Marijuana Legalization

[MachineGhost]

[Austen Heller]

Here in California, the legalization topic gets discussed a lot. Most folks I know are in favor of it, but who knows, maybe the soccer-moms will come out in force and shut it down.

I was at my local hydroponics store last weekend, and I thought those guys would be in favor of the legalization so they could sell more supplies, but nope, they were voting against the law. They said they still make over $1500/pound for their marijuana, and fear that the price would go down if everyone can easily grow it. I'm not sure that will happen though; demand should vastly outstrip supply for quite a while.

I have some experience with hydroponics, so if the legalization passes, I will probably give it a shot. Supposedly up to 6 plants can be grown for personal use. It could be like beer home-brewing though, where the input costs are high enough that it is easier to just buy the final product instead of making it yourself. If you can grow outside, it should be cheap, as long as you can keep thieves away. However, growing indoors gets expensive in CA due to our high electricity rates.

[craigr]

It's a total disaster. We're going to see a huge spike in psychiatric episodes. I know two people that deal with emergency and non-emergency psychiatry and they are already seeing this. Also, we're going to see more impaired driving and addicts.

Marijuana prosecutions also kept a lot of bad guys off the street for more serious crimes they were doing but the cases were too weak for solid prosecution. MJ possession at a crime scene is easier to prove and lock them up.

Marijuana also reeks. Smelling it as I walk around the city is worse than cigar smoke, IMO.

Things you'll never hear anyone say:

"You know John, you were a real loser before. However, since you started smoking pot I found you've really turned your life around!"

[MachineGhost]

The problem with states like Colorado, Washington and Oregon is they're very homogenous, i.e. white middle class. I think a better test will be when a racially diverse state with no middle class like California legalizes it. I know that DC has which is overwhelmingly (poor?) black voted to legalize, so it'll be interesting to see the stats coming out of there.

We should have the crime stats available for CO in 2015 in about another month. That will be enough to determine if there's any potential trends emerging after two full years of legalization. The police seem woefully unequipped, though. Having over an ounce is illegal and they have no reliable means of detecting THC in the blood or in foodstuffs. So I'm not sure CO counts as "full legalization" if they're gonna be too occupied with this petty shit to go after the real criminals.

[WiseOne]

The natural response after a long period of prohibition is to go overboard with it, but usage will eventually settle down to something similar to alcohol and nicotine. There will inevitably be more people driving under the influence, which should be made illegal if it isn't already, but perhaps those people are simply substituting pot for, say, alcohol, so that the overall rate of DUI may not change much. Not sure if that's being looked at.

I'm not aware that marijuana causes "psychiatric episodes". Acute psychosis is usually caused by contaminants such as PCP, or combining pot with hallucinogens. Probably the issue is that someone is stoned, and another person isn't yet familiar enough with it to know how to handle it so they go to the ER. The bigger worry is that, due to research being banned for so long, we have no idea what the long term effects are - especially in children. That's a big concern as many of the most crowd-pleasing medical applications for cannabis are in kids.

[jafs]

We have pretty high levels of usage of alcohol and cigarettes, I believe.

So, we might wind up with high levels of pot use, even in the longer term.

Driving under the influence of any substance that impairs driving should clearly be illegal - that's just reasonable.

Even if we haven't had a lot of research (it would be better to have that, of course), I'm pretty sure that long term chronic use of pot has negative health/mental effects, just as long term chronic use of alcohol/cigarettes have. It definitely affects memory (I think there have been some studies on that).

The strongest argument for legalization isn't that pot is good for you, it's that the government shouldn't be in the business of protecting people from themselves, and that if alcohol and cigarettes are legal, pot (and other drugs) should also be legal.

How the negative health effects should be dealt with is worth thinking about - maybe insurers should charge pot users higher premiums, as well as smokers and drinkers?

[craigr]

I'm not aware that marijuana causes "psychiatric episodes". Acute psychosis is usually caused by contaminants such as PCP, or combining pot with hallucinogens. Probably the issue is that someone is stoned, and another person isn't yet familiar enough with it to know how to handle it so they go to the ER. The bigger worry is that, due to research being banned for so long, we have no idea what the long term effects are - especially in children. That's a big concern as many of the most crowd-pleasing medical applications for cannabis are in kids.

I know one psychiatrist that handles emergency cases in a large city hospital and he is convinced that Marijuana use has increased the chances of a person who is perhaps borderline of having a psychotic break. The second person is a mental health counselor and they have seen situations made much worse by marijuana use. They both think legalization is a bad idea.

Of course it's chicken and the egg here. If a person is prone to be schizophrenic for instance (genetically) it could happen regardless. And also perhaps they are self-medicating to a degree in some of their cases no doubt. But the general consensus between these admittedly anecdotal data points is that increased marijuana use is going to result in making things much worse.

I encouraged at least one of them that they should start keeping records of pre vs. post marijuana ban to try to form a longer term correlation. Not sure it will happen though.

The other issue is, as you point out, we don't know how it will affect developing brains in teens, etc. A person is taking a psychoactive substance and who knows what it will do. They could have been fine mentally but perhaps pot use as a teen (as you said, it's the cool thing to do), caused the problem.

Mostly though, when I think back to the great things America has done say 50+ years ago, it was with a population that generally avoided marijuana use regardless of the legality. A population of heavy pot users is just going to be dumber. But this reflects an overall decline in American culture and not sure what can be done about it other than to get in leadership that shows there are alternatives to smoking pot to have fun.

[dualstow]

We're going to see a huge spike in psychiatric episodes.

I have also read about a link between regular pot smoking and schizophrenia. Of course there are high-functioning smokers like Seth Rogen, but many more who are predisposed to mental illness, and pot seems to bring it out in many of them.

The other issue is... we don't know how it will affect developing brains in teens, etc.

Agree again.

Marijuana also reeks. Smelling it as I walk around the city is worse than cigar smoke, IMO.

Oh, come on! I love the smell of pot. Cigars stink, and while I'm a smoker of neither cigars nor pot -- well, I've smoked pot under ten times in my life, and maybe two cigars -- I love the sweet scent of marijuana. While it's not legal where I live, I think the punishment is down to a ticket for possession of a small amount.

[WiseOne]

Whenever anything bad happens, e.g. a psychotic break, it's natural to look for something to blame it on. Psychotic breaks in schizophrenics are most common in the late teens & early 20s, which coincidentally is exactly when people are most likely to be experimenting with pot as well as other drugs. In other words, this is not convincing evidence, and simply correlating use with timing of the break is unlikely to be convincing either, IMHO. It's kind of the same thing as vaccines and autism: kids are first diagnosed with autism around the time when they're getting lots of vaccines, thus the apparent "correlation" that took many large and carefully done studies to refute.

Research is needed obviously, but let's not jump to conclusions. This is how dubious "facts" are born. I am troubled that usage, both recreational and medical, is far outstripping serious research. There's very little of it going on; most centers have jumped straight to clinical trials for the purpose of attracting lots of patients (and their $$). It's working well. One trial I knew about filled up about 10 minutes after the phone lines opened.

[dualstow]

Just speaking for myself, WiseOne, I wasn't merely going by timing. No, I've seen a lot of studies.

This article suggests...well, it suggests a few different things.
The link between weed and schizophrenia is way more complicated than we thought
Study finds genetic overlap between cannabis use and schizophrenia
http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/24/58367 ... cated-than

[MediumTex]

The biggest risk associated with pot use right now is that it can cause the government to take away your property and put you in a cage like an animal.

I think it's good to eliminate these risks through decriminalization.

Alcohol prohibition didn't work any better than pot prohibition has. It just turns a large segment of your society into criminals, while fascilitating the rise of the prison-industrial complex.

Craig, it sounds like your acquaintances are describing Reefer Madness.

Whatever the evils of pot use may be, the evils of pot prohibition seem worse.

[Pointedstick]

I think it's important to separate these "bads" from one another.

It's clearly bad when the government goes out of its way to hurt people who enjoy intoxicants, even those who consume to excess and become losers and washouts.

It'a also clearly bad when people use intoxicants to the degree that they negatively affect their own lives. I have heavy puritanical tendencies (no alcohol, no drugs, no smoking) so I try to be open-minded here, because there are clearly people who can use intoxicants responsibly--my wife, for example, and many many people other who do things like enjoy a glass of wine with dinner or smoke weed only every now and then. It seems important to focus on those who have problems with intoxicants rather than everybody, and whatever we preach, it must be aggressively positive. If you want people to use fewer intoxicants, stress the myriad benefits of quitting them.

[MachineGhost]

I'm not aware that marijuana causes "psychiatric episodes". Acute psychosis is usually caused by contaminants such as Mostly though, when I think back to the great things America has done say 50+ years ago, it was with a population that generally avoided marijuana use regardless of the legality. A population of heavy pot users is just going to be dumber. But this reflects an overall decline in American culture and not sure what can be done about it other than to get in leadership that shows there are alternatives to smoking pot to have fun.

But that's because of the anti-Black and anti-Hispanic stigma that was associated with marijauna due to Refeer Madness propaganda. So America was only "great" back then from a narrow, white man's perspective. They were naively living in a suburban bubble isolated from the dirty world of the colored and their travails.

In Holland, marijuana use is de-trivilized and the locals have very little interest in it vs the tourists. So I think there's a chance that could happen here. But Holland is also another homogenous white society with cultural norms that I'm not sure applies to a racially diverse America either.

I would have been emotionally happier with harm reduction first to give all the stakeholders a chance to evolve in preparation for full legalization, but it's not going to happen now that the genie is out of the bag.

[MachineGhost]

Whenever anything bad happens, e.g. a psychotic break, it's natural to look for something to blame it on. Psychotic breaks in took many large and carefully done studies to refute.

Like Lenin said, its not the voters that decide elections, is who counts the votes. The same logic applies to who allows "many large and carefully done studies" that are actually anything but to be published. But I don't want to digress.

I've had some very scary and highly paranoid moments on pot. Blaming it on the pot or contamination is hard to know or prove because you don't know the quality controls on the black market. But it's not a trivial concern in terms of psychiatric potentialities in my view. We already know marjijuana changes the brain structure of those with a high genetic risk for schizophrenia.

[MediumTex]

I've had some very scary and highly paranoid moments on pot. Blaming it on the pot or contamination is hard to know or prove...

I've had similar experiences with reality.

[MachineGhost]

I've had similar experiences with reality.

Care to share? Did you see Jesus or something?

[Mountaineer]

I've had some very scary and highly paranoid moments on pot.

[/quote]

N ...... O ...... W ....... (long drawn out slurred words full of unicorn and pegasus images soaring over rainbows) ....................................... I understand your posts.

Thanks for the clarification. I thought that was only LSD.

Mountaineer

[MediumTex]

I've had similar experiences with reality.

Care to share? Did you see Jesus or something?

Just trying to make the point that a bad pot experience doesn't mean pot is bad.

Like reality, pot just is. People, however, experience it in many different ways.

If pot usage creates undesirable mental states, I would say don't use it. Problem solved.

[MediumTex]

Thanks for the clarification. I thought that was only LSD.

Mountaineer

While they each have their place (depending on the job), comparing pot to LSD is like comparing a snubnose .38 to a Stinger missile.

On the subject of drugs and religious experiences, though, I don't think it's an accident that throughout human history various mind altering substances have been used to prepare the mind for religious experiences.

Stated more simply, if God didn't want us to use marijuana, mushrooms, peyote, etc., why did he put them here?

If life were a video game, drugs would be the Easter eggs. They remind you it is a game and give you a peek into the mind of the Creator.

[MachineGhost]

If life were a video game, drugs would be the Easter eggs. They remind you it is a game and give you a peek into the mind of the Creator.

I agree!

P.S. Fix your avatar.

P.P.S. How's the economy in Texas doing lately?