I think BB was just mirroring the original article’s headline. The article makes it clear: he’d been relying on being an educated white guy to avoid trouble and that he was called on it when he complained to a black friend.
“A white Harvard law school graduate gets a taste of what life is like for the not so privileged. It’s an eye-opener.”
Now let’s see how do your argument looks with substituting marijuana for a way more dangerous yet legal drug, and let’s imagine it is illegal as it was back in the 30’s: Alcohol.
Now, would you consider making alcohol illegal and take away from people the RESPONSABILITY of using something legal in a abusive way with all it’s social and legal consequences?
What’s next? Sugar?
(S)he explicitly said it shouldn’t factor into legality, and that (s)he’s not suggesting it should be illegal. (S)he explicitly said it was how the person uses it. You’re making a straw man.
No kidding, even if she believed an officer wouldn’t lie, why in the world would she think that they couldn’t just be wrong?
So we are all at the same page, misuse is an issue about adults being responsible, and the solution is not making people’s personal decisions into illegal arbitrary items, pushing for empowering party-cracy fascists nanny states disguised as democratic that would like to even decide what we should think.
Then I see no problem. I’m glad. Now we could keep doing whatever we want to.
My take is – she didn’t care. As a land lady, all she wants is to stay on the good side the local cops. She doesn’t know and doesn’t really give a shit about truth in this matter. Another “unmentioned reality” issue is: what did this Harvard lawyer do or not do to piss off the rat-neighbor?
He didn’t share?
Not silly. Cannabis is a drug. Drugs have side effects.
tl;dr: Cannabis is a psychoactive drug, so it messes with your brain. Would you like a side of psychosis with your high?
Semple, D. M., McIntosh, A. M., & Lawrie, S. M. (2005). Cannabis as a risk factor for psychosis: systematic review. Journal of psychopharmacology, 19(2), 187-194. (Link is pdf of original paper)
When prohibition was attempted in the Soviet Union, it resulted in a sugar shortage.
Here are three articles RE: Caffeine psychosis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19407709
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09101456
The actual causality is tricky though. In my years of anecdotal study of ambulance patients I believe that I observed a self medicating trend in heavy pot users. The pot lifestyle was a cover to deal with some sort of depression or to wallpaper over a trauma, or lazy basement/attic dude just wants to get his lazy on and pot helps him ignore his mother.
Caffeine is a methylxanthine (which is a group of psychoactive agents), so heavy caffeine consumption provoking psychosis in someone with schizophrenia is not really a surprise.
My point being that while cannabis may be relatively benign for occasional adult users, it’s not without risk. And heavy use, particularly by adolescents, is undesirable. Unlike caffeine use, cannabis use (particularly in adolescence) appears to increase the risk of psychosis even in individuals who have a low predicted risk.
I’m not saying prohibition is the way to go, just sounding a note of caution. Cannabis use isn’t risk free.
Have a look at the cohort studies I linked to. Cohort studies allow inference of causation.
So methylxanthines and methylpheylethelamines should have legal routes of administration although they are associate with psychoses but diterpenoids present in certain plants shouldn’t enjoy this same status?
I will be the first to admit that certain tropane alkaloids are really hazardous and should be closely regulated, though, so maybe I’m a hypocrite.
isn’t it everyone’s right to be useless if they choose to be so? also, who are you to judge the usefulness of another person? or to assume that pot use is even the cause? i see others have already pointed the contradictions of these statements out though…
can any substance cause issues if abused? sure, of course…
Of course.
My point isn’t to judge people, just to raise an alarm in an era when most alarms about pot are being ignored.
[quote]or to assume that pot use is even the cause?
[/quote]
That, of course, is very difficult to prove, but at a minimum its an incredibly frequent co-factor to abject laziness and general helplessness as a human being.
And my point in raising these issues isn’t to judge anyone or question the legality of pot. I’m all for people having the freedom to smoke as much as they damn well please, especially when its medically useful. Just noting that its very possible that pot is much more dangerous than people give it credit for, especially when they evaluate it only on the basis of how much physical harm it can do.
Hopefully now that its absurd Schedule I status has been revoked we’ll get some meaningful studies on this kind of effect.
That’s a fantastic point and beautifully put.
Pretty sure I addressed that:
It always pays off to learn as much as we can about what we’re using is all I’m saying. That applies equally to me as prescriber as it does to users of recreational pharmaceuticals.
It also helps to use Levels of Evidence and Impact Factor when hitting Medline and evaluating journal articles. That way avoids linking to Level 5 (opinion and anecdote) papers in reply to Level 2 (systematic review and cohort) evidence. 
That has been my observation as well, and I used to agree with this (quite strongly even). But over time, I’ve come to question my thinking on it - particularly the causality. I can’t think of a single person who fits that profile that would suddenly become successful and happy and productive if the weed just vanished from their life. I can’t think of one instance where it is the actual problem rather than a symptom - a reaction to other problems.
I don’t know how valid the Rat Park experiments really were, but the concepts from it seem much more likely to me than “weed is an evil magic demon that possesses people and makes them bad”.
That’s great that you’ve seen some success stories!
I think it may have had a devastating effect on some people’s lives, but what’s worse is that I think there are many for whom the alternatives seem (or even are) more devastating. In terms of official medical uses, some people may be incurable and others may be treatable but not able to afford the treatment. We’re not talking about medicinal usage, but my anecdotal experience indicates that hardcore potheads tend to fit into similar categories - people actually unable to solve their problems or unable to afford the solutions. They get that far gone because it’s the only relief they can find.
Older me tells younger me that instead of fighting a war against an inanimate plant, we need to look into those problems and how to fix them or enable people to deal with them.
But that’s much more difficult than just blaming and shooting a plant…
Ignored by who? By the same idiots who think that something is harmless because it’s legal?
There’s plenty of information around about what cannabinoids do to conciousness, and what tar and volatilized hydrocarbons does to lungs, etc… Shall we nanny and force feed them info to all of those grown ups really not caring or not wanting to care?
People dies at raves for drinking too much water, and mdma didn’t pushed them into that in a pavlovian unavoidable way, ignorance and lack of awareness killed them, what shall we do? Label each bottle of water as DANGEROUS PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN.(Yes, another straw man, but if its about conceptual forms and not context, a straw man has the same silhouette as a full fledged man, semiotics points to sign and symbols being the access point to higher level concepts to the conciousness, and let’s be honests: Aristotle lacked in semiotics, he was all about “matter and form”, kind of very much like “scientism”, so Aristotles sophistical refutations cannot hold all about the human condition and issues, ie. the hard problem, qualia etc. hence it’s not holistic for humanism. IT LACKS.)
I apologize because I realized maybe I’m coming as an hypocrite here, because at another thread telling people about the dangers of not caring about having Microsoft and the NSA peeking at their living rooms and to get informed about tech privacy issues, and at the same time taking the posture of just letting unknowledgeable people be and decide by themselves if they want to know or not via “cannabis FUD”, because I’m all about not supporting totalitarian-utilitarian schemes and groups, whatever their affiliation is.
Cannabis FUD only helps the same politic and/or religious groups pushing to grab empowerment out from people for everyday personal choices using it as an appeal to fear tactic. NSA/PRISM FUD only helps people into becoming knowledgeable and responsible, disempowering big brother(all of them, local or global) at the same time.
EDIT:
Disclosing only for the record: I’m not a cannabis user.
