You don't have to go and look on social media, just come here to HN and say "perhaps weed is not completely safe and we should research whether it could damage the brain" to get downvoted
You'll always have to ignore large categorizations such as safe or harmful anyway, no reasonable person is saying cannabis is as safe as air (well actually some air might be worse) rather they are saying that since society is perfectly fine and acomidating of worse substances such as alcohol and tobacco it makes no sense to prohibit cannabis much less criminalize it.
> no reasonable person is saying cannabis is as safe as air (well actually some air might be worse)
Maybe none of them are reasonable, but there sure are a lot of them. I've met a lot of people who think consuming cannabis is more healthy than not consuming it. I think this is becoming a more popular viewpoint and might even become a mainstream belief in a few years.
You get this with any kind of health-related opinion, on any forum. Just look at anything diet-related, and watch the people spouting vegetarian and vegan propaganda come out of the woodwork.
Health cults have taken over. My theory is that so many people feel powerless in many aspects of their lives, and they fall back on diet and exercise and snake-oil supplements as one corner of life they can over-compensate on.
Yes, but I don't think it's just "health cults". Locus of control and learned helplessness are very powerful drivers. If you have a person that has derived benefit from an intervention, placebo or otherwise, and you challenge that mental model, you cause a mighty cognitive dissonance in their brain. That challenge must be "dealt with", the usual outlet being arguments over the internet.
At the federal level, weed is still classified as schedule 1. The federal government's stance has served to place severe restrictions on exactly the sort of research you seem to be calling for.
There is certainly some evidence for health and even psychological risks, but none that I am aware of for "brain damage", which is why you are likely to be downvoted.
What’s the link? Perhaps teenagers with schizophrenia are predisposed to using marijuana.
For instance, 80%+ of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes. Do cigarettes cause psychosis and schizophrenia, or do schizophrenics seek out nicotine due to their schizophrenia? It’s not that simple.
In addition to nicotine, cigarette smoke (tobacco) contains MAOIs. MAOIs were commonly prescribed as antidepressants and antipsychotics back in the 50s and 60s, but fell out of favor for various reasons, despite showing far greater efficacy than SSRIs.
(one of these reasons was dietary: MAOIs have bad interactions with the amino acid "Tyramine", found in aged foods. However, Tyramine content in food has dropped dramatically since the 70s, and this is no longer a significant concern)
When I hear “80% of population X exhibits characteristic A”, my first reflex is to guess on whether I think the size of population X is on the order of magnitude of the presence of characteristic X in the general population. If not, I suspect I am learning something more about pop X than char A.
I’d guess there’s orders of magnitude more smokers than schizophrenics, making it seem unlikely smoking is a primary driver, though I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
I hear 80%+ of all perpetrators of sexual violence engage often with porn, but suspect that if porn drove sexual violence, its rates wouldn’t be decreasing. Most heart attack sufferers drink water within days of their cardiac event. All lottery winners have lottery tickets...
I agree with you science nowadays is mostly junk. On the other hand if we can choose to ignore any study that links X to something bad, then this is a conversation not worth having.
Myself I like to err on the side of caution, since my country has free healthcare which means I have to pay for the mistakes of others, so I don't want them making mistakes in the first place. They should feel free to smoke all the weed they want and become psychotic drones in the fucking Congo
Your healthcare system also treats people who have got into a vehicle accident or a sporting incident - should buses and cycling also be banned? How about alcohol?
Everything has some risk, and the anecdotal evidence is that weed does not affect the vast majority of adults in a way that would result in additional healthcare needs.
No. They are generally safe and people NEED to get around to live. They don't NEED to get high though.
>cycling also be banned? How about alcohol?
Yes, definitely. Both things are risky and bad. But that would be hard to achieve. Since weed has never been legal (at least here), things can go on the way they are.
I have smoked weed heavily in my late 20s, ingested many types of edibles, topicals, etc. I am certainly not as sharp as I used to be. It can cause brain damage indirectly due to changes in your cardiovascular system. It can mimic a temporary sort of vascular dementia, as well as increase your blood pressure to very unsafe levels. Weed can also reduce the amount of grey matter in your orbitofrontal cortex. Not to mention the somewhat bizarre cartoon-like images you see on high doses of edibles. These images can fracture your mind if you see them enough. The risks are very real, and trying to downplay them or censor them is extremely irresponsible.
No. At your thirties you can be at least a sharp as in your twenties. One of the main culprits of loss of sharpness is sleep deficit, that usually hits when having a full time job and family. It's not the age, it's the environment.
A nuanced point of view is incompatible with the ideology of the extremists at both ends of whatever the issue is so you have twice as people mashing the "make the wrongthink go away" button
It’s also plausible that we are diagnosing more and more people with weaker and weaker symptoms with the same disease, so in aggregate, the effect will seem weaker.
There's lots of pro-cannabis and pro-LSD comments everywhere. My cynical view is that the "power" wants us all sedated, and it's investing its media to promote the "new" batch of drugs to get another generation hooked up.
I do think that there are probably quite beneficial uses of drugs, but probably not in a ludic way as most people prefer to use them.
My first thought when I saw this was of all the people and corporations investing in CBD and whatnot. Most corporations seem to be using adtech and social media (which are really the same) to perform mass manipulation. When that’s combined with all the crazy financial tools people can make a lot of money.
I think if lawmakers actually wanted people using drugs for the effects then drugs would be legal, I would argue they instead want the ability to arrest and incarcerate people at will.
I would personally find it more likely that these tweets are part of the ramp up phase of trying to attract real followers to then spread other messages. These are the sort of tweets that I would imagine are fairly popular with a certain segment and lead to the retweets and followers that give bots more reach.
The market for cannabis is so undeveloped and unstable that it seems unlikely that such marginal market growth tactics would see as much return as they do in more established markets.
People are getting savvy to bots (used here to mean all variety of inauthentic social media accounts). The one-track tweets approach doesn't cut it anymore, you need a modicum of authenticness. That's why we are seeing Deepfake profile pics and much more effort going into fleshed out bot accounts, getting friends and followers, and multifaceted story feeds.
It's a classic infiltration technique. Get in, silently grow your roots under the radar, before deploying the payload.
What lawmakers want isn't some single coherent thing; you're talking about a profession perhaps most famous for getting in fights with each other. Some politicians may want draconian drug laws because they're involved with the prison industry or prison workers union, while other politicians with different interests might want drug legalization for reasons like those described in the grandparent comment. The distribution of politicians across this policy continuum may change quickly, or slowly. Not all change is quick.
Here is my pet theory: many politicians have historically opposed cannabis use because they believed cannabis use makes people lazy and believe widespread use of cannabis could suppress economic productivity. This is the sort of believe that could be challenged with evidence to the contrary; currently several states have legal cannabis and in doing so are putting many beliefs to the test. If/When fears relating to economic suppression are dispelled, some politicians who once opposed it may decide they no longer care.
> Here is my pet theory: many politicians have historically opposed cannabis use because they believed cannabis use makes people lazy and believe widespread use of cannabis could suppress economic productivity.
1. Corporate interests want to reduce hemp use for oil and material to help their dino oil products
2. People buyin that its bad
3. Politicians use it as a way to think people are bad
4. One generation later and the reason is whatever is most expediant.
I believe that 80+% of politicians today that oppose legalization do so genuinely because they grew up being told it was bad and a gateway drug. And they're too ignorant to consider the Nixon quote or that their government has always been bought and paid for to maintain a status quo
Certainly one of the things that gives me the creeps are the CBD quiosques freaking everywhere selling what amounts to CBD weed, CBD lotions, CBD potions, CBD whatever; I've seen them in airports, in tourist locations and in shopping malls. Mostly completely unpatronized, with a sullen presumably CBD anesthetized employee manning the desk. Just for the rent and employees we're talking something like a hundred millions a year in money flying out the window. To what end? Nobody is buying this shit (outside of tourist locations afaik). Someone is paying for it to happen.
It reminds me of when the Israeli spooks were selling toys in shopping malls in 2001 (rounded up after 911 and memory holed)[1]. Maybe it's just RJR ramping up to sell actual weed everywhere, but it sure is creepy.
Do you have a source on the fact that "nobody is buying this shit"? Here in Paris the few attempts at opening CBD shops (now closed by police) were extremely popular.
My own lying eyes tell me this. Though there were a lot of takers in the Lisbon tourist location; I see literally dozens of these across the US northeast with zero customers, ever. Was just staring at the one in the Manchester NH airport. In a freaking airport! "Gee I have to get me some CBD cookies and massage oil to take on the airplane with me."
> "Gee I have to get me some CBD cookies and massage oil to take on the airplane with me."
Where they THC cookies, they'd probably make the plane flight a lot less uncomfortable with a lot of people. I'd wager they're trying to cell CBD to people who hate flying and are willing to try anything to make it less unpleasant. That their products are ineffective, at least in this application if not in general, kind of takes a backseat.
Out of curiosity, did you ever upgrade to Fortran-08/18? I used to sling a fair amount of Fortran77 back in physics days and a higher level version of the language might be fun if I can plug it into networks and such without invoking satan. C is fine for PDP-11 assembler, but I'd rather something that lets the compiler do more of the work.
I share some of your cynicism but I think the “sedated” comment is a massive leap to make. However I do sometimes wonder if there has been a push from tobacco manufacturers as a way to booster profits now that smoking has fallen out of vogue. Admittedly I’ve done zero research to back up this suspicion.
Personally I do think laxer drug laws are a good thing. Those that want to get high will always find a way so it’s better to regulate the market than push it underground.
I think at least with regards to HN, it's that the average user is, just being honest, wealthy and from a very privileged background without too much lifetime difficulty. There's a disproportionate number of people here who can and did walk into Silicon Valley and said something along the lines of "give me 10 million dollars and I'll make a phone app", then have the free time and comfortable fall back to write a failure report about "their journey." I'm not saying that's all or even most of the people here, but it's a larger proportion compared to probably any other community on the internet.
I mention this because many of the strongest "let's decriminalize (or even legalize) all drugs" commenters have similar backgrounds. Comfy financial situation and room to experiment with the peace of mind knowing that they have people to help dust them off should they get a little sloppy with their drug use. These people can afford to take a week to enjoy an ayahuasca resort, follow it up with a beach vacation and a little MDMA, then return home to a daily bowl of weed to relax from their hard month of partying and pop a couple addies to get focused and pull an all-nighter on their new web app. They can financially and mentally afford to use drugs as mood and mental enhancers. Loads of people who aren't so comfortable use drugs to numb the rough edges of life. Having been on this site for over a decade, I've seen loads of comments that make many users here seem completely out of touch with what average people go through--many HN users on another plane of existence.
I think a considerable number of people who promote drugs everywhere have good intentions, but they don't really consider the effects for most people. The aspect of being locked up for drugs does do a lot to tarnish lives, but the mere act of having easily available mind-altering substances is also enough to ruin the lives of many.
I agree, drugs can have a negative effect on people but I believe that this affect regarding marijuana use pales in comparison to the negative effect its continued prohibition causes. In the United States it is wielded as an oppressive tool with use "roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."
Those arrested are then affected for the rest of their lives, their criminal history hurting both their social and economic future. The fact that the rich know they are able to get away with it is proof that there is a separate legal system and that legalizing marijuana should be done. I am not arguing that pot cant be detrimental but its very much in the same ballpark as alcohol.
There are people currently non violent offenders spending decades in jail for selling marijuana, something that those same people from comfy backgrounds are now getting rich from. The genie is out of the bottle, its far less detrimental now to just legalize it federally, apply rules similar to those applied to alcohol and let all non violent marijuana offenders out of prison.
Society often looks at people through an odd lens. A rich white guy sitting drinking a couple of scotches at night is approved of, a group of black guys sitting around drinking a couple beers is reason to call the police. Marijuana prohibition does nothing but entrench this view.
I believe that's what OP is saying, That neither party should be in prison for a crime that is just a crime for some people in some places and legal in others.
i think what's really out of touch is assuming that poor, unprivileged people are like children, who need to be babysat and protected from themselves, else they spend all day just getting high. this is classist and incorrect. many people find it simpler to blame the individuals without considering the systemic causes of addiction, but that is putting the cart before the horse.
Just because the people making the argument come from privileged backgrounds doesn't invalidate the argument itself.
I came from Canada where drug offenses of all kinds are penalized much less harshly than the US. Even in cases of addiction, the social safety net to deal with it is much better: free hospital stays, free counseling, cheap college, better employment insurance, etc.
Effectively, everyone in Ontario can be considered as privileged as the people in your example in terms of leeway given even though I've never been given 10 million dollars for a phone app. We made that decision as a society and since I left the government has started selling marijuana: www.ocs.ca
So when talking about lives being ruined, we have to start asking if the cure of prohibition is worse than the disease of addiction.
Anything that can be abused is finds its population to do so. Banning is not a solution though, but more research and education on the subject. Think about how alcohol abuse and even sugar abuse are treated by society: people are aware of the dangers yet some can’t stop having them.
> I mention this because many of the strongest "let's decriminalize (or even legalize) all drugs" commenters have similar backgrounds.
How is this relevant? Many of us who support decriminalization do so because of the impact it has had on less fortunate communities. Those who are privileged should be using their privilege to help those communities by promoting decriminalization.
If alcohol were not legal your comment would make sense. As it is, we reserve the most dangerous (as in, causes most harm both personally and socially) for those least able to cope. Prohibition makes recreational soft drug use less common among those with fewer resources than it otherwise would be, despite the fact that this would be safer than abusing alcohol.
