It more targetted. Mayor of the town, get pulled over with a joint in the ashtray? They aren’t seizing your escalade. Wage slave with the wrong skin color / attitude / history / etc? You lose that F-150 homie.
1 Like
If it’s not about money, it’s about money.
2 Likes
I entirely disagree with the other replies that it’s easier to home brew good beer than grow good weed. Homebrewing requires specific equipment and careful attention to temperatures, times and clean procedures. Growing good weed requires: good genetics (seeds) & a basic understanding of the needs of a plant (water, sun, something to keep bugs off it).
Growing top-end green is somewhat difficult because it needs to be done either indoors or in a properly sealed greenhouse as to get the most out of the genetics you have to ensure the female plants aren’t pollinated by the males. Sensimilla, baby. The thing is that if you have seeds that have good genetics it will produce pretty killer weed even if the plants do end up pollinated. Genetics trumps all.
This book is excellent and addresses the reasons behind the ongoing prohibition: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=auatLlqO_AIC&printsec=frontcover&vq=driving
TLDR: Alcohol companies know they stand to lose big $ if it’s legalised so they throw their full weight, wallet and pack of lobbyists behind the promotion and perpetuation of the myths of the war on drugs.
The growing-your-own-means-no-tax-revenue is fucking nonsense. If weed is being grown you are going to have incidental costs that are taxed: tools, fertiliser, lights, quality soil. You’re also going to have an increased spend on munchies because: it’s not like people typically save disposable income. The money that isn’t being spent on weed/beer/whatever is still going to be spent. At present if you’re buying weed on the black market then that’s a spend in the economy which isn’t being taxed… a lost opportunity to raise some money to pay for the impacts of smoking weed: an impact whose cost must already be footed.
Not sure how it is elsewhere, but in the US PNW quite a bit of high end is outdoor Oregon / Nor Cal grown.
Sorry dudes. While I’d like to agree with you I don’t believe your contentions to be true. Some drugs fuck people to the point of not being human. This is not propaganda of the drug war it’s simply fact. Krok might be more dangerous than heroin but it’s not like having a bunch of people strung out on heroin is much better. There was a MASSIVE problem with heroin use in Sydney in the 90’s and I’m telling you: it gets nasty.
The misconception about portugal is that hard drugs are “legal”. In fact the laws simply changed the issue from a criminal to a civil/administrative matter. From Wikipedia:
The drug policy of Portugal was put in place in 2000, and was legally effective from July 2001. The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than ten days’ supply of that substance.
It’s a great example of sensible drug law reform because it took a problem that was happening in the unseen underbelly of their society and turned it into a situation where users would not be punished with convictions for being caught they were instead being directed to addiction treatment programs which have consistently been shown to have better outcomes than prohibition and prison.
I would agree that some drugs classed as “hard” would be pretty consequence-free to legalise or decriminalise (MDMA, shrooms, LSD and a bunch of other hallucinogens) but things like heroin,meth and pain meds can turn people into empty useless shells with little connection to any human morals or self respect. It’s not all propaganda.
What is that story? I’ve not heard it and I find it hard to believe.
Why did she end up brain damaged while people who smoked the rest of the batch that was sold did not. It’s impossible to believe that one person had such an extreme reaction when others did not - unless it was an allergic reaction.
Edit 2: Thanks for the link… it certainly sounds like a case to be interested in but it’s worth pointing out that stroke caused her brain damage, not the drug directly and that smoking cigarettes can also cause stroke. Her life has clearly been fucked up by having that stroke, but she’s making a decent recovery: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/miracle-progress-teen-near-death-synthetic-marijuana-article-1.1456099
That article also points out that, contrary to the phraseology of The Independent article, she had been smoking the stuff daily for two weeks before having the strokes, which I feel casts doubt on it being the cause.
Not sure how it is elsewhere, but in the US PNW quite a bit of high end is outdoor Oregon / Nor Cal grown.
Does the bud have seeds in it? If so then it’s a testimony to the powerful genetics, if not then they’re doing something to ensure their precious babies aren’t being pollinated.
Here in Australia you typically get hydro in the cities and outdoor anywhere where’s there’s privacy and space to grow it (in the country). You can often find someone selling outdoor (we call it ‘bush bud’) in the city but who wants that when you can get higher from hydro by smoking less plant matter?
To be fair the pacific northwest of the US is US pot mecca. Here, hydro is often enough referred to as “bc bud” which elsewhere in the US is a very good thing, but here can be used as a derogatory moniker given to mass produced, fast harvest cycle hydro weed. Outdoors, weed grows best in about the same conditions as hops do - 2000 to 3000 feet up a (preferably) volcanic mountainside. Assuming you choose your site well, pollination is kept to a minimum by prevailing winds, and you are planting pre-sexed clones backpacked up the trail. Plenty of that to go around in the area fortunately 
The Parks system here (and in Cali.) has had some real problems with growers clearing land, and diverting water to grow.
As for Emily Bauer, it was mainstream news in the US, and I never try to make sense of medical mishaps involving drugs. Ecstasy deaths? Don’t exist. Yet, some have died under the influence. Bath salts in all their different chemical makeups are completely harmless cocaine substitutes according to many… until some guy gets his face torn off, and all the other documented psychotic behavior associated. LSD harmless? Watched some people completely disintegrate on acid, babysat quite a few others, meanwhile others had their essential identity untouched. The fake marijuana crap “spice” is a whole bunch of different chemical formulations made by god knows who with god knows what quality control. How it will affect any given person physically / mentally is a complete cipher until it actually happens.
Edit - clarification on outdoor grow technique.
All I hope is that legalization of pot will decrease the number of people who fall in with libertarians and then start believing that all government is useless.
4 Likes
So heroin was legal in Australia at that time? Because otherwise you’re not actually arguing a counterpoint demonstrating that legalizing hard drugs = less expense due to policing, incarceration, hospitalization, theft.
See the point isn’t that legalizing hard drugs make people do them less, the point is that prohibition does fuckall to mitigate problems while costing a lot of money that ACTUALLY COULD BE USED TO MITIGATE PROBLEMS.
People who want to get fucked up will get fucked up. That’s the end of that story. You want to make things generally safer and less costly for people who don’t want to get fucked up? You legalize it, and test it the same way you do aspirin and toothpaste. Result? Cheaper dope due to it not being black-market = less stealing, more money for social programs, fewer medical costs because when you but a bag of heroin that says “80%” pure heroin then that’s what you get so a heroin user knows how to do it w/o killing herself.
The downside? Fewer assholes getting rich from the for-profit prison system.
Heh… you’ll notice I included the moderator “pretty”. All of the things I listed can get you so fucked up you’ll do something dangerous or deadly but I feel the risks are manageable. Obviously LSD will fuck people up who have an ego or are constantly trying to manage people’s perceptions of them, but it’s very rare that any trip is affecting the person 24 hours later, particularly if they’ve taken a dose within reasonable levels. When you say “completely disintegrate” do you mean for the duration of the trip or afterwards?
I’ve never done bath salts but IMO the majority of these psychotic violent acts committed under the influence of stimulants are largely because of sleep-deprivation induced psychosis that accompanies staying awake for longer than our bodies are built for and if you dig into the stories deeper you usually find that these people were abusing an assortment of drugs, not just the one the media has jumped on to scare people with.
PS: I can see how the phrase would be used to denigrate mass-produced hydro, but it’s probably somewhat misplaced considering bc=British Columbia, Canada: A place that is renowned for producing amazing strains. There are always douchey assholes who’ll try to cut corners for the skrilla. I just don’t buy from them 
I’m not trying to argue that legalisation would lead to less expense: locking people up and the judicial process is expensive. What I’m saying is that some drugs are able to take hold of people in such a way that their own lives become nothing but a pursuit for ways to procure more of those drugs and then do them. I feel that is someone’s right to do if they choose to but I also feel it’s sad to let people do that when life can be so freaking amazing.
How would you feel if your brother or daughter chose to become an addict, and keep in mind that when I say “chose” I’m actually saying: at one point they chose to do the drugs but at the point of addiction are they actually still choosing that? I’d argue no.
I entirely agree that prohibition does nothing to mitigate the problems. In that regard you’re preaching to the high choir, but I think you need to consider a case in point which is already legal and highly taxed: cigarettes. Here in Oz a pack of 25 is going to set you back a whopping $20+. Even at that ridiculous price the costs imposed on the health system by smoking are far more than the tax revenue from sales of cigs. It’s also an example which doesn’t greatly impact things like policing or increased crime rates. You may well be right that the revenue earned could cover the costs to society imposed but short of having a real-world trial you’d never have the hard figures to make a call on it and since we can see that in the case of tobacco there is a massive shortfall between the revenue and the cost I’m not convinced that legalisation would definitely lead to less overall expense in the case of all drugs.
so a heroin user knows how to do it w/o killing herself.
People OD using reliable drugs all the time. The problem is that certain drugs affect your memory and risk assessment and most drugs create some level of tolerance meaning that regular users typically scale up their dosages over time.
Man I’m all for universal legalisation just to see what the hell happens, but I really believe that we’d discover that some drugs would have cost impacts that are unpredictable.
PCP induced psychosis is pretty well studied in medical literature. It may not happen in everyone, but when it does, the effect is quite bad.
1 Like
hm… upon further inspection I don’t believe comparing to PCP is appropriate since PCP is a dissociative anaesthetic/hallucinogen not a stimulant (as ‘bath salts’ typically are).
In any case I think the discussion of “synthetic drugs” is something we should encourage people to avoid since it’s a buzz word that means very little in the scheme of things. We and the media should be calling these drugs by their chemical names so at least the people interested in checking this stuff out know what the hell they’re actually putting in themselves - but that will never happen since the non-specific mystery of exactly what these drugs are is part of the scare campaign against them.
Yeah, the amazing strains are what travel. Locally that became an epithet when the BC cops allowed indoor operations to go without enforcement and we got tons of warehouse weed. Beats bale / brick weed (which you can’t give away, let alone sell in the PNW) by a mile but that’s about all.
Acid is a weird one. The lasting (I wouldn’t mention trip/recover period, it goes without saying) psychological / cognitive damage I’ve seen has been both among the psychic warrior idiot “dude I just dropped a quarter sheet! lets go out and drink!” crowd, and among people who took the same (reasonable) amount of the same batch I and others did. I have always dismissed examination as impossible, you would have to figure out how much is mental vs physical, etc. I’ve made the assumption that some peoples chemistry (brain? endocrine? who knows…) is vulnerable. As for completely disintegrate I mean loss of job, loss of ability to keep such, sudden deficit in critical thinking / logic, loss of girl/boyfriend, place to live, etc. Moving from an intellectually and socially high functioning individual to a marginalized, going to need societal / institutional help individual. Rare, but random and awful to see.
Source - I spent a couple decades immersed in psychedelic / drug culture, using, selling, buying, and generally having a bloody good time with Thikal & Phikal as a “designer” bucket list, lsd, mushrooms of a variety of types, marijuana as a constant, ecstasy, amphets, and some prescription drugs.
The new crop of synthetic “analogue” drugs I don’t touch. No two formulations are the same, and the formulations change as the US fed adds the new chemicals to the drug enforcement schedule. Add to that these are likely being made with god knows what industrial chemical supplies in ill measured batches in some outhouse. Oops, spilled a bit too much of w/e in that bucket? Oh well. Not quite enough battery acid to finish this batch? Well I have to piss anyways… I don’t believe for a second their labeling is accurate. As for discussion, the vast majority are unstudied in animals, let alone humans.
Because whilst drugs remain illegal, no-one gets fucked up and requires healthcare!
I would love to think that Australia will follow suit with the US and legalise marijuana, unfortunately whilst I think there probably is growing acceptance that weed doesn’t cause many problems, there is such a huge push here against tobacco, and I think most likely the pro-majijuana cause will run headfirst into the anti-tobacco cause; i.e. why would the government legalise one smoking substance while it pushes to ban another.
heh… we should hang out sometime.
I agree that the manufacturers of these shit analogue drugs change the recipe up a bit for each iteration to avoid the law but what is stupid is that they could already be busted under existing drug analogue laws irrespective of changing the recipe, provided the prosecution could prove they were produced and marketed with the intention of human consumption.
FWIW there’s no reason to assume other mainstream drugs (MDMA, amphetamines) don’t have the same problems with shitty cooks. For the most part these retail products are produced in China, or using “Research Chemicals” produced in China. I’m extremely judgemental of China’s penchant for cutting corners in manufacturing (I avoid buying Chinese made foods whatsoever) but I don’t accept the premise that these things are inherently dangerous due to the mystery of their production.
What I do unreservedly agree with you on is that you’re better off doing the real deal, not these “half-measure” alternatives. Also interesting to hear what John W. Huffman (whose research group created the synthetic cannabinoids which are used to make these shitty alternatives) has to say on their consumption:
“I figured once it got started in Germany it was going to spread. I’m concerned that it could hurt people,” Huffman said. “I think this was something that was more or less inevitable. It bothers me that people are so stupid as to use this stuff”. Huffman may have developed these compounds for scientific research, but now he gets blamed for its abuse. As JWH-018 is more potent and easy to make, Huffman believes it is a more widely used synthetic cannabinoid of the JWH series.
Mostly agree - but lsd has a particular “feel” to it that is relatively easy to grade. Most designers, amphets, and MDA/MDMA are all easily (maybe not everywhere, testing materials are easily available here in kit or ala carte form) testable for purity, concentration, and contaminant if you’re willing to sacrifice a bump/pill.
AFAIK there is no user test for these analogues.
w00!
What kits do you have that test for purity/concentration?? I thought the only way to do that was with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry? Also, quick reactions to reagents supposedly indicate higher concentrations, but it’s a pretty dicey way to be measuring concentration.
Check out last weeks cops from proof of just the above. Car impounded and the cops acting like it was a great pay day for all of .1 oz of weed.
