The soft-head-long rush to legalize “pot” reveals a gigantic weakness shared across institutional and political leaders of every stripe. Much of the “leadership” each claims on this “complex” subject is craven followership, at best. At worst, and fairly common among political types, is the abject desire for money, regardless of source. “Drug Money” is perfectly good for society if the definition of mind-altering, stupefying drugs can be changed sufficiently as to make everyone believe a new thing. After all, the beautiful new taxes that may be collected will provide all of these “goods”:
1) We’ll pretend to give some to education, proving that official endorsement of brain-altering and brain-retarding substances will help children – not hurt them, no, no, no. There will be an age limit on their sale, too… see?
2) Some of the funds will be diverted to imaginary drug-treatment programs which will HELP the tiny minority of human brains that may be negatively affected – and there is no proof of this effect, but just in case – so that’s a new benefit legal drug sales will enable… see?
3) The funds will also go to repair our crumbling infrastructure, which will save lives and create good-paying, campaign-enhancing union construction jobs. This will make our roads and bridges safer, especially since drug-users will not be allowed to work on these vital projects when there are still some drugs in their system, no, no, no.
4) Experimenting kiddos who are caught with some marijuana won’t have a black star on their records that might interfere with their parents’ plans for their college careers – not just for one little mistake – so unfair, laws be damned. Besides, they’ll be 18 years old in college and a little pot won’t be able to hurt their brains a bit, there is absolutely no proof of that if someone told you otherwise, and who doesn’t need to relax now and then under the tremendous pressures of college, for Pete’s sake?
5) Finally, the corrupt racketeers in our many statehouses will no longer be perceived as mean, nor will their jack-booted police minions, who will now spend their valuable time chasing REAL criminals (unless they are illegal entrants) and we’ll all be safer. Safer!
Well, that’s all certainly a win-win-win-win-win. What possible reason was there for not doing this, decades ago?
The sixth great “good” has been described as “getting pot out of the hands of criminals,” which actually doesn’t happen, it turns out, and, even better from the glazed viewpoints of congenital regulatory types, “we’ll finally be able to regulate its purity and safety so that buyers won’t be getting other drugs mixed in with their legal pot.” That’s a big one.
What is equally as large a benefit in the eyes of pot buyers, is that legal growing has quickly facilitated development of much, much, much stronger variants of marijuana, and has permitted – wait for it – edibles(!). There are pot cookies, brownies, cakes, cake mixes, crackers, breads, gummy-bears (gummy bears?) and other candies, none of which will be sold to minors, not ever, no, no, no.
Nor will pregnant moms ever, ever use pot… except medicinally, of course, because just like there isn’t any evidence of pot harming anyone, ever, it certainly can’t harm the developing brain of a fetus. Besides, pot is far less dangerous than cocaine or heroin, so shove it. And, everyone knows it’s far less dangerous than (shudder) alcohol. Goodness gracious, look at all the drunk driving and people dying from cirrhosis and flying into angry outbursts when they’re drunk! You never hear of a cannabis user getting angry or, worse, hitting someone, no, no, no.
Just because that unfortunate David Njuguna fellow blacked out after enjoying his medical marijuana, and then murdered state trooper, Thomas Clardy – left his wife and 6 kids – on the Mass Pike, it certainly wasn’t the fault of the marijuana, no, no, no. The driver did it: he must have been taking other “medications” at the same time and made a bad choice to drive. Too bad he didn’t use a gun to kill the trooper; the gun would have done it, in that case. Only THC was found in his blood samples.
Did you know that George Washington grew “hemp” to make ropes and other products? So, shove it.
There used to be a fairly simple marijuana landscape: marijuana and hashish, which was stronger. Different sources of marijuana offered variations in how high a smoker could get, although some of that was marketing myth. Still, Hawaiian pot was better than mainland-grown, which was perhaps a little better than Mexican stuff, except that the Mexicans could flood the market and the damned narcs kept local weed in short supply.
Hashish was like living on the wild side, and if you smoked it the right way, could really separate a person from reality. “Assassin” derives from hash user: “hashishim.” Many assassination jobs were suicide missions and required that the perpetrator was not “himself,” as it were. “Pot” today is in a whole different realm.
Controlled cultivation has rendered some 120 strains of marijuana, most are 4 times stronger in THC concentration (the psychoactive chemical) than the weeds of even 15 years ago. It’s like trading a “beer” for four vodka nips and figuring that you’ve drunk LESS, since 4 nips don’t even fill half a beer glass. Yeah, well, better pot means you don’t smoke as much, man… so shove it. Besides, we don’t have to smoke it anymore, they’ve got tabs that dissolve under your tongue and they’re 80% pure THC, so shove it. And alcohol is way worse than pot, man, so your example isn’t worth… ahh, some bad dope, like.
In the interest of public health the many, many health agencies, the surgeon General, no less, and lots of PSA’s and subway posters have slowly driven down the number of TOBACCO smokers in the U. S., to the point that catching a whiff of smoke is uncommon, and all restaurants are now smoke-free as are most bars and lounges. By all measures the anti-smoking campaign has been a huge success, aided, no doubt, by the $3, $5, or $9 per-pack taxes and the billions of other dollars extorted from tobacco companies over the past 25 years. Those taxes were for health coverage for children, for goodness’ sake, and helped fund… well, education and infrastructure projects and, umm, ahh… oh! Helped fund anti-smoking campaigns of course.
However, with the significant decline in smoking there has been a dangerous decline in crucial revenues for childrens’ health coverage and stuff. Did you know that State Police officers can cash in unused sick days when they retire? Regardless, states were carefully spending their tobacco windfalls and simultaneously decriminalizing marijuana use: smokers are smokers, some we like, some we don’t, and there is no campaign we thrifty state managers can foresee that is going to reduce the number of pot smokers. Besides, all that tax revenue that legal pot produces will go to education, crumbling infrastructure, children’s health care and permanent housing for the homeless. Stop pot smoking? Over our dead bodies.
THC is readily absorbed by fat cells, which doesn’t make a lick of sense to a pot smoker but it’s true, and the largest, diet-proof pile of fat cells is a human brain. Funny. And it’s also a fact that purging toxins from brain cells is very difficult to do, since the nature of the body is to breakdown every fat cell it can find (if a person eats a low-carb diet and forces the body to shrink a little) EXCEPT brain cells. They tend to live long and die slowly and even, recent research shows, replace themselves, even building new neural pathways and synapses if properly stimulated. The disruption to brain development in youngsters who use pot is well known, especially in the realms of short-term memory, initiative, sports abilities and other things a growing child hopes to have.
It is not yet accepted that cannabis in the bloodstreams of older or elder humans will have any effect on healthy brain cells or on the new cells trying to grow. God forbid it has anything to do with Alzheimers, or the acceleration of Alzheimers. Let’s hope not as both become more widespread. May God also forbid any effect on the incidence of autism.
Ohh, sorry. For a few sentences I went off track there, imagining bad side effects from the barely researched impact of the broad array of THC and other marijuana chemicals’ concentrations in the incredible, balanced biologies that enable human existence, development, survival and procreation. Glad I caught myself. There’s just no way potently psychoactive drugs have some “lasting effects” on human brains. Besides, with Suri, Alexa and what’s-her-name, plus GPS satellites talking through every phone and car, people don’t really need to remember all that much… or even learn it in the first place. So, shove it.
Back to brains: THC likes being in brains and the owners of the brains like its being there, too. The most active part of pot attaches to the same receptors as does heroin and fentanyl, but it’s not as strong. You may have gone by a billboard here and there that proclaims fewer opioid deaths in states with legal marijuana. There’s no direct connection between the two conditions, but like every other pot-related argument, the slightest case for justification (“alcohol is way worse, man” and “pot’s therapeutic”) is pure gold, the mountain of evidence of personal destruction ain’t worth… ahh, some bad dope, like.
Everything we ingest, however, has the potential of causing changes to our bodies. Some are foods, some are pharmaceuticals, some are pollutants, some are poisons. Some make us stupid in ways we find enjoyable; some cause us to forget or ignore our problems real and imagined; some, we think, make sexual relations more likely. Whatever, all of them have long-term effects.
Some are addictive. Pot users know that addiction is bad so they swear up and down that pot doesn’t “cause” addiction. Maybe we can pretend that, but regular users know fellow tokers who never miss an opportunity to get a “hit.” Pot may not “cause” addiction but, like so many, many substances, starting with sugar and caffeine, pot can create withdrawal discomfort when there isn’t a fresh infusion at an appropriate time. Users will go to a lot of trouble and, flailing governments hope, expense, to resolve their withdrawal anxieties. “Medical” marijuana can relieve anxiety. Call it what you will.
That terrible scourge, alcohol, is mildly psychoactive, much less so than original pot and way, way less so than the modern types. Still, ethanol can “teach” the brain to cause a lot of strange actions and reactions, hallucinations and psychoses, while it chemically damages cells in livers, kidneys, throats, blood vessels, hearts and other places. A certain fraction of humans is very susceptible to becoming addicted to alcohol, but many more can make themselves alcoholics if they work at it. Sugar can do the same to lesser degrees; heroin is fairly quick to train the brain to “need” it; cocaine in some forms needs but a single “hit” to turn on debilitating cravings. Pot, however, stands alone in its ability to interfere with dopamine receptors, like all psychoactives, and NEVER create dependency, no, no, no.
Like heroin and cocaine, THC affects many areas of the brain and consciousness, memory difficulties perhaps the best known (hypothalamus). But it also distorts time awareness, key to vast tracts of decision-making, not least of which may prove to be was there a car entering the intersection from the right just now or was that earlier? Otherwise, pot is much like alcohol in terms of motor skills, psychoses and lethargy, but waaay better than booze, as everyone knows, and you don’t wet your pants as much.
Like so many activities rapacious governments legalize for money, the comparison of this one with the stupid laws, and their poor enforcement, against stupid uses of alcohol is sufficient justification if the money and votes are there. Maybe pot doesn’t make a person as stupid as booze… observers of a side-by-side test of stupidness would be hard-pressed to choose a “winner.” However, alcohol can be metabolized while much of marijuana cannot; alcohol flushes from the system renally, much of pot does not, staying in fat cells for days and weeks somewhat cumulatively. From the clarion viewpoint of a pot user, on the other hand, the winner is obvious and that’s where the money is. And, from the corrupt viewpoint of government and wealth-seeking former politicians, two stupids make a lot of money.
Some smokers we like, some we don’t.
Curious? https://americanaddictioncenters.org/central-nervous-system/