Not a marijuana leaf in the photo.
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Sir William of Occam approves!
If we assume that older folk are not all completely brain dead, it is reasonable to assume that we try not to incriminate ourselves on surveys.
Thus, decriminalization should always generate more survey positives.
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If you are interested in a good scary read, check out the stories on erowid.org from people who have tried jimson weed. Pretty much a guaranteed bad trip that can last days and maybe screws you up physically for a while too.
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Every generation views the younger generations as disrespectful ne’er-do-wells who are up to all manner of unsavory activities, even if statistics are clear that Baby Boomers were more sexually active and far more likely to engage in underage drinking and drugs than their Millennial counterparts.
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Am I the only one who thinks that those numbers seem really, really low? Admittedly, I live in the Bay Area, but still…
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Perhaps established pot smokers are aging?
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Oh yeah, I have read some of them. You’re almost guarenteed to have a dark and scary trip, invoking dysophoria instead of euphoria. I have never done jimson weed and I never will, unless under the care of a shaman. I imagine it’s similar to salvia divinorum, but salvia only lasts 3-5 minutes with some lingering after affects. I can’t imagine having a bad salvia trip that lasted two days. You’d definitely never come back… at least not on this level of existence.
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Ahhh… the wisdom of Gandalf!
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I tried salvia divinorum when it was still legal where I live. The experience was wonderful and very abstract, and as you say, lasted about 5 minutes, but it felt way longer than that.
The best part was when I lied down, and had a vision of my body burning (in a pleasant way) to a white ash, starting at legs, until nothing but consciousness remained. That was the most positively nihilistic thing I’ve ever experienced 
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Did they check for a correlation between older people smoking more weed, and paying attention to current events?
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We ain’t smoking less.
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Having had pot only twice in my too-respectable youth, now that it’s legal in AK I do think about using it. But my boss doesn’t recognize its legality and, though the likelihood of being caught is vanishingly small, it would be cause for firing.
Oh hey, there’s a bill:
https://www.fedsmith.com/2018/07/29/bill-protect-jobs-federal-employees-using-marijuana/
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Exactly. The same people are smoking, they are just older people, now. And now they are older still. How about now?
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It’s going to be legal here in canada in about a month, and you can bet I’m going to be smoking it. It’ll be nice to be able to medicate my mood without simultaneously nuking my stomach / esophagus
Speaking as basically an older person, the more you have to lose, the less it made sense to smoke while it was illegal. When I was in university I tried it a couple times, but once you have kids and a house, and the sense the the government might plausibly try to take away either of those things over a drug charge, well, a person might feel inclined towards caution.
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Yeah. When I was younger, I engaged in physical activities, and didn’t want any sort of impairment. Now that I can’t play sports, dance, etc. because of bad knees, I don’t have the same deterrent.
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This article is fake news. Gary Wenk has no citations in the Philosophical Transactions B. This journal has not published anything on cannabinoid research that could be described as a treatment for cognitive decline, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s. The closest it comes is a paper on synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists as possible antipsychotic treatment. That paper is from 2015.
Here’s the search page. Go read for yourself instead of spreading noise from an advertising machine. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org
(And no, there is no even vague, even outside mechanism by which marijuana could treat Huntington’s. That’s so completely irresponsible that I am without words.
)
I get that everyone who consumes wants their drug of choice to cure what ails ‘em and what’s likely to ail ‘em in the future. Anecdote is not evidence. Nobody has any evidence for it. The evidence we do have says that marijuana is at best a respite drug, that it makes people feel better at the time, and its long term use contributes to multiple HPA issues. It may be a seizure treatment, but right now, we only have anecdote.
We have been through this “miracle plant” routine about a billion times in the last 30 years. Not a one of them has actually been a miracle plant.
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And our children always think of us as ancient and clueless. The “older folk” being discussed here were young in the 60s and 70s, when weed was the least of what was going around. Most of us who stopped or greatly reduced our weed consumption did so because we didn’t want to set a bad example for the kids, or because it was incompatible with our careers, or because we lost touch with reliable sources.
Those constraints no longer apply to many older folks. If I were offered a joint in a social situation I would probably accept, and I would certainly not object to using it for medical purposes, but my relationship with drugs (apart from caffeine) is not as close as it was a few decades ago.
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Possible. I was also wondering if those who were weed smokers in the '60s and onwards just never stopped. Hippies y’all!
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