet so potent).
The word “overdose” does not mean you have to die. It just means too large a dose, with adverse effects.
Well, if that’s the case then “overdose” has no meaning.
I assure you, no matter what amount of marijuana you ingest there will be no adverse medical effects whatsoever. Short or long term.
My understanding, and I am 100% positive that any person working in an ER would agree, is that an “overdose” walking in the door indicates a patient who has taken an ACTUALLY toxic amount of the drug that could lead to death.
You can “overdose” on alcohol, cocaine, heroin, opium, meth, ecstasy and any number of prescription drugs. Meaning, if you take a certain amount you WILL need to go to the hospital or else likely die.
Marijuana is not one of these drugs. I promise you that if you present yourself at an ER claiming that you took too much marijuana and are going to die, that they will all be laughing at you backstage at the hospital. It will be a joke they tell and re-tell.
The biggest danger to you in this sort of “overdose” will be that someone leaks the security tape to youtube and you become a worldwide laughingstock.
Anyone who writes, “The sugar in the brownie will kill you before the pot ever would” has had his brain fried beyond repair.
That statement was 100% accurate.
This entire dialogue is absurd, and y’all sound very ignorant. I don’t mean ignorant as in dumb, I mean ignorant as in you have no idea what you’re talking about. The facts exist, you have the ability to find them, but you choose not to know them.
A toxic amount of marijuana/THC, if such a thing were to exist (and I assure you it does not), would involve an amount much larger than would fit in an edible. You’re talking pounds if not tons. Not only would that be impossible weight wise (you’d die from overeating — which is not an overdose– long before you would the toxins in the marijuana), but it would be cost prohibitive in that your edible would run you into the millions of dollars.
126 Emergency room reports?
So how does that compare to alcohol?
BTW the “jumper” was reported to have consumed the equivalent of 6 joints (what ever that means). So I would rate him a probably inexperienced.
And the other guy? Well toxicology reports are not back yet. So it may note even have been pot.
Ymarsakar Says:
April 19th, 2014 at 7:41 pm
But whatever, regardless weed just makes people dumber.
The effect is especially potent on people who don’t use it.
The two cases here in CO last week involved the person becoming so intoxicated by what they had eaten that they were erratic, incoherent, and violent. We’re “ignorant” because this is new to most of us, with marijuana edibles only recently becoming so freely available. We’re familiar with blood alcohol measures, but the THC measure is new.
Levy Thamba Pongi had 7.2 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood, where Colorado law says anything over 5 nanograms per milliliter constitutes driving while intoxicated. I have no idea how much THC one must eat to get to 5 nanograms, nor how much more would have to eat to raise it to 7.2. Pongi ate more than one cookie containing 65 mg of THC which the seller had identified as 6 1/2 servings. That sure sounds like an overdose to me.
http://www.wfaa.com/news/national/255654181.html
Alcohol intoxication can make people do stupid, crazy, and/or dangerous things, and I think we can agree that alcohol abuse is not a good thing. I’m not sure why those who support pot legalization think they can shrug off similar behavior from edible marijuana over consumption, or simply dismiss concern of an intoxicant that can be distributed in such a stealth manner – candy, cookies, etc. – and at such a high concentration as mere ignorance. As the Kirk murder and Pongi death have demonstrated, marijuana is not always harmless. I’m sorry if that messes with the 4/20 narrative, but it can be dangerous, and it has gotten into the hands of children (some of whom didn’t know they were eating marijuana edibles).
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/03/10/middle-school-students-arrested-for-pot-edibles/
Richard Kirk had purchased “Karma Kandy Orange Ginger,” a candy form of edible marijuana, and a pre-rolled joint about 3 hours before he murdered his wife. She mentioned that he had consumed the marijuana edible during the 911 call. I haven’t yet seen any details on his blood THC measure, probably because with this incident the focus has been on the poor police response. It will interesting to see how intoxicated he was.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25593871/observatory-park-man-charged-wifes-murder-pot-shop?source=hot-topic-bar
Decades ago, the late John Campbell, of Analog Science Fact and Fiction–they ran the first Dune–had one of his provocative editorials.
In prehistoric times, he said, kids listened to their parents because those who didn’t got eaten up by that cuddly cave bear.
Since civilization has rounded off the sharp edges, kids can escape the consequences of not listening to their parents.
So lets legalize drugs, tell the kids not to use them, and return the gene pool to the status where kids listened to their parents.
To overgeneralize history, Britain had some social issues that practically ruined them as a nation. One was the Restoration and the other the Regency.
In both cases, the Methodists, in effect, rescued them. The guy who thinks a night out is taking his family to the church pot luck to see a missionary’s talk is going to be better equipped to work the next day than the guy who gambled away his home at the casino.
So the straight arrows may end up on top, watching a bunch of buzzed zombies wandering around looking tor their EBT cards.
Since the 60’s, pot has been genetically engineered by selective breeding to maximize THC levels. I tried it once in the early 70’s and once in the early 90’s. The first experience was mildly amusing; the second disturbing. Now we learn the stuff causes permanent brain damage among other problems.
So, how long before pot gets demonized like tobacco and alcohol?
This thread is really a bit comical. We are supposed to be driven by facts and not fall easy prey to media lies.
Okay, say you have no experience with pot. But, you DO have experience with the media. They lie to you, about everything.
Whatever you’ve read about pot overdoses is straight up crazytalk. It doesn’t exist. If someone goes nuts while under the influence, that wasn’t the pot it was the person who took it. Same as with alcohol, except without the same loss of motor skills
We reject the cult of global warming, yet you seem to embrace the cult of pot demonization.
Do you know who is the problem, when it comes to pot?
YOU.
Because you have no science whatsoever to back up any claims regarding hazardous effects of pot use. And then you line up like sheep to support laws that have put millions of people behind bars and ruined millions of lives. For nothing.
All because of your general ignorance on the subject of pot, and silly fantasies about “overdoses” that a 5 second Google search would show you is not only a medical/scientific impossibility, but will get you laughed at if you actually say something like this around other people.
I truly mean no offense, because I enjoy this blog and the generally high level of discussion here, but if you are blogging about pot “overdoses”, you do nothing but self-identify as knowing literally nothing about the subject.
And the sad thing is that you people are the ones who blindly support pot prohibition and keep the stupid laws in place. These dumb anti-pot laws should be the absolute bane of a conservative’s existence, with the way they destroy families, communities and with the militarization of police forces it contributes to the corruption of our very government.
The danger with pot isn’t overdosing.
The danger is YOU.
I’m not trying to be a jerk or anything, but if you truly are concerned with the human toll of the marijuana issue, then you should examine your own support for putting tens of millions of people into prison and ruining millions of families. Because that is what the status quo situation has led to. It’s an empirical fact and I could prove it to you backwards and forward until the cows come home.
If you can support THAT and not bat an eyelash, while getting uber concerned about pot overdosing (i.e. something that does not exist), then I would suggest that you have a basic morality problem and need to go back to basics.
WHAT, exactly, do you seek to achieve by putting millions of people into prison for smoking pot?
Most pot smokers just seek to be left alone.
There’s a worthy parable in there, regarding conservatism and what it means to truly respect other peoples’ choices and privacy.
Is it all talk? Or do you truly walk the conservative walk?
If the right were smart it would put lock, stock and barrel behind legalization.
I assure you, no matter what amount of marijuana you ingest there will be no adverse medical effects whatsoever. Short or long term.
Obeying Obama, everything becomes crystal clear in Utopia land.
The emotional control I mentioned before is demonstrated in the lack of it here in the foreigners.
First they resort to school yard taunts against people like me. Then they start the offensive mobilization.
Place your faith in such… people, if you wish, but when they destroy society, it’ll be people’s taxes paying for it. Just like birth control and abortion. It was never about freedom or the ability of people to do what they want to their own bodies. It was always about finding ways to guilt trip the majority into paying for the vices of the minority, including the gun and sex slave trafficking.
Crustie can try as much as he wants to limit his behavior, but the pot will try much harder to prevent such control.
As for weed economics, the state will always prefer a monopoly over such, whether it comes in the form of DEA blocking importation or California confiscating weed in backyards. Thus it’s not really the patriots or liberty lovers that are behind the banning of controlled substances, but the Regime and its fascist like corporations. After all, Vegas makes a lot of money for Reid in Nevada. Hollywood makes a lot of money off guns in California. Why can’t the Left make money off pot and taxes off tobacco then? And if they are making this money, then they surely won’t allow competitors to get a slice of the pie, anymore than the MPAA wants you to watch movies for free.
Lest I be mistaken for being someone of the left, I assure you I am as conservative as it gets. The real deal. I worked for years in the trenches, traveling to all corners of the country, to further the conservative movement at a grass roots level as well as in DC where I live. I was part of Susette Kelo’s legal team (aka the Kelo case) and spent more than one night in the cold chained to Ms. Kelo’s house to keep it from being bulldozed. A study I wrote on eminent domain abuse was cited by Justice O’Connor in her dissent. Also worked on the Zelman case that upheld the constitutionality of school vouchers, and did some work on the early part of the Heller case though it was a little after my time.
Pot isn’t really a conservative/liberal issue. In fact, I will say that having traveled in national policymaking circles on both sides, generally the conservatives are MUCH cooler on the subject than the liberals. One thing I noticed about my liberal friends is that, while they advocate all sorts of pathologies for others, they tended to look down on those other people with contempt while themselves living a basically conservative lifestyle.
Conservatives, I have found, are a hell of a lot more fun to hang out with.
If our side could just re-think its position on the pot issue it would be a golden opportunity to truly stand up for the concepts of liberty and freedom we purport to favor.
If you take all the references to marijuana in this discussion thread and change them to GUNS, and then take some purported evil effect (as told to you by a loving media that you can always trust) caused by those guns, as window dressing justification for outlawing guns or criminalizing the possession or sale of guns, people here would go absolutely bonkers at the injustice of it.
And yet, when it comes to pot there is no ideological consistency whatsoever. And blind support for marijuana laws that were enacted not because of science or reality, but because of race/class fears and hatred of black people and Mexicans who happened to smoke weed rather than drink a beer, by people who lived about 100 years ago.
And you are tacitly responsible for destroying far more peoples’ lives through the pointless criminalization of pot than could ever be harmed in your worst anecdotal fantasies (all of them false) about silly people who ate too much of an edible and really just need to find a couch and TV and ride the thing out. It’ll be over in a few hours, even if you condensed the THC from a literal ton of marijuana into a tincture, and then drank a gallon of it.
Your ignorance ACTUALLY destroys lives. Your incarceration of people who smoke weed leaves families without breadwinners and, paradoxically, creates conditions that lead to MORE of what you purport to want to stop (marginalized people who are barred from normal employment and become ambitionless zombies who smoke weed).
Marijuana itself does not destroy lives. Whether you think you do or not, I promise that everyone reading this knows friends or family who smoke it all the time and lead productive lives. They just may not tell you about it, having correctly judged your stance on the matter to be lame, uncool and more than a little idiotic.
All this stuff about edibles that you read in the paper is a joke. It’s no more legitimate than anything else you read in the media that’s been created to stir you up and take advantage of your ignorance on the subject so that you will blindly support criminalization without thinking about WHAT it is you support. In short, on this topic you are a “low information voter”.
If it’s your business that your neighbor may be smoking weed, then how is it NOT your neighbor’s business whether you have purchased health insurance?
Weed is a microcosm for much larger and much more serious societal issues, as well as basic issues relating to privacy and liberty.
Kustie the Klown:
It is you who show ignorance—about what is actually being said in this thread.
Who’s advocating continuing the criminalization of marijuana as the solution? I can’t say I read every word of every comment (don’t usually have time for that, although I skim them all), but I wrote nothing advocating that in my post and saw no comments to that effect, either. So you are continually railing against a straw man.
The entire point of this thread is to point out the problems with using pot, problems that may increase with its legalization, problems that may also increase because of the increased use of marijuana edibles, which have a unique profile which makes them more subject to over-ingestion (especially by novice users), adverse reactions, and/or accidental ingestion by children.
This blog post is about unpleasant, frightening, and/or dangerous symptoms, particularly from people ingesting a stronger dose than they bargained for, and particularly symptoms of the psychological type (although not limited to psychological symptoms). And although murders (such as the one reported in the linked article) are certainly unusual, it is not so very unusual for people to have very negative psychological effects, or even to need emergency room or other medical or psychological treatment, after smoking and especially after ingesting marijuana. These things need to be known, whether marijuana is legal or illegal.
In addition, no one here except you used the term “overdose” in the sense of ingesting enough of the drug to cause death from the drug itself. So you are setting up another straw man. However, you are also wrong when you state that medical people limit the word “overdose” to mean something fatal, or fatal if left untreated. Medical definitions can be found here, and include “an excessive use of a drug, resulting in adverse reactions ranging from mania or hysteria to coma or death.”
The mechanism of troublesome overdose and/or adverse reaction (a clearer and better term) from marijuana usually takes the form of a severe panic reaction that can involve physical symptoms (increased heart rate, blood pressure, hyperventilation) as well. These symptoms are more likely in novice users as well as in marijuana that is ingested rather than smoked (see this article, from a website that is rather pot-friendly, and yet which recognizes these realities).
By the way, in addition to the psychological symptoms, there may be physical mechanisms which could put pot smokers (especially older ones) at a slightly increased risk of heart attack after smoking marijuana (this study involved smoking rather than ingesting, however; I don’t think there’s been any research on edibles). It is also the case that outright psychosis (as opposed to severe panic reaction, already discussed) and/or schizophrenia can be triggered in susceptible people by marijuana.
Artfldgr:
We have discussed the fact that human beings are not going to focus entirely on the big issues of the day, nor will any blog fit its topics to what you deign important and eliminate everything you consider trivial. Life consists also of small pleasures and interests, such as, for example, food and fashion.
We’ve had it out many times about that. I have kindly and politely asked you to stop trying to dictate the topics I write about here and to stop insulting me for not following your prescriptions about topics for the blog.
Neo, the problem with your use of the term “overdose” is that you are being used as a dupe by people who for very specific reasons have introduced that term into the pot debate, in order to pass on bad information to other people that somehow it’s possible to have an overdose where you die from using marijuana.
It was interesting to me that this thread sat for a day with nobody pointing out that you can’t overdose from marijuana, in the generally used form of the term.
With marijuana, there is literally nothing about it that should under any reasonably normal circumstances land you in the hospital for a medical issue. Unless, maybe, you choked on a seed or a stem.
That this never came up told me that the pontificators on this thread know a whole bunch of nothing about the subject.
When I called you on it, you changed the definition of “overdose” to “too large a dose, with adverse effects”. Well, okay then. What is a “dose”? What is “too much”? What are “effects”? What makes them “adverse”? Etc. With pot, you CAN’T MEASURE any of these things. Not even in one individual, much less extrapolate from your one extreme case something that is useful throughout broad society.
The people who craft the message KNOW this, and purposely conflate the terms.
You are saying empty words that together can mean anything or nothing.
And then you are using those meaningless words to justify infringements on peoples’ liberty that is an unconscionable wrong, with unconscionable results. That isn’t a strawman, that’s the REALITY of pot laws that have been on the books for your entire life, but have never seemingly raised a hackle with you. Have you ever actually questioned the existence of pot laws?
All while pretending that you have some kind of scientific basis for what you’re saying. Any person with a decent amount of REAL experience with pot, not something they read about in a book, would read most of this thread as comedy.
If kids want to smoke pot, they will just go to one of their friends and buy it, at school. This notion that pot shops in Denver are going to introduce something to kids that wasn’t already there is silly.
If a pot store is selling edible pot to children, that’s a different crime. If a parent is negligently leaving pot brownies where their kids can get to them, that’s a different crime. Neither of them has anything whatsoever to do with the underlying weed.
If I seem “ignorant” about what’s being said, I assure you that YOU and your readers (most of them anyway) are a thousand times more clueless on the subject, based not only on some of the sillier things that have been said in this thread, but also by sensible things left unsaid.
Just take this sentence:
“But apparently, officially sanctioned and state-controlled marijuana can be a lot stronger even than the current crop of illegal marijuana, which was already stronger than in the past”.
There are about 10 problems with what you’re saying, just in this one sentence. Apparently = I don’t actually know, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. “Officially sanctioned” marijuana and the “current crop of illegal marijuana” are the SAME EXACT THING. “Can be a lot stronger” –> Flatly, no it can’t. The same people are growing it all! It’s the same know-how, whether it’s legal or not. Government imprimatur has NOTHING to do with it. There isn’t anything you PUT into weed to make it stronger. It’s purely genetics and method. And that’s the same whether you’re in a government lab or on the street.
The whole thing, in sum, screams out: I AM CLUELESS.
If I sound unreasonable or passionate on the subject, it’s because people like you make laws that destroy many people’s lives. And you know literally nothing about what you’re saying.
Just the tone of the subject matter alone — widdle childwen are being enticed to eat edibles because they look like candy — should raise your antenna that you’re being sold a bill of goods.
Why don’t you just ask someone you know who has experience with weed if any of this is true?
Do you know how many children have ever died from eating Halloween candy that was tainted by an evildoer with poison or razor blades?
Zero. Ever.
Coat hanger abortions on record?
Less than 10. Ever.
This is a similar thing. It’s dangerous when the ignorant make our laws based on their false premises.
And again, if you REALLY are concerned about pot’s effect on people and their lives, you need to join the legalization movement. There isn’t anything chemical in the weed that’s harming society. It’s the FACT that it’s illegal that is destroying lives.
If the so-called “science” on weed is, at this late stage in the ballgame, still murky at best, and generally dubious, should you not err on the side of liberty?
I mean, as a general matter?
And, if not, then how can you possibly argue in — for instance — the case of global warming, that we should base our policy on science and/or personal liberty, rather than on false, wildly exaggerated or dubious pseudo-science?
That the “scientists” can come up with no better than what’s being reported about edibles (clue: edibles have ALWAYS been around and 99.99999% of them aren’t sold in pot shops) should clue you in that you’re being sold a bunch of BS.
Kustie:
Once again, you are fighting a straw man. This will be my last lengthy reply to you, because any more is likely to be a waste of time.
I did not use the term “overdose” in my post. You used it in a comment in response to a question from another commenter. I only used the word in a comment after that in order to point out, in response to your use of the word, that overdoses are not limited to fatal or potentially fatal ones. I am not a dupe of anything or anyone. My comments are based on my own 40+ years of observation of marijuana users, beginning in the late 1960s, as well as readings and training in mental heath issues.
“Overdose” is a technical term that doesn’t apply very well to marijuana (as I wrote in my most recent comment, where I said I prefer “adverse reaction.” I prefer the latter term because the adverse reactions are not necessarily dose-dependent, so “overdose” is somewhat misleading in that sense (again, it’s not my preferred word and I didn’t use it; I merely clarified that overdose is not a word that’s limited to a fatal reaction).
But marijuana can be quite dangerous for a subset of people, a subset that is not small. To deny that is to be in denial.
The same is true for many other legal substances, by the way.
And many of the articles I’ve seen that use the term “overdose” to refer to marijuana explicitly say that overdose in the sense of a fatal overdose is virtually impossible with marijuana. Some of these articles are from people who are for the legalization of marijuana. So the word “overdose” is not invariably used to scare people about death.
Once again, I’m not justifying “infringements on liberty” through making pot illegal. Where did I write that pot should be illegal? I am merely pointing out certain problems that come with legalizing it. I believe that both prohibition and legalization have huge problems, and that we need to inform ourselves of the problems inherent in each, which are different.
As for whether legal marijuana is stronger than marijuana on the street, legal marijuana is certainly not invariably stronger. But there is evidence that some of it is certainly stronger, especially when ingested. In my comment I didn’t mean it was the actual marijuana plant itself that is stronger in legal versus illegal marijuana these days. I actually was thinking not of the plant but of the dosage packed into a candy or other edible (although, because I used the word “crop” rather loosely to mean “bunch” or “product” rather than an actual literal crop, I realize in retrospect my remark could have been interpreted to mean the plant or crop itself).
I have observed this increase in potency in the product personally—not because I’m a user (I’m not) but because I know quite a few users. With edibles, even the regular and habituated users I know have had their socks blown off by some of the extra-strength legal candy they have consumed.
The word “adverse effect” is not empty, and it can be quantified as well as anything psychological or physical (i.e. trying to measure whether there is an increase in the incidence of heart attack after smoking pot) can be quantified.
Of course parents leaving pot candy or other edibles around where children can get them is negligence. But it is also true that pot in the form of candy or brownies (very popular in the legal marijuana business) is inherently more attractive to children than other forms of marijuana delivery. So leaving marijuana candy or brownies around is probably going to lead to more ingestion by children than leaving an equal amount of marijuana around in other forms would have caused. If you can deny that, your denial has reached an especially high level.
Plus, Krusty, (you prick) love you!
Still, dammit, monomania is your fault. Seriously!
The Western world prospered with alcohol and when it was prohibited?
But not Marythejuana.
And why not. You address nothing except the claimed allegation of fact that M doesn’t cause overdose.
Big Fucking Deal. Who cares. The main idea is that we are not a nation of deadheads.
Got it, because you’ve lost it. M is a ticket to nowhere land when abused, just like alcohol, but America hasn’t learned how to use it.
You may have, but not the rest of America. Right now it serves the purpose of those who want to the Feds and Elites who want to deprive our youth from their natural freedom.
You may be right but you are narrow minded. Who the fuck cares about your narrow point. It’s fucking safe! Fuck you. It’s not fucking safe when it serves as the panacea gov’t supplied drug.
Get a fucking clue you fucking moron. You’ve gotten so obsessed with one truth that you’ve lost the other. Grab the handles to the shower and get clean.
We really need you back.
Neo, obviously we are having a misunderstanding of general terminology. If you want to know, though, it is NOT true that edibles available in pot shops are stronger than what people make themselves. If anything, it would be WEAKER because the government sets the maximum potency. The people who run the pot shops and make the edibles are nothing but former people from the illicit side who went legit and got a license (in most cases). If there’s a way of kicking more THC into your product, the street thought of it long before the government ever did.
The scientific term for what you’re talking about in this thread regarding “adverse reactions” basically, is “wow that person couldn’t handle their shit”.
What normally happens in that case is that the person realizes they aren’t cut out for weed, and never do it again.
You can probably count the deaths that result from this on one hand.
The situations described where people lose their minds, that only happens on the first or second time you do it. And it’s extremely rare at that. I’ve been around pot smokers thousands of times and never seen it once. Among people who smoke regularly, it just does not happen.
Neo, regarding edibles being attractive to children, people have been making pot brownies since long before Colorado passed its law and this never seemed to be an issue.
I just think you are too inexperienced with the subject to come up with realistic situations. I don’t imagine there are very many parents out there leaving pot brownies lying around on the counter. To even suggest that this is somehow common tells me, again, and in about 10 different regards that you don’t know what you’re talking about. These are cultural, custom type things that if you aren’t in the know you aren’t going to know. It shows that you don’t know how people store pot. It shows that you don’t know WHO would have edibles in the first place. Demographics. Who goes to government pot stores vs buying off the street (do you know that MOST people in Colorado are still buying it off the street despite the fact that it’s available in stores? This is an aspect of pot culture — that it is dealt among friends. Etc.
It’s like being a lawyer and then trying to watch a courtroom drama on TV.
As someone who isn’t remotely part of the pot culture, you’re not even going to know half the time when you’re saying something on the subject that is completely batty.
Waitforit, if you really think something magical has changed all of a sudden in the pot world because it became legal in Colorado you are clueless (as well as, seemingly, a bit unbalanced). It’s funny that you call me narrow minded and then mention deadheads. My argument must have really scared you. GOOD.
You think marijuana prohibition is falling because of our elites wanting to keep people down? You’re so out of the loop bro. Marijuana prohibition is falling for the simple reason that a solid majority of people don’t support it anymore.
This has been an interesting thread if only to show that a lot of people who fashion themselves as conservatives who care care about personal liberty, are actually neither.
You should mellow out. All the “fucks” in your comment told me all I needed to know about who you are, where you are on the ladder, and what you have to offer.
Kustie:
You are setting up straw man arguments again.
I did not write nor do I think that marijuana edibles sold by legal marijuana dispensaries are stronger than what people could sometimes make by themselves. They are, however, stronger than what most casual or even regular users (especially those whose experience has been pretty much relegated previously to smoking it) are accustomed to, or what novices might expect. I know this from personal observation of habitual users I know, and from their personal reports, as well as from what I read (and, as I said before, that reading includes articles by people in favor of pot legalization and who are users themselves).
I have no doubt that there are indeed some habitual pot users who manage to make mega-strong brownies or other edibles themselves. But of all the pot users I know (and I know a lot of them) I am aware of none in my acquaintance whose experience prior to legalization was to habitually make very strong edibles. They were all smokers of pot. The legal dispensaries have made the ingestion of a strong dose of pot in food very much easier and simpler than it was, because it’s already prepared.
From your first appearance on this thread, you have been insulting people here for straw man arguments that you yourself have concocted. I wonder why. Are you hungry—I mean hangry?
I’m a nigger, and you are really racist.
I’m a woman, and you are really sexist.
I’m trans, and you’re really one of us.
So really, sweetheart, I love you; got some M; want to get together.
Give Neo the contact, we’ll fuck it out.
What was missing from all of your mis-allegations was any reference to evidence, facts, studies, experts, names, whatever.
Why do you love M so much, huh?
Bitch.
Kustie:
And you have absolutely no idea what my experience is or lack thereof. Your assumptions are just that, assumptions. You make an awful lot of them.
You are wrong about who has adverse reactions to marijuana, or when they have them. I have witnessed quite the opposite of what you assert. Adverse reactions are by no means limited to first or second-time users, although I agree they may indeed be more common among them. But I have personally witnessed adverse reactions among habitual users, particularly to edibles but not limited to that. It is a form of hubris to think that because you’ve used in the past and not had a bad reaction that you are protected from one.
That was funny at the end, Neo. You made me laugh.
I apologize for the strawmen. I should do better.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, I don’t know. I’m 40 but many of my friends are younger, and I know some of my slightly older friends’ kids who are now grown up and whatnot.
I just don’t think people quite are ready to “get” the fact that among people my age and younger, there just isn’t a whole lot of support for continuing with the criminalization of pot.
Too many of them have seen, at this point, that it’s basically harmless (for the most part). Or they’ve seen their parent get arrested or their friends. According to my friend’s recently graduated son (from a good public high school), EVERYONE their age smokes weed. From the dorks to the jocks to the dweebs and outcasts. Those parents out there who think their little snowflake isn’t in on it are just fooling themselves.
But there’s no denying that there has been a sea change on the subject. This generation sees pot smoking as no different than having a beer.
Today it’s Denver. Within 5 years it will be legal in all 50 states (it’s already legal in DC, as of the recent election).
Here’s your scoop for the day from inside the trenches: President Obama is about to make conservatives look like backwards fools by granting clemency to thousands of non-violent prisoners (i.e. weed convictions). Watch the coverage when it happens, and how the pro criminalization side gets treated.
The tide has turned. Not even like gay marriage where it’s a potempkin tide by a few loud people. I mean, like, nobody cares anymore.
Neo, I apologize for the assumptions. However, even though you don’t explicitly say something you still tell me a lot about what your experience is by what you do and don’t say. There isn’t anything in the weed world that I haven’t seen, and I can pretty much tell you from first hand experience whether what you’re saying is true or false.
I have smoked pot with a congressman, famous people, members of the White House staff. Immediate family members of a sitting secretary of state. I have openly smoked a joint, inside the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation. I know the Koch brothers, like in real life.
Weed is everywhere. From top to bottom, and bottom to top.
Kustie:
Oh, I agree that the tide has turned.
But that means nothing as far as the effects of pot itself are concerned. And that’s what I’m writing about, and it does no good to deny adverse effects or to pretend they don’t exist.
I’m a LOT older than you and have seen a lot more, particularly in the early days. And believe me, I realize that pot smoking is endemic among the young and has been for decades. As I wrote, even I know tons of people, young and old, who smoke it.
Drinking alcohol is also very common among young and old. Prohibition was tried and failed. But alcohol remains a substance with many adverse effects, and there’s no good to be had from denying that, either, although prohibition isn’t the answer.
What is the answer? I can’t come up with one. It’s society plus human nature that fosters the need to turn to drugs or alcohol. Marijuana is by no means the worst one. But my personal observation is that it’s worse than most people who are advocates of legalization think. I think the acute and long-term effects are more common than they acknowledge, and have affected society as a whole.
Kustie:
Well, if you haven’t seen adverse reactions in people other than first- or second-time users than you have not seen everything—or even all that many things—even if your hubris tells you you have seen everything.
Simply put, your assumptions are wrong.
Kustie:
And your comment at 6:00 PM is hardly a convincing pro-marijuana argument. In fact, it could be construed by marijuana opponents as going quite a way towards explaining the screwed-up state of our country and our society.
Personally, I’d much rather people kept their minds as clear as possible by not using substances. But I’m not about to try to compel them to do so.
In the end, I think the answer is just to live and let live.
I have smoked pot with a congressman, famous people, members of the White House staff.
Heh, Hussein O smoking buddies aren’t a social acknowledgement point. Not amongst the top 3% of humanity.
From the view point of the current and recent generations, the ones in power are weed heads that do whatever they want, to whomever they want, whether in war or in peace.
Sooner or later, somebody will figure out that Burning it All To Ash is a better starting point than what they got now.
There’s some smoke for ya.
As if hypocrites here have the authority to tell us their Hussein O weed buddy is gong to “live and let live”.
W, get back on your meds before you blow out again.
Ol Crustie here must have had a lot of doses of weed back in his teenage days to come out as a fanatic in the weed wars. If anti gun and Leftist fanatics are bad, we should all join the religion of the Weed right?
As if that would ever happen.
Having a person’s entire entity tied up in wee weeding it up with politicians and famous people, who are by definition higher placed socially than those of us here who they “laugh at”, is only Logick that works for teenagers. The idea that their special clique laughs at the outsiders and puts them down, becomes the teenager’s special self privileged exaltation of their growing identity.
A mentality privileged for 13 year olds, combined with the blood power of adults, isn’t a good combination.
All I was saying is that weed is a lot more widespread than some people think. Most of my political connections are from the Bush years.
I moved to DC after college and my first job was working for former secretary of state Bill Rogers. I smoked with people there. Then law school where probably 1/4 the people there smoked. Then I did a stint at a large dot com in northern Virginia so I smoked with people in the VC world as well as our company CEO. Then at various spots inside the “conservative movement” as it is manufactured, organized and commoditized. Weed smokers were everywhere there. I’m no longer in that world but still have a lot of friends there, plus other national type organizations around DC and unions.
I never hid what I was doing, and it was never a problem anywhere. In some cases, I was the go-to expert on the topic.
The point is that the pot smokers always find each other. Like gays in bus station restrooms. And the pot smokers are just normal folks like you, they just prefer pot to wine. They are everywhere and they are FAR from the “deadhead hippy” stereotype you imagine. High level people — the ones who make the world go round — smoke weed in basically the same numbers as any other group. They just don’t let YOU know they are doing it.
And the world seems to run fine.
Neo, regarding “adverse effects” I concede that they CAN happen, but they are not widespread. More than anything it’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the user can just pull his shit together he’ll be okay. A freak out type thing is a psychological or mental issue that is confined to that one person.
The way I look at is, assume the worst of the sensationalist media hype stories are true. Okay then, ?? As it stands, the current policy on pot jails millions of people and ruins millions of lives, DIRECTLY. Do anecdotal stories you’ve heard about outlier cases of pot freak outs here and there justify this? On, like, a human rights level as well as a basic moral level.
Everyone smokes pot and the world is just fine.
Just.
(And I need everyone to realize how important I am.)
Probably because you smoke pot all the time and never wake up enough to realize you really aren’t all that you think you are.
Bitch.
Kustie, hello, hello.
Bitch makes jellow
Can’t keep mellow
He’s our fellow
Kustie, Kustie, Kustie.
High level people, the ones who make and profit off the laws concerning weed, are the ones you are buddy buddies with. But because it’s easier to attack faceless people on the internet, you throw around self righteous comments here, not at them. Not at the ones who are actually stuck in on the weed economy.
If only a few states are “modern” on the weed war, what has the politicians been doing in the other states and at DC? Too busy wee weeding it up with their pals to worry about the effects of their police goons throwing people in jail, is it.
Kustie:
“The world seems to run fine”?
As they say: what are you smoking? 🙂
Not that all, or even most, or even a significant amount of the world’s problems are due to pot smoking. But the world doesn’t “run fine,” in case you haven’t noticed. There’s a lot of fuzzy thinking out there—including, I’m afraid, your own.
I know many pot smokers, by the way—maybe even the majority of the people I know? Another assumption you’re making—based on absolutely nothing but your own imagination—is that I don’t know many pot smokers and have some sort of stereotype about them. Not so.
Most of the people I know who smoke or use (some legally) don’t smoke very often, but some smoke or use moderately often and some smoke or use very very often, basically on a daily basis. It is also my observation that many of them are very fuzzy thinkers.
However, it is my observation that most people in general are very fuzzy thinkers. Is fuzzy thinking any more common among pot smokers than non-pot-smokers? Don’t know.
Weed ispires.
I mean insires
sPIRES
wHAT.
Kustie:
Another thing I’ve noticed is that not only do you create strawmen and make unwarranted assumptions, but you almost never link anything you say (in fact, I don’t have time to check, but it’s my impression is that you’ve provided no links in this entire thread).
Thus, at 7:29 you wrote:
First of all, anyone who smokes pot or deals pot in a state where it’s illegal is nobody’s victim. That person is breaking the law and making a choice to do so. So that person is choosing to ruin his/her own life if he/she happens to get caught, a risk he/she always runs.
That said, I actually don’t support jailing users. I’m more of a libertarian on that issue.
But you know what? “Millions of millions” of users are not jailed. In fact, “millions and millions” of dealers are not jailed.
Would you like some facts? I suggest you take a look at what Rolling Stone (a source I assume you’d agree is not anti-pot) has to say:
HI EVERYBODY
IM TALKING IN CAPS BECAUSE IM AN ELITE.
IN WASHINGTON
SO FUCK YOU
LISTEN TO ME
I AM YOU RULER
I CAN’T BE WRONG
MY NAME IS KUSTIE THE SHITBOWL
I HAVE SMOKED POT WITH CONGRESSMAN
AND WOMEN
AND ROBOTS
SO THERE
HEAR ME ROAR
I AM SO AWESOME
I AM THE ELITE
HOW DARE YOU CHALLENGE ME
I SAY THEREFORE I AM
AND I AM
THEREFORE YOU BOW TO ME
SEE HOW THAT IS
BITCHES
Waitforit, you sound kind of dumb and I want nothing to do with you.
Neo, the truth doesn’t need any links in order to make it true. It is of no use to me to get into some kind of link battle to show answers I already know.
I am talking about cumulative numbers, not current. The number of people imprisoned for possession of marijuana is in the millions, unquestionably. Pot has been illegal, generally speaking and in the modern sense, since 1937. State and federal. And then you go from the individual numbers to the families the incarceration destroyed. At this point, it’s multi-generational in many cases. Not from adverse reactions, mind you. But just from the law itself.
That most cases now go to alternatives other than prisons is a great thing, but it’s relatively recent.
Regarding fuzzy thinking and weed, it really depends on the person more than the weed. I bet Steve Jobs smoked the good stuff. Bill Gates too, in his younger days. The Beatles. In the hands of the right people, weed can help inspire unbelievably great societal advances.
Yamarsakar –> The so-called DC elites with whom I have pot related experiences all either favor legalization or don’t care either way. They certainly aren’t pushing for tougher laws. It’s a bit like a preference cascade, where we have these laws in place (enacted by people who died a long time ago, and who enacted the laws for dubious reasons) and nobody really knows why. And not that many people actually support them, it’s just the way it’s always been. And no politician of national prominence has had the guts to tell the truth and say what’s what. The day THAT happens, most of the pot possession laws will fall rather quickly. It’s a policy that no longer has a base. Plus, it’s a cure that’s worse than the sickness.
DO NOT misconstrue anything I’ve said about weed to apply to the other actual dangerous drugs out there. The ones that DO lead to death. Those are a terrible scourge and we should focus on stopping THOSE. Fortunately most people (even pot smokers) don’t touch the harder drugs. Pot and cocaine/heroin are in entirely different classes. But with the harder drugs you’re talking about a really small number of people.
I have seen — though not partaken — of just about every drug there is, including some really freaky designer type chemicals that are so far underground that the media and police are years from even learning of their existence. I’ve never seen heroin and never will. In my anecdotal experience, the most dangerous and harmful drug of all, unquestionably, is alcohol. And I would throw in an additional caveat that prescription pharmaceuticals are particularly dangerous. I tell everyone I can to stay away from those.
Some of them, though, are harmless. I actually think, all told, that LSD is the LEAST harmful of them all.
Neo, you should try weed if you really want to find out what it’s all about. Hands on experience would tell you way more than an internet link. You might like it. And it probably won’t make you freak out, but if it does please film it and post it here 🙂
The dirty little secret is that it’s LIBERAL elites who have an interest in keeping weed illegal. From police unions to community organizers on down. They need a repressed minority underclass in order to keep their scam afloat.
I said earlier that in my experience conservatives are WAY more fun to hang out with. And they have tended to be way less concerned with the drug issue. Most liberals I know talk a big game about accepting different people, but are actually quite contemptuous (and fearful) of the people whose back they supposedly have. They look down upon and sneer at all of their alleged “friends”, from pot smokers to minorities to trannies.
Kustie:
You have demonstrated great stupidity. Sorry, I don’t usually say that sort of thing to commenters. But in this case it cries out to be said.
I was a teenager in the 60s, if that tells you anything. I have said over and over in this thread that you know nothing of my experience with pot, absolutely nothing, and that you are making incorrect assumption after incorrect assumption. And yet, after all those warnings, you are still able to write something as profoundly stupid as “Neo, you should try weed if you really want to find out what it’s all about. Hands on experience would tell you way more than an internet link.”
I have to say that if your thinking is an example of what happens when a person smokes a lot of pot over a long time, it’s not the best advertisement for the practice.
And now you say that those “millions and millions” of incarcerated people for pot are millions over a period of about seventy years or so? And agree that current policy doesn’t jail but a small small fraction of that? Talk about moving goalposts—especially since your original quote was the following [italics mine]:
To repeat: you said the current policy and used the present tense, as in “jails” rather than “jailed” or “has jailed,” and “ruins” rather than “has ruined.”
And then there’s the crowning arrogance of “the truth doesn’t need any links in order to make it true.” Of course it doesn’t, but when one is writing commentary on a blog and stating supposed facts about millions and millions of current incarcerations for pot, it behooves you, oh great truth-teller and truth-knower, to give a link for us little people, so we can see where you get your Great Truths rather than taking it on faith due to the Argument From Krustie-Klown Authority.
What a long strange trip it’s been, trying to reason with you.
Neo, the current pot policy of putting people in jail for possession of the substance and the past pot policy (since it was criminalized) are one and the same.
If I made a mistake or was unclear, it was in tense. I should have said HAVE jailed and HAVE ruined. That’s what I meant.
From the beginning I’ve been talking about the OVERALL effects of the policy. Now is just a blip on the map, extrapolating from current numbers doesn’t even begin to add up what already IS and HAS BEEN.
My concern is with the overall societal toll, over time.
If I have been unclear on that point, my apologies. I don’t know that isolating the current situation is particularly relevant. And that isn’t even to get into the related subject of what having a pot offense on your record (even if you weren’t imprisoned) does to your life. Those people are swept up in it too. You would think they had assaulted someone or robbed a business.
It’s such low hanging fruit for police departments to corrupt themselves with. It really is just a cash grab. A tax by other means, except that the means itself is particularly cruel. And it keeps police resources tied up that would be better spent elsewhere. Like no-show overtime at murder scenes.
Thank you for your kind words and all best.
And Neo, regarding what I know and don’t know about your experiences, I’ve been reading your blog practically since the day you started it and have read almost every single post you’ve ever written here.
And I’m a fellow changer. The black sheep of a looney liberal family.
Kustie:
This entire post is about the effects of pot, not about whether to legalize it or not. As I’ve made clear several times.
You brought up the legalization issue, and I responded by describing my opinion, which is that criminalization isn’t realistic at this point. So why would you go back in time and discuss the last seventy years of policy on the criminalization or decriminalization of pot and how many people have gone to prison, especially since at present there isn’t much incarceration for it at all?
You may have read almost every single post I’ve ever written here, which is certainly gratifying. But then you should know that I’ve never written about my personal history with drugs. So why would you make assumptions about it?
It’s puzzling.
It’s not really puzzling. You build a relationship with a writer, follow their life vicariously and you build a profile. Reading people is a skill. I know your tendencies. I’m sure I can with almost certain accuracy WHERE you fall, in the drug socio-milieu.
I mean all of this as a compliment. I wouldn’t stick around if you bored me. I have better things to do. Your blog is one of the absolute best, ever, anywhere. You’re a bit of a legend.
The ONLY reason I came out of lurking status was because the general commentary on this thread was SO off base in so many respects. And everyone here is usually so spot on. Like, from the initial premise of “not your father’s marijuana”. A lot of time has passed since weed fundamentally changed into what’s available now. It was like 20 years ago almost.
The snippet from the article you posted –> I don’t think that Bronstein fellow knows what he’s talking about. He runs a poison center. He’s not a scientist. His claims, on their face, aren’t something that jump out as credible. It’s a hype, a put-on.
Maybe I’m cynical or whatever from experience, but I know a put-on when I see it. I know how the sausage is made.
I even read all the threads about dancing. You’ve taught me a lot I didn’t know previously.
Kustie:
I appreciate your appreciation of the blog. But my point is that, although you think you know all this stuff about me from reading my posts, your judgment on that actually isn’t correct.
Also, the “not your father’s marijuana” line fits in quite nicely with the idea you posit that marijuana changed about 20 years ago. A 20-year-old, for example, would be likely to have a father whose marijuana smoking days commenced over 20 years ago. And someone older than 20 would be likely to have a father whose smoking days commenced even before that.
Since warriors and soldiers have given me numerous times for self improvement, I’ve never seen a truly good warrior or soldier fight at their best using alcohol, drugs, or weed. Stimulants, perhaps, but weed isn’t exactly a stimulant like nicotine or caffeine is.
So the problem here is that if personal experience is the final authority, then unless you have jailed millions of people, you can’t claim that you know this to be true unless You Have Done It.
As for the other problems with smoking weed to know what smoking weed is about, not everyone in American society wants to be conditioned to be cattle. For example, the very definition of the 3%, those individuals willing to fight against the entire world for internal concepts of justice like in the American Revolution, have certain reality limits on what they can do.
For example, a warrior trained in killing humans using bare hands will run into certain social problems if they get drunk or stoned. They might think it’s fun slaughtering people they see, for example. All the limits and restraints placed upon the tools and expertise drilled into soldiers or warriors, is interrupted and destabilized by mind altering drugs.
The idea that Crustie has, that there’s a pot war and if you smoke weed you are on one side, and if you don’t, you are on the other side, is insufficient to explain human individual talents.
As I see it, a real war will test the capabilities of one side against the other. Which side has superior battle judgment, death defying ruthlessness and resolve, and better teamwork, reflexes, and skills in war? That’s what determines a war, if one excludes the logistics.
Our society is setup where recreational drugs are like bread and circuses, it keeps the mob down. Because if they weren’t the mob but people with power or personal lethality, those drugs would cause civilization to collapse. Drugs are like any other tool, it is only harmless if the livestock that is using it, is harmless or fully controlled.
Light drugs, like alcohol, has the problem where once someone is under its influence, they don’t have the awareness or self control to fix the problem. Weed is often justified by the smokers as being without long term consequences. Just like alcoholics say that their judgment isn’t impaired in the presence of alcohol. That may or may not be true, on an individual level. On a social level, where we have objective observers, it’s easy to spot a statistical grouping.
It’s not the place of the users to say what other people should or shouldn’t do. True individual freedom is about controlling oneself, not using weed or alcohol to control oneself.
You build a relationship with a writer, follow their life vicariously and you build a profile. Reading people is a skill. I know your tendencies. I’m sure I can with almost certain accuracy WHERE you fall, in the drug socio-milieu.
In Japan, they have something called stalker koi or stalker love.
A situation where one admirer builds up an image of their ideal person and then proceeds to go around building a one sided relationship, following them around, reading about their interests, etc.
What makes this stalker love instead of normal love for the Japanese is that the stalker generally can only sustain the illusion of their perfect image ideal by keeping the relationship one sided. However, there is no such thing as a one sided relationship, so it breaks down sooner or later.
In my judgment, anyone that is an adult or at least over 30, should be able to figure this out just via common sense. But weed has a certain effect on a person’s emotional maturation when taken very young. It freezes their emotional knowledge and awareness at a prior point.
Your personal experience, Crusty, far from denying my personal experience and estimates, are merely confirming it.
Reading people is a skill, but words are a low bandwidth communication measure. Compared to voice tone and body language, words only compose 30% of total human information being communicated, if perhaps even less than that.
You went on and on about how people in the comments here were for jailing drug users or rather weed users. From my estimate, most people here don’t care for police, laws, or laws about weed. They may have been more tolerant or easy going for a bipartisan compromise years ago, but the idea of society using laws to protect things was still viable years ago. Reading people requires that you test your hypothesis and recognize the truth, to fix your hypothesis if it is wrong. You can’t do that by “vicariously” hiding out in the shadows, lurking.
The problem with “not your father’s marijuana” is that it implies some kind of revolutionary difference between the weed of today and the weed of a generation ago. And that’s just not true. Yes it is “stronger” but your father’s weed wasn’t weak to begin with. It’s like 96% purity vs 94% purity (I’m making these numbers up, I just mean by COMPARISON).
It really just boils down to OVERALL quality. The growers use better lights, scientific food and other methods such as separating males and females to eliminate seeds. A heartier leaf. A better taste. Over time, the creation of new hybrid strains.
It really is a CRAFT. The people who make this stuff do it as a labor of love and put real time and thought into it.
And, having been on both sides of the developments I can say with authority that the “differences” between pot now and pot then are not that significant. A matter of degrees.
A poison control center operator who is worth his salt should, at every opportunity, be reassuring the public that if they’ve eaten a bunch of weed edibles and called his center that they’ve called the wrong number because marijuana is not, and could not be, poisonous. I suppose it’s possible to have an allergic reaction, but that’s not a significant risk. And, as far as his field of expertise goes, that’s IT. Anything else he says on this subject is BS and he’s no expert.
But because he is speaking to the public through the prism of a news media article on pot stores, it becomes clear WHY he’s in the article — to create the impression or implication among readers that weed is poisonous. It is not. John Q Public is going to read what that Bronstein guy says and draw a false inference.
I was being a bit absurd yesterday regarding the “sugar in the pot brownie” killing you before the weed. But it’s true. A better analogy would be if the brownie contains peanuts. THAT would fall into this guy’s purview, because peanuts (unlike marijuana) actually CAN be poisonous.
I was taking his claims at face value — if you’ve been “poisoned” by weed or “overdosed” on it, that means you’ve eaten about a ton of it (like, literally, 2000 pounds of it). And that’s not possible. Yes you might be poisoned if you did that, but not from the weed.
That is bad information.
I may have been fighting strawmen and using weak rhetorical technique, but I haven’t said anything in this thread regarding weed that isn’t true.
Ymarsakar, you absolutely can read people if you know what you’re looking for. It helps to see them visually, but it’s not necessary if you analyze the data correctly.
Funny story –>
Shortly after 9/11 I was at a social gathering of friends (not political people). One of my female friends brought a date with her and we were all making small talk. Her date had just moved to town and was working in the tech field (where I was at the time).
By the time he’d given me his business card, I had already figured out that his entire story was a lie. It was confirmed when I looked at the card and saw irregularities on it that 999 out of 1000 people would not notice.
A little while later in a moment when we were alone I looked at the guy and asked –> What do you REALLY do?
A few days later I get a call from the guy and he asks me to lunch. So I go, thinking it’s just lunch. When I got there, the first thing he said was, “How did you know?” My answer: I just knew.
Then he proceeds to pull out and hand me his OTHER business card: Special Agent, Defense Intelligence Agency.
So we went over his cover story and I pointed out the flaws.
He asked me if I would like to come work with him. Specifically, he said for me to disappear for 6 months, clean up my profile, quit smoking weed and then give him a call.
The subject of marijuana had never come up in any of the prior proceedings. But I didn’t even need to ask how he knew.
When you speak the language, you can tell almost instantly who’s who.
And lest you think I’m making things up, here are both business cards. I kept them.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7422/13972537694_b9ba2d6503.jpg
Kustie:
First you said “not your father’s marijuana” doesn’t work because the marijuana only changed 20 years ago. When I point out that that would make the time frame work for the phrase rather than against it, now you say that well, the difference isn’t so great anyway.
There are people who used marijuana back then and also now who say differently. Let me add that the main reason for the title of the post was to make a little joke. The joke being that, these days (as opposed to when I was young), people’s fathers are likely to have used marijuana.
As for your assertion that: “I haven’t said anything in this thread regarding weed that isn’t true”—you certainly made assumptions about me that weren’t true. You made statements about how many people were currently incarcerated because of marijuana that weren’t true. And I would add that the following statement of yours (the last sentence of the excerpt) is not true; just because you haven’t experience something or witnessed something doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen:
I didn’t use the phrase “lose their minds,” and I think it’s incorrect for what I’ve been talking about except in rare instances. But severe panic attacks can happen in experienced pot smokers, and it’s something I’ve seen. Google it, too, and you’ll find people describing their own experiences. Here for example, is a forum about it, from users.
You aren’t the complete expert you think you are.
Neo, I’m not really disputing the existence of panic attacks or freakouts from weed, at all. I know that it happens. For the most part it occurs in novices who are inexperienced and take a large dose. I don’t dispute any of that, and I concede that this is partially what the Poison Center guy is saying. I have also seen people who are very experienced begin to have an adverse reaction that causes them to turn away from using. On one level, all of this is true.
What I dispute are (1) how common this is; and (2) the implication regarding the medical severity of this happening to someone. It would be very unusual for the drug to take a person so far out of reality that they can’t be reasoned down from just about any proverbial ledge. Unless they mix it with alcohol or some other substance that would do that to you.
They won’t even have a hangover in the morning. The proper thing for that person to do is just chill out.
I get it about “not your father’s marijuana” as a double-entendre joke. That actually exists and is used as a real catchphrase in the media end of this issue as it is pumped out by the pros. It’s one of the very best and most effective soundbites on the subject.
What I mean re its having been around for 20 years now is that much of the readership of an article like this is already going to know that. It’s not news to anyone, i.e. anyone that would be walking into a pot shop in Colorado. If they’ve taken that step, then there are certain assumptions you can make about how aware they are of pot’s possible effects. And the effects, OVERALL, are unchanged between old and new pot. You would still get plenty zoinked on old school dirt schwag. The new stuff is more like a cherry on top.
I apologize for the assumptions about you. I should have kept them to myself and they hurt my overall argument.
All of those things, by the way, i.e. panic attack, psychotic episode, vertigo, temporary loss of motor function etc. can just as easily happen spontaneously out of the thin blue air. With no marijuana anywhere.
It’s not so much the drug as it is the person.
Neo, also in the legal pot shop environment the staff is very knowledgeable, friendly and open. If they see an older person walk in seeking edible marijuana for medical purposes, they are probably going to warn them about all of this stuff. The WANT their customer to be informed because it serves nobody to give the user an unexpected bad experience. They will tell you EXACTLY what to expect from each strain.
I know this because I’ve purchased pot legally in a Colorado pot shop. A few months ago, right at the base of Pikes Peak. It a bit jarring to see sandwich boards and flashy ads right there on the street in front of God and everyone, as if it’s 7-11 selling slurpees.
I too question whether it is wise to have this happen everywhere. I absolutely don’t think it’s a great idea to allow it to be sold in bars for consumption on the premises. Home use only and transport only to get it home seem like reasonable restrictions.
Kustie:
Your denial is profound. I wonder what it actually would take to prove to you what almost everyone else who uses marijuana concedes, which is that some people experience panic reactions to it.
Your answer is always “it’s the person.” Of course it is, at least partly, and that’s true of all reactions like that. You might as well say it about alcohol, or cigarettes and lung cancer, or anything under the sun that doesn’t have a 100% concordance with a certain practice.
Logic seems to have gone out the window with you on this topic, I’m afraid. You don’t have to deny the existence of adverse effects of marijuana to argue that it shouldn’t be criminalized, you know.
Neo we could go on forever and just disagree on this topic. And I don’t really think we even disagree about much on it. I would have done better to explain verbally. There’s only so much you can put forth in a blog comment. Such as, I was joking when I said you should try it. I wouldn’t say something like that to you seriously. I greatly respect you.
Anyway, I don’t want to monopolize you and very much appreciate your attention and dialogue. Very nice to meet you and thanks for everything you do 🙂
By the way, if you don’t know what a kustie is that’s street lingo that would be understood by anyone and everyone in a pot shop. It means I’m a buyer not a seller.
Ymarsakar, you absolutely can read people if you know what you’re looking for. It helps to see them visually, but it’s not necessary if you analyze the data correctly.
I don’t disagree on that point, however that’s not what we’re talking about here at least.
It’s not about whether it is feasible or possible. It is feasible or possible, but the topic is whether you are accurately doing it or not using only a blogger’s word data dump over years. The question is thus personal, not abstract. This is consistent with the other personal sources of authority such as smoking weed, etc.
That’s not to say I want to continue the issue in contention, but merely to clear up that single point. I think we’ve all made our points, and time or the Left will determine what happens at the goal.