I’m watching this show on medical marijuana on CNN while waiting on Game of Thrones, and guess who figures prominently as anti-marijuana:
As a hard-partying teenager, Patrick Kennedy met President Reagan at a fundraiser for the JFK Library, a meeting captured in a photograph that the former Rhode Island congressman now hangs in his home office. He used to think of it as a funny episode, a collision of Camelot’s cocaine kid and America’s foremost opponent of illegal drug use. But Kennedy took his last hit of anything in 2009, and he’s since honed an anti-drug message that sounds a bit like Reagan with a Boston brogue.
Kennedy believes there is “an epidemic in this country of epic dimensions when it comes to alcohol and drugs.” He’d like to treat it all, but he’s convinced that the single biggest threat to America’s mental health is free-market marijuana. So even as Democrats favor the legalization of pot—by a 34-point margin, according to the latest WSJ/NBC News poll—the scion of America’s most famous Democratic family has broken ranks, criticized the White House, and aligned with the likes of Newt Gingrich to warn voters against trying to tax and regulate today’s psychoactive chlorophyll.
“I don’t think the American public has any clue about this stuff,” says Kennedy, after welcoming guests with a choice of Gatorade or bottled water.
The “stuff” in question is modern marijuana, of course, which gets pumped into snack foods and candies, and carries more THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical that gets you high) than the ditch weed used by the hippie generation. Kennedy calls legalization “a public health nightmare” because he believes it will warm more people to a dangerous drug, and lead inevitably to “Big Marijuana,” a blood-sucking vice industry dependent on converting kids and selling to heavy users—same as the tobacco and alcohol industries.
It’s a real shame Teddy Kennedy isn’t alive to kick his son and his nephew’s (RFK, JR.), anti-vaxxer extraordinaire, asses. Although Ted’s hands aren’t completely clean, because he helped shepherd the 1986 drug law that enacted mandatory minimums and created the ridiculous sentencing disparities for crack v. powder cocaine that ruined lives for a quarter century before it was changed in 2010. That 1986 bill went a long way to making the god damned mess of a drug war we have today.
And why would Kennedy have done that? Google Len Bias and see what team drafted him.
Hunter Gathers
Yet another hypocrite who thinks that people should get thrown on jail over shit that he did that got him a slap on the wrist. He can go fuck himself.
Unabogie
John, did you just Bigfoot your own goddamned thread?
jl
Where does this stupid ‘ditch weed’ myth of the hippie generation come from? I remember older cousins and classmates giving younger HS kids hash oil that would blow your socks off. I mean…, of course… that is what I’ve heard from some of my friends who unfortunately had wayward episodes during their youth.
Stupid hippies didn’t have coke or LSD or mescaline or ‘shrooms and meth. And didn’t mix stuff?
That is not what I have heard.
Actually that is not what I saw. I was at parties where people were tossing pills into a bowl and then scooping some out and swallowing them to see what happened. And I never did that, honest to God, that stuff was crazy.
I am not as old has the hippies, but I was probably in the next wave, whatever my generation is called. X, or Jones, or disco swill punks, or whatever.
Cervantes
@Hunter Gathers:
Whereas here’s what the linked article actually says:
Anne Laurie
@Hunter Gathers: Well, Patrick didn’t go to jail, but his various addictions have had a terrible effect on his life, his career, and his family. It’d be nice if he were more temperate in his anti-marijuana crusade — I think he could more profitably concentrate on, for instance, e-cigarettes — but it’s not like he got into this fight just because he was looking for a way to be a huge public nuisance.
jl
@Unabogie: Cole is the honey badger or blogging etiquette. When Cole gets going he don’t give a shit, he don’t care. He goes for it.
Tree With Water
I propose that every taxpayer be mailed a package of cannabis seeds (with growing instructions) by the Department of Agriculture, to be delivered promptly on the 15th of April of every year, to serve as a reminder to (first of all) relax, and (second of all) that as you sew, so shall you reap.
Mr Stagger Lee
If he thinks he and his family can retake the mantle of the Democratic Party, stands like this will make them a failure. Besides the Kennedys are so 20th century, after all you don’t see any Roosevelts around.
Gin & Tonic
@jl: hash oil that would blow your socks off
Did, not would.
I also recall something called “kief” that was, um, more powerful than some people expected.
Zinsky
The Kennedy family has been a huge waste of time, money and energy for the Democratic Party for reasons both within and outside of their control. Democrats need to put more time and energy into formulating solid policies and positions on issues and push them relentlessly like the vermin on the other side of the aisle. They need to stop believing that a savior is going to rise up and carry them to the Promised Land.
eemom
Most especially the latter, and thanks for mentioning it, Cole. That irresponsible scumbag was a day one originator of the antivaxx nightmare. With nothing, of course, but his fucking family name to give him any credibility, he was right out there at the get go hyping the junk “science”, and is largely responsible for the fact that it caught on amongst equally ignorant, rich, irresponsible assholes.
More to the point, he has never to this day uttered a single word of retraction, much less responsibility.
File under hope there’s a hell, so he can rot in it.
pseudonymous in nc
Zeal of a convert, etc.
I think there’s there’s the slightest sliver of a point here: the people getting very rich right now off the loosening legal climate for medical/recreational marijuana are young white people with lots of money and MBAs and pasty libertarian investors, while the people getting locked up for having a teenth on them remain… young black men.
I am really not fucking comfortable with that — not least because who the fuck enters the legal weed market with zero experience of the illegal business? — and before some dudebro sells his weed delivery app for a squillion dollars, I’d like to see some blanket amnesties on non-violent drug offenders.
KG
@Cervantes: so, it’s decriminalized until you keep doing, then it’s criminalized? Nah, see, that’s still criminalization, just with a couple of extra steps.
Calouste
@efgoldman: The Kennedys are a very good advertisement for why you don’t want political dynasties. Not as good as the Bushes, but still pretty good.
John Revolta
@jl: Apples and oranges. Sure, hash oil was/is stronger than pot. But there is pot out there today that is on a completely different level than what I had growing up. This is not a bad thing, necessarily. People today don’t smoke fat joints like we used to; a couple of hits from a pipe do the job nicely. So you’re actually inhaling less smoke and all the harmful nonactive shit that goes with it.
Or so I’m told. That is.
Gin & Tonic
Patrick Kennedy was an entitled douchebag who, having never lived in Rhode Island before going to college here, decided he was owed a seat in the state legislature while still in college, then a few years later was owed a seat in the House of Representatives. Enough old people and party-line Democrats looked at “that nice boy of Teddy’s” and decided to gift him that seat. After accomplishing not much in Congress, and spending much time dealing with his well-documented personal demons, he retired, and promptly left Rhode Island, because nothing at all had ever tied him to this state.
I only regret that he was elected in the other district, and I never got a chance to vote against him.
John Revolta
Oh wow man…………now where’s that edit button again? I had it right here man…………….
Smiling Mortician
@Tree With Water: I can get behind that.
Cervantes
@KG:
And dying from old age is the same as being aborted, “just with a couple of extra steps”?
Anyway, that wasn’t the point.
Baud
If you want to talk about ruining the family name, check this out.
Iowa Old Lady
@efgoldman: What these folks really are is an ad for a good, stiff inheritance tax.
Cervantes
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Well, that depends on where you look!
Villago Delenda Est
“Oh, won’t somebody think of the children??!?”
Just because you’re a dirtbag, Patrick, others are not.
JPL
@John Revolta: In the olden days, Balloon Juice use to have a preview page before posting. The edit key was used less often.
jonas
I’ve been seeing more of this “pot today is a lot stronger than the stuff the hippies smoked” canard lately. Did it ever occur to them that making pot illegal in the first place is what pushed growers to breed stronger strains of the stuff? If you can get busted for having more than X grams or whatever, better make sure that small amount is as strong as possible!
On the other hand, I guess if they’re reduced to making such pathetic arguments, it’s a good sign that they’re on the losing side of the debate. With the GOP so deep in bed with anti-drug evangelicals, this is definitely one issue — among many, like gay marriage — where Democrats can get out ahead and “brand” themselves as more in step with the a progressive majority. Idiots like Kennedy aren’t helping that.
KG
@Cervantes: then, wtf was the point?
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: I didn’t (and don’t) think of Machtley as a dipshit. He was certainly an improvement over Freddy St Germain.
Roger Moore
@KG:
That’s criminalization for poor blacks and decriminalization for rich whites.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic:
You seem … disaffected!
Patrick Kennedy was not only elected to the state legislature, he was re-elected.
Then in ’94 — the year of the Gingrich landslide — he was one of very few Democrats elected to replace a Republican. And not only was he elected, he was re-elected … what was it? Seven times?
You may be right in some sense that he should not have won any of these elections, but win them he did. As someone once said: “The people have spoken — the bastards!”
Steeplejack
Is there a legitimate screening test for “marijuana addiction”?
Cervantes
@Roger Moore:
How do you interpret the following paragraph?
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: And not only was he elected, he was re-elected … what was it? Seven times?
You like to look shit up. How difficult is it for an incumbent Representative to get re-elected if he runs?
No, I was never a member of the Patrick Kennedy fan club. Had he been any one of the other 5,000 PC students in 1988 he would have been as likely to be elected to the RI Assembly as I am to be elected Pope.
Roger Moore
@Cervantes:
You’re leaving out the part where pot users eventually wind up in jail if they keep using. Any bets on how often those people winding up in jail will be minorities? If you want to stop locking people up for using drugs, stop locking them up. Making rules that allow some users to be locked up will just continue the current system. There may be fewer total people in prison for pot use, but you can bet that the ones who are will be disproportionately poor and dark skinned.
The underlying problem with incarceration for possession and use is that it goes against the whole ostensible justification for drugs being illegal. The idea is that we want them to be illegal because they’re dangerous and can mess up people’s lives, but so is prison. We’re effectively saying, “Don’t use drugs because they might mess up your life. If we catch you using them, we’ll throw you in prison and guarantee that your life is messed up.” This is not a sensible policy, even if you dress it up with some attempts to get people to stop using before destroying their lives.
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: You have good taste in Congressmen.
jonas
@Steeplejack:
Any discussion of marijuana being addictive always brings this to mind.
ETA: NSFW
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
Someone that uses the demon weed? You just know they are going to be addicted with the first puff.
/snark, in case you weren’t sure.
I’d like to say that I’m amazed at the lives ruined by the use of pot – not the pot itself but the laws, and the wholesale confiscation of property, etc. The money squandered on stopping it. That of course has worked about as well as Prohibition but lasted longer and caused much more damage.
People are going to do things to get high, especially if they are leading shitty lives with little hope that it may ever get any better. Or if they have enough money to buy their way out of trouble.
What a waste of human energy the last 30-40 yrs has seen because of the WAR ON DRUGS.
And just in case you ask last time I got high was 31 yrs ago last month. Went to a banquet last Sat and the number of people who congratulated me for not drinking when offered was astounding. That doesn’t mean I think others should stop, only be responsible, don’t imbibe and drive, or if it’s hurting your life or those around you, get help.
Cervantes
@Roger Moore:
I think you’re right — but what do you say to the argument that if the threat of eventual incarceration helped to stop him, it can also help stop others?
Anyhow, I’m off. Have a good evening.
uila
John Revolta: Don’t necessarily disagree with your comment, but just want it on record that they’ve been trotting out the same tired line about “oh golly gee the weed is just so much more powerful than it was in the old days” since I came up 30 years ago. While it’s true in the meaningless sense that yes, some reefer is better than others, ultimately it’s just an urban myth designed to scare kids and sell expensive weed. The truth is we’ve all been getting stoned out of our minds for a good long time and more’s the better I say.
So kids, if you’re reading this… keep rolling those fatties and fuck the bullshit!
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Steeplejack:
I’m not sure there’s a current valid mental health screening for any kind of addiction. We desperately need one, because you can’t treat a mental illness you can’t screen for, but for the most part we’re still not treating addiction as a valid mental illness.
scav
@Cervantes: “So what?” Sometimes making something illegal increases the attraction to certain types of personalities. See Prohibition. See those that get an extra sexual charge exactly from it being adulterous or in the bathroom in an airplane. It’s not as though the effect is as single-direction to make the prohibition an obvious Pareto-improving move.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: The important thing is that those seeking pleasure be punished, as an example for others to avoid seeking pleasure.
This is all about America’s fucked up Puritan past. And present.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack:
Yep. You black or brown?
smintheus
@Gin & Tonic: I was still living in RI when that d0uchebag moved there, and everybody knew immediately that he was planning to camp himself in one of our congressional seats. A useless twerp, like so many other Kennedies.
Bill Arnold
@Steeplejack:
That didn’t make any sense to me either, so I read the website
http://learnaboutsam.org/the-issues/legal-reform-3/
and the proposed screening appears to be normal drug screening (probably with a low threshold) is after a determination of marijuana addiction is made. (I presume that there are ways, probably not very reliable, to do that.)
I have limited sympathy for these guys. A desire for altered states of consciousness is common, almost universal, and it is a real shame that this desire is mostly legally satisfied by alcohol in the U.S., IMO. Other safer legal means like religion or meditation, or spinning until dizzy, are much less common.
Perhaps this is from personal small-sample experience; the several deaths in my youth among my friends and acquaintances were all alcohol-related.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Do recall that the Puritans didn’t come here to avoid persecution they came here to have free rein to practice it.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mnemosyne (tablet): The psychiatrists at least are treating addiction as a brain disorder, complete with a medical acknowledgement that relapse is part of the course of many diseases. And thus should not be considered a failure of recovery. There are also some receptor agonists that are quite useful in terms of usage prevention.
As is also common, the general public is behind the curve of the medic science. Those same docs are pretty opposed to the model of the (generally unsuccessful) total abstinence (untrained) “anonymous” peer programs.
NotMax
@Bill Arnold
Sorry to hear about the deaths, but putting a blanket onus on alcohol rather than misuse of alcohol is misguided, IMO.
Safer? Countless more have been (and are yet) killed due to religiosity than via alcohol-related circumstances.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
This.
One always has to pay for “screwing up” their own life. Seeing as how you aren’t really doing that by smoking pot, we are going to do it for you. And if you happen to be a minority we are going to make it worse, because we like you even less. Now if you are rich you can pay all you need to and that’s fine with us. We like that money is power and can buy freedom, political office, record expunging or any of the other things that one needs to be a hypocrite.
/conservative
/religious nuts
Yes I know there is quite a bit of crossover there.
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
Dang. Reading the website I linked above,
They should clarify this, but I can easily see this being implemented as a demand for a urine sample with similar legal force as for a demand that one take a breathalizer test, then a threat of a misdemeanor if one has indulged in the past several weeks.
They seem pretty serious about prohibition.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Methinks they are conflating addiction with habituation.
Bill Arnold
@NotMax:
The religion quip was mostly a joke, sorry.
Re alcohol vs religion,
http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en/
says “In 2012, about 3.3 million net deaths, or 5.9% of all global deaths, were attributable to alcohol consumption.”
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@eemom:
Bobby Junior has never retracted anything, in fact he’s never given up on thimerosal, long after it was removed from all childhood vaccines. Here’s a recent story from Orac’s place.
jayjaybear
The problem with testing for “marijuana impairment” is that, unlike alcohol, you can have THC in your system for MUCH longer than your judgment/motor skills will be impaired by the use. If I’m driving two weeks after I last smoked a doobie (IRL I never use the stuff because it doesn’t really affect me), the THC will still show up but the high is long gone. That seems really offensively punitive just for using, rather than for driving while impaired.
Brachiator
@Bill Arnold: As more states legalize marijuana, I expect more challenges to the absurd suggestion that any level of the drug be considered impairment. This kind of thing doesn’t even rise to the level of junk science.
Steeplejack
@Bill Arnold:
This is circular and makes no sense. (I presume the is in your sentence was a typo.) You screen for marijuana addiction after “a determination of marijuana addiction is made”?
Maybe the problem is with the NBC story from which Cervantes pulled the quote:
So I, too, went to that page of LearnAboutSAM.org. There are only two mentions of screening:
The first one:
That seems to suggest that “mandatory health screening” means testing for any evidence of marijuana use at all.
The second quote (emphasis mine):
No source is cited for the claims about dependency and “marijuana addiction,” but, again, “screening” seems to mean testing for evidence of any use at all—after which the person would be subject to the full menu of “interventions” proposed by SAM (funded and administered by whom?).
I did a Google search of the whole LearnAboutSAM site for the phrase “marijuana addiction,” and all I got were references assuming that it is a proven thing and referring to it as such. Perhaps that is where NBC got the phrasing for their story.
Finally, I checked Wikipedia to see if there was an entry for Smart Approaches to Marijuana. There is a short one. (I half expected to find that it is funded by Big Tobacco to kneecap the competition. Ha, I kid.) It turns out that Kennedy’s co-leaders of SAM are David Frum (!) and Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida, who Rolling Stone called in March 2013 “‘legalization enemy No. 1,’ ahead of the U.S. drug czar and the DEA adminstrator.”
Okay, that’s way more time and energy than I wanted to spend. I’m not an apologist for Big Weed, but this whole thing sounds like complete horseshit—perhaps a rear-guard action to continue the war on drugs by more palatable means.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Hell, it’s not even that. They appear to mean screening for evidence of any use at all. See above.
NotoriousJRT
Don’t need the google. As a Celts’ fan, I know.
jl
@John Revolta: I don’t really think apples and oranges. People want to get high. I’ve never heard of people getting all wine or cigar snob about the fine flavor of weed which makes them smoke something stronger than they want.
People know how to dose themselves. I roomed with some truck drivers once and remember them rolling their spliffs and making their little mini pipe rolls: they wanted just enough to give them a light buzz while they drove, they didn’t want to get stoned. Cigarette smokers sure do know how to dose themselves. An average stronger weed would be a big problem if it were extremely addictive like coke or nicotine, but it’s not.
Though I did read a research report that points up a problem with current screwed up drug laws wrt to medical marijuana, I guess except in CO and WA. Lack of really open and safe and regulated markets in weed is causing problems for medical marijuana. So much of the demand is really disguised recreational demand that the stuff is being bred to emphasize the chemical that makes you high, THC, and not the chemicals that give therapeutic benefit.
So, there is a problem but it is not kids getting tobacco/crack level addicted or getting stoned when they don’t want to. It’s a problem of demands for competing uses of weed when there is not legal or economic mechanism to establish truly separate marektes.
sm*t cl*de
Ha. Might as well screen for phlogiston abuse or Caloric dependency… “marijuana addiction” only exists in the sick little heads of authoritarians. Especially the ones who scent an opportunity for a life-long sinecure.
RaflW
I’ve been in recovery for 12 years and I support Colorado’s experiment in legalization. I think it will require some careful monitoring and, as needed, tweaking of the law. My biggest concern is how to sort out “under the influence” citations/arrests. The tech isn’t there the way it is for booze.
I’m an avid snowboarder and I don’t relish the idea of more stoned skiers (especially out of state tourist skiers/boarders who are dabbling in pot).
But I also dislike that the resorts sell 24 oz cans of beer in the on-mountain lunch spots.
I just want people to use responsibly if they chose to indulge, and preferably to indulge after the lifts close (or at least after about 2:30pm when I’m usually tuckered out).
And, I want easy access for folks to get treatment, aftercare, and cultural support for recovery – from pot, booze, coke, whatever – if they can’t use responsibly.
Kennedy is being an over-zealous, recently-sober primadonna. IMO.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@sm*t cl*de:
Serious question: does gambling addiction exist, or is it just something authoritarians made up?
jl
@Steeplejack: I agree,
I don’t have time to go find all the literature I’ve read on it, but the Wikipedia article below has data that are very similar to what I remember reading when I did projects on economics of addiction. Scroll down to Dependence Potential section and go to reference in Lancet for more information.
Substance dependence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence
I think the data in the Wiki article show booze as having a lot more potential for dependence than dope, I remember them being about equal. But dope is nothing compared to heroine, cocaine and nicotine.
You go as low on scale of dependence/addiction potential as dope, you’ll need to test everyone for alcohol dependence, paint thinner and solvent dependence, nasal inhaler dependence.
Legalize and regulate, or decriminalize it, either way do it keeping in mind that dependence and addiction are primarily medical problems, not crimes or moral failings. Shit, this is supposed to be the twenty first century.
And, it is not as if by now several high income industrial countries have pioneered the way and given the world a roadmap on how to do it. All this BS is inexcusable.
sm*t cl*de
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
I am sufficiently pedantic to insist that “addiction” requires both physical dependency and increasing tolerance (i.e. a need for larger and larger doses to provide the same effect). “Dependency” and “habituation” are not addiction. Call me a definitional originalist.
Anything else is just sloppy metaphor to dramatise and medicalise a personality problem.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I have seen those programs work for specific people, but I still think that the main reason they’re so popular with courts is that they’re free. There’s no way that every suspected addict is going to be sent for a full psychiatric evaluation at state expense when they can give them a list of mandatory free meetings to attend instead.
Omnes Omnibus
@sm*t cl*de:
Wow.
Tree With Water
Seeds & Soil & Water & Sunshine/Mr. Grow Light = Marijuana.
People who think they can, somehow, control that equation are insane. Picture Elliot Ness six or seven years after Prohibition was repealed raiding Jack Dempsey’s joint in NYC.. that’s how preposterous today’s anti-grass zealots appear to me.
Come to think of it, they looked the same way to me forty-some years ago, too. It’s just nowadays so many more people have wised up, and the tide has turned and is now running high. About fucking time, too. Fucking people.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@sm*t cl*de:
So do you feel that way about all mental illnesses, or just addiction? Is clinical depression just a personality problem?
sm*t cl*de
So do you feel that way about all mental illnesses, or just addiction?
You seem to be arguing with something I haven’t said. I do not like the word “addiction” for problem gambling (or other problematic behaviours) because “addiction” has a perfectly good meaning already.
John Revolta
@jl: “Apples and oranges” referred to your comparing hash oil to the weed that was around back in the day. You were asking where the “ditch weed myth” came from. Fact is, stuff like what goes around now just wasn’t available in the 60s or even much of the 70s- it hadn’t been “invented” yet.
More’s the pity……………………..
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@sm*t cl*de:
Problem Gambling Tied to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders
http://psychcentral.com/news/2015/02/16/problem-gambling-linked-to-obsessive-compulsive-behaviors/81310.html
I’m trying to figure out if the issue here is that you’re not up on the current research about addiction and don’t realize that it’s being examined and treated as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder with some success, or if you think OCD is a mere “personality problem” that’s been medicalized.
Tommy
There are a lot of things in this world I don’t understand. The anti-vaccine people might be close to the top of the list. Through science, we’ve learned how to not let our kids get sick. In many instances not die.
I’ve noted here I sometimes got these shots at a doctors office. Had to turn in the paperwork to the school, well before school started each year. But more than a few times, this is the 70s, I got the shot at school. Public school.
Nobody was protesting it. There was no conversation about it. Just a given it was done. My grandfather was a doctor. Pretty progressive. Read all the medical journals and attend the conferences. He basically forbid my parents from letting me play football, because getting hit in the head isn’t good.
Now the NFL is just coming around to this ….
If he had any concern about vaccine he’d have said something. He never did. Pretty sure if my parents said, “well maybe Tommy won’t get them” he would have slapped them upside the head and ask mom and dad if they were stupid.
I try to be polite and not mock people that hold views different then myself, but these anti-vaxxer are shit all stupid.
Omnes Omnibus
@sm*t cl*de: Just off hand, is the brain a part of the body?
jl
Speaking of bad drugs, people need to find out what Steve King is on and avoid it at all costs.
Rep. Steve King: Obama Is Importing Millions Of ‘Undocumented Democrats’
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/steve-king-obama-importing-undocumented-democrats
Tommy
@John Revolta:
Ages ago I was a huge pot smoker. I had a great source where what I bought looked like it was out of High Times. My friends were always amazed by the quality.
A few years ago there was a reality TV show, I think the Discovery Channel, about a medical pot place in CO. I was looking at what they sold and thinking to myself I am not sure I could even handle that.
You throw in legal, the potential for profit, and science and us humans are pretty good at making shit better.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy: Ages ago?
Tommy
@jl: As I have said here many times I live in a rural district. Very blue. Heck I am just a state over from Iowa. I feel like in many ways my district is somewhat similar to King’s. If King tried to run in my district he’d be laughed at and mocked.
Tommy
@Omnes Omnibus: Troll.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy: Hey, man, should I just refrain from talking to you at all? You were willing to respond to my comments earlier today. Now, if I say something, I am a troll in your view?
Tommy
@Tree With Water: The tide has changed almost 24/7. Back when I smoked a ton of pot I was making more than $150,000 a year. Corporate job. Wearing Brooks Brother suits to work.
My friends I smoked with where the same. Corporate jobs. Making a lot of money. Home owners. Driving BMWs. We were not deadbeats. We were productive members of society.
Finally states are starting to realize this.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy:
Dude, you were in advertizing.
ETA: Yeah, I am mocking you. Feel free to respond with lawyer jokes.
Tommy
@Omnes Omnibus: It is the tone of the comments that pisses me off. I have no problem having a conversation with you, even if we don’t agree. But at times, and you know exactly what you are doing, you are trying to get me to argue with you.
Update: And your last comment about me working in advertising is a perfect example.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy: Do you want to make a case that advertising is good for society? I can make a case that lawyers can be.
Tommy
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh I can easily make that case. This site is a case in point. No advertising on it, well it might not exist or if it did you would have to pay a fee to post here.
Same for your local TV station, NPR, PBS, you name it.
The local newspaper you pay .50 cents for or a buck, that doesn’t even cover the cost of the paper, much less the ink nor the salary of the people writing the articles. Ads gets that cost down.
Look I don’t like ads everywhere and I worked in the industry. But if you can’t realize they subsidize a large part of your media then I don’t know what to say.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Gotta say that you are approaching the bullying zone, with this and the interaction last week. Let it go, man.
sm*t cl*de
Mine is, certainly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack (tablet): I hear you. OTOH, I tried to make a joke and Tommy responded.
Oh, fuck it. I’ll drop it. I’ll ignore the particular commenter’s past disturbing comments about Jews, AA culture, and police violence.
jl
@Omnes Omnibus:
” I can make a case that lawyers can be. ”
Emphasis added.
Dude, you better start with something stronger than that.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: Why? I was trying to be accurate.
Tommy
@Omnes Omnibus: I am so sick of comments like this from you. You try to cherry pick one comment here or there, taken out of context of the entire comment thread and call me a racist or this or that.
Before I was just a racist, but now I guess I am a whole lot of other things. Clearly you know very little about me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy: I told Steep that I would drop it, so I will. But the site’s archives are there for anyone to search.
Tommy
Just watched the replay of the Cards/Cincy game on ESPN. Still very early in the season clearly, but my Cards look like they are as good as I thought they would be. I have to admit I feel kind of spoiled my team is as good as they are year after year.
sm*t cl*de
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
The problem (such as it is) is that OCD is not something I give a fuck about, and not something I am interested in commenting about, given its irrelevance to this thread and to my original marijuana-related comment.
I am not doctrinaire on the question of problem / compulsive gambling, and if I come across evidence that it involves physical withdrawal symptoms and habituation requiring progressively larger doses, then I will happily accept the re-definition as “addiction”.
Serious question: does gambling addiction exist, or is it just something authoritarians made up?
Was this really a serious question, or an attempt to start an argument?
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus – @Tommy
A short time-out to count the flowers.
Tommy
@NotMax: Yes. Life is too short to fight. I should have been a better person and just let it go. I didn’t and that was wrong of me.
Fred
I’m no expert…BUT… I don’t think MJ is addictive in the same sense as heroin, cocaine, alcohol or (especially) tobacco. I think it falls more into the habit category.
People throw the word “addiction” around a bit too casually. I’m not addicted to internet but I probably spend more time on it than is good for me. But it is MY LIFE and I should be able to waste it as I see fit.
Tommy
@sm*t cl*de: I am not sure the current research on gambling as an addiction. But I don’t see how it isn’t, even if it might not have the symptoms you noted like:
I’ve know people that have what I’d call a serious problem with gambling. Smart people. Educated. Good jobs. Loving spouse. They gamble away everything.
I recall the guy that taught me poker in college anytime I think of going to play some cards. He said there is a reason there are billion dollar casinos. It is good to be the house.
I know the deck is stacked against me so I won’t take my hard earned money in just to lose it. That people at least as smart as me would gamble away their money makes me think there is an addiction going on.
Tommy
@Fred: I think your use of the word “habit” is very accurate. The research I’ve read says if you do something every day for 30 days it can become a habit. It can be something good for you, like running. Or bad, drinking to excess.
I can of course only speak for myself but I try to form habits and my experience is this is a pretty accurate thing. If I can force myself to do something every day, for 30 to 45 days, I find in the end I don’t have to really even think about it much anymore.
Just a habit at that point.
nastybrutishntall
For me, here in SkiTown, CO, legalization has had the effect of making me use it almost never, no more even taking hits of whatever is being passed around (which in CO is something that has always the cultural norm), since there’s nothing special about it, its available any time I might want it, and I’d rather not feel self-absorbed and self-conscious, which is the bulk of what I find unpleasant about what pot does to me. Occasionally a portion of an edible for sleep. In other words, I think for many locals, taking any illicit thrill out of it = less or no use.
Interrobang
I’m going to stand up for smut clyde here, because as far as I can tell, very few people (if any) get physically dependent on pot, although mental habituation is probably another story.
If liking to do something enough that you seek it out regularly is an “addiction” (which seems to be how these people — smut’s “authoritarians” — are using the term, with the codicil that it involves a substance the person in question doesn’t happen to approve of), then I was “addicted” to pot, in that I still miss smoking it even though I haven’t smoked it in a decade and had no physical withdrawl symptoms from quitting. But then again, by that criterion, I’m also addicted to chocolate, pizza, and horseback riding.
TriassicSands
I live in Washington and voted for legalization, mostly because criminalization has lead to a horrifying amount of injustice. That said, I don’t expect legalization to be an unmitigated success. While I have nothing particularly good to say about Patrick Kennedy, what he says about “Big Marijuana” is worth considering. That doesn’t mean we recriminalize, but we should discuss sensible regulation of the industry before anything like “Big Marijuana” gains significant control. For starters, it might be good to bar tobacco and alcohol corporations from being involved in any aspect of legal marijuana. We’ve all seen the abuse the tobacco companies have inflicted on the world. Advertising is another issue that should be dealt with, and it should probably be illegal. One of the problems with advertising is how easy it is to target kids.
One of my disappointments with the Obama administration has been its failure to change the federal government’s marijuana policy (yes, I know Obama has had to choose his fights). There is no rational reason for marijuana to still be classified as a Schedule I drug. There needs to be extensive scientific research done on marijuana and the DEA should have no role in that at all. THC gets all the press, because it is what causes the high. However, there are many other compounds (cannabinoids) in marijuana that should be isolated and made available for targeted medical use. Recreational users want the psychoactive effect, but chemotherapy patients only need to suppress nausea, while chronic pain sufferers need to control pain without the psychoactive effects that make it illegal to drive and unwise to engage in other activities. Unfortunately, the US has made a mess of the marijuana issue and the catastrophic war on drugs has made it impossible to follow a sensible path to the availability of medical marijuana and the legalization of recreational weed. Just because the Kennedys suck doesn’t mean that everything Patrick says should be completely ignored.
TriassicSands
@sm*t cl*de:
I’m afraid you have your own definition of addiction, but it is not one that many researchers would accept. Physical dependence is not necessary.
One key to identifying addiction is when a person continues to do the substance (opioids) or activity (gambling) despite resulting dangerous or significantly deleterious repercussions. In the case of opioids, addiction and dependence are often confused. A chronic pain patient will develop opioid dependence — that means that abrupt cessation will result in very unpleasant withdrawal. That is not addiction. However, if someone who no longer needs opioids for pain, continues to take them illegally and engages in behavior that threatens his or her well-being, e.g., loss of job, destruction of personal relationships, financial ruin, they can be said to be addicted. Gambling becomes an addiction when a person feels they have to continue gambling despite bankruptcy, divorce, etc. (It doesn’t have to go that far to be addiction. It’s addiction when they are on that path, even if it is in the earliest stages.)
The problem with addiction isn’t the substance or activity, but the person. Some people can take a course of opioid medication after surgery and easily quit when the pain eases. The addict will continue to fill unnecessary prescriptions, steal opioids from other people, and do whatever it takes to get more. When someone who started on legal prescription pills no longer has an available source, he or she may turn to illegal heroin — they are addicted.
mr_gravity
@John Revolta: Sure it was. You just needed to be in the right place at the right time.