Posted on 09/08/2016 2:36:00 PM PDT by AzNASCARfan
If you grew up during the era of big wheels, horrid hair styles, and the Reagan administration, you probably grew up thinking that green plant you see above you was a really dangerous item. This is especially true if you grew up a Christian during that era.
I mean, it was the lowest level “drug” on the list of drugs, but it was the gateway drug. This gateway drug was to be especially feared, because it represented the slippery slope to every other drug or form of immorality. Even trying it once could result in you no longer wanting to wear your denim skirt. Try it twice and you might swap out Sandi Patty for Motley Crue. Three times? Well, by the third time you wouldn’t even want it anymore, because you’ll be in a dark ally buying an even harder drug with the money you got from pawning your wedding ring.
It was all a bunch of nonsense.
All these years later, it is still a bunch of nonsense.
(Excerpt) Read more at patheos.com ...
Ok. So you want to demand people to be completely 100% sober 24/7 under penalty of prison?
Never happening. Intoxication has been a huge part of every known civilization as a recreational activity to relieve stress since recorded history began. It has even been done by animals LONG before humans walked the earth.
Even if you magically outlawed all substances, people would huff road solvents or ferment their own feces to escape reality. The best we can do is allow certain drugs on the market that are pure, non-toxic, properly dosed and don’t cause long-term harm. So people can escape but still come back when they want. Otherwise you have people instantly and permanently destroying their brains with things like spraypaint, K2, bathsalts and countless other contaminated fake drugs that are the fruits of prohibition.
Pain killer maker spends $500,000 to keep marijuana illegal in Arizona
Do you smoke your peppers?
Bird’s eye peppers... they smoke me
Dancing was a no-no in the eyes of many Christians when I was a kid. It could lead to lust and sexual misbehavior, after all.
Seriously though I smoke CBD oil in a ecig, if I stop, within a week my back stiffens up and I cant even bend over and touch my toes... I will smoke the other if offered to me socially etc, but have not had extra $$ to spend on it for some time... I got my card when Arizona legalized it medically, and we had grow rights because no dispensaries were around yet. The law we passed screwed us though as it had a 25 mi clause, in that if you lived within 25 miles of a dispensary, you could not grow. So the next year I did not renew the card because I could not grow nor afford $400 an ounce at the state run dispensary... just went back to the 50 state legal CBD oil.
Whoops State Licensed, not State run...
Dancing was a no-no in the eyes of many Christians when I was a kid. It could lead to lust and sexual misbehavior, after all......They were too late after I found my brother’s Playboy. Dance, hell. The girls in the neighborhood called me Dr. Feels ‘em up good.
Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.
My mom was not allowed to Dance... She could go to the dance, as long as she sat on the bleachers and socialized but she knew better than to venture out on the dance floor. We are talking small town out in the country, she knew they would know... My grandparents were Strict Baptists, They had to pray on it over the weekend when my Dad asked my Mom to go to the movies when she was 17. Came to the conclusion it was probably better to let her go to the movies that to forbid it and have them go park somewhere instead...
It depends upon what you mean by 100% sober.
There is a subjectivity to this, which I don’t pretend doesn’t exist. We have somewhat arbitrarily decided on .08 blood alcohol in California, for example. Now you might go .09 or something and I still wouldn’t consider you drunk. But you do have to have some sort of standard.
I’d hope it would be a reasonable one. What is the alternative?
It would be anyone could take anything at any time and we could all just deal with the wreckage.
So somewhere betwen 100% sober all the time and everyone staggering around out of their minds, hopefully, we find a reasonable and workable level.
It takes effort and intelligence, we can’t just wish the problem away.
Oh I know people who smoke weed. I am not particularly naive.
I also would WAY rather have someone smoke week daily than take meth daily. I understand that there are some drugs that are worse than others. A person’s previous mental status (which WILL degrade to some degree no matter what they decide to get high on), their physical health, and their overall personality will affect how much damage would be done over how long.
I wouldn’t let my pot smoking friends babysit my kids when getting high. If they got high yesterday, I would. As long as I trusted them not to get high while one the job.
On the other hand, I’d let my Grandma babysit even if she has a glass of wine with dinner.
And I wouldn’t let a junkie babysit at all, ever.
Matter of degree.
These pre-crime fishing expeditions are completely arbitrary and nothing but a scam for revenue. Some people are barely walking at 0.03 while others can do heavy work all day at 0.20. Many illegal drugs are less impairing than average people who blow a 0.08. And many legal Rx drugs are WAY more impairing than someone blowing a 0.08. Also, we have no breathalyzer for the countless impairing Rx pills even though MILLIONS of people legally use them.
The 100% pure and fair “alternative” is to ONLY prosecute people for real crimes that actually harmed someone. NOT this “pre crime” or “potential crime” warrior nonsense whose mission is expandable to infinity.
IF you are driving wrecklessly and breaking rules, you get pulled over (none of this “checkpoint” BS). IF you kill someone and are found to be intoxicated, you go to jail. If you steal, you go to jail. If you burn down your neighbor’s house, you go to jail. We shouldn’t be creating a network of spies arresting people for things that “might” someday harm someone. With that thinking, there is no limit to expansion of the nanny/surveillance state.
Such thinking has led to such insanity as seizing cash indefinitely until YOU can prove it’s not drug money. It has led to the acceptance of no-knock warrants, SWAT teams everywhere and countless innocent people being killed.
In 2010 I went to Country Thunder and camped out for the 4 day weekend, our next door neighbors were a group of about a dozen of Flagstaff’s finest with their wives and girlfriends, blowing off steam for the weekend... I never have seen another group of that size put away that much alcohol, Besides various hard liquor, they had brought 30, 30 packs and had to go get more before the end of the weekend, they were sharing it liberally, with the women that wanted to show off their goods, but anyway, one night sitting around the campfire with half a dozen cops, I asked them what they thought about Marijuana vs Alcohol... the common feeling was stupidest law ever and wished they did not have to enforce it, with the captain saying he would much rather send his guys to go break up a teenage pot party of 20 or 30 kids than to have to go break up a teenage kegger of the same size.
I have a friend that is a functional alcoholic that told me he puts away 2 handles of ten high a week (that is close to a gallon of the cheapest whiskey)... If he admits to that, I am sure there are weeks that it is even more. I always wondered what his normal blood alcohol level is during the time he is not drinking and at work... He says one usually lasts him the work week and then drinks a second over the weekend... can only imagine a 4 day weekend week...
I could have been right there with him, Back in the day on our fishing trips, I drank a case to his 12 pack... I was about 20 years old and my room mates bet me (a keg) that I could not quit drinking for a month. During that month, I started smoking marijuana socially instead of drinking, was not my first time, but not often then. When my month was over, I had won, they bought the keg and the next morning I woke up saying this is stupid, I never felt this way from smoking pot and I am done getting drunk... after that did not really see a need to drink socially, if I did not want to be drunk, it certainly did not taste particularly good.
I argue that marijuana actually saved me from becoming and alcoholic... I was well on my way!
Yeah, I am not promoting drunkenness, here.
I am not saying drunkenness is more virtuous than getting high on marijuana.
“Pre-Crime Fishing Expeditions” =
noticing a weaving car and pulling them over BEFORE they hit someone
noticing a passed out drunk in charge of a little kid and removing the kid BEFORE he is damaged by child neglect
noticing a man threatening to kill an official and arresting him BEFORE he does it
noticing a company letting rats climb all over their canned tomatoes and shutting them down BEFORE anyone gets the plague
noticing that a person has an unfenced swimming pool in the front yard and forcing them to fence it BEFORE some kid drowns
etc.
I am not promoting the idea of citizens being randomly pulled over and searched for pot, or any other thing. Nor having their homes invaded or searched.
But yes we do have preventative laws, of course we want them within reason, that is where the hard work and thinking and cooperation comes in. It is not easy but as I asked before what is the alternative? Much worse.
I do understand that, and please understand that by giving my personal experience, I am not trying to promote marijuana use as much as taking a simple common sense position and being an advocate for the legalization of a natural plant. Conservative Republicans mocking marijuana users as Jeff Spicoli stereotype does not further ANY cause besides our main opposition, the liberals, because it makes them look foolish to a large swath of our electorate that does know, honestly. Its a big reason I quit watching and listening to Sean Hannity, he says he has never tried it but then goes on to mock ALL pot users as total losers and morons... based on what exactly, edited government information. Our idiot Republican governor Ducey says yesterday that its totally stupid to think about legalizing marijuana when we have this HUGE Heroin problem, in Arizona, when all the evidence points to legalized marijuana reducing that exact thing. It is either just pure ignorance or they are bought and paid for!
I understand the potential for abuse and like alcohol, it is NOT for school age kids, they have enough to try to figure out about life with out any recreational drugs changing thought waves... including Tobacco, Alcohol, Marijuana and all the over-prescribed pills so many children are on today too...
But a Legal adult that can go buy tobacco that is known to cause cancer and kill people sooner than otherwise and be very painful and expensive to treat the results of can also go buy Alcohol which exact negative same things can be said of PLUS all the people maimed and killed by drunk drivers yearly should be able to go buy and use however he sees fit, a natural plant that grows from the ground by adding water, without fear of going to jail.
“It is not easy but as I asked before what is the alternative? Much worse.”
We didn’t used to have most of these “preventative laws” for most of this nation’s history for very good reason. The nation was much more free and I’d say that’s much BETTER. Freedom from constant government harassment is worth the cost of all those supposedly “prevented” crimes and stupid people hurting themselves.
You used to be able drink while driving and nobody cared unless you actually broke traffic laws. IF you swerved, etc you were pulled over and cited. But simply having a beer in your hand did not equal a jail-able crime
If you didn’t wear a seatbelt, you were taking your own personal risk and nobody harassed you over it (or took you to jail for it when you couldn’t afford the fines)
You used to be able to blow anything up on your property and buy dynamite by the ton. And nobody cared unless you ACTUALLY harmed someone. Now you can’t buy a little fire cracker in many places!
You could buy a machine gun for whatever reason you wanted and nobody cared unless you ACTUALLY hurt someone
And you used to be able to buy any drug known to man at the local store. No questions, no government database, etc. And nobody bothered you unless you ACTUALLY hurt someone.
The tiny handful of idiots or people that abused their freedoms is no excuse for taking them away from the MILLIONS that didn’t hurt anyone while responsibly exercising them.
Bring back personal Freedom and Natural Selection! I’m absolutely SICK of what this nation is becoming- a PC nanny/police state of wimps afraid of anything with a little danger. Live a little! Take some risks and face the consequences!
Seems like people in modern society are so isolated from death, they think they’ll live forever and pointlessly try to legislate this illusion of “safety”...
The difference I see between tobacco and marijuana is, marijuana is much more psychoactive. It affects the mind and brain health, actually causing brain damage.
I run into trouble with this line of reasoning because everything is sort of psychoactive. Sleep is. Sugar is. Coffee is. So.
it is a matter of degree, admittedly.
In my opinion, the psychological damage done by marijuana is great enough that I think it should be banned except for TRULY medical use. I hope we can agree that the vast majority of the “medical use” for example here in California is an obvious farce.
I am not into mocking Spicoli or whatever, my position is serious, and I’m not into using perjoratives. I have lost a lot of good friends, in various ways, (death, suicide, going crazy, just generally becoming useless) to various types of drug abuse and I don’t like it when people act as though unregulated drugs is some sort of conservative position. This is a conservative site, not a conservative Libertarian site, so why are people surprised?
“Victimless crimes” a la Libertarian philosophy are a myth, IMO. I call it is I see it.
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