I’d never touch any mushrooms to eat (for even a normal meal), smoke or whatever with a 10 foot pole because perfect identification can on occasion be so hard to do (it appears).
But you ferment some beer/wine, grow some tobbaco/weed/coffee, some opium, and probably some other stuff I’ve never heard about and you can be reasonably sure you’ll be getting what you expect. Doesnt make them “safe” in and of themselves, but you are not nearly as likely IMO to end up with nuclear strength deadly shit or other nasty shit in it like you are with rogue manufactured drugs.
Note, I’ve never done an illegal drug in my life. My opinion is just based upon basic logic and science.
It really annoys me when people claim pot is harmless. An argument can be made that it’s not more dangerous than some legal drugs, fine.
But while evidence on the risks isn’t definitive, there’s enough to suggest we should be cautious.
For example, a recent news article linking it to risk of psychoses:
And no, “I’ve smoked pot and it didn’t have that effect on me” isn’t counter-evidence - obviously it doesn’t have negative effects for everyone, but you can’t tell ahead of time who is will have negative effects on.
I can grow toads, peyote and magic mushrooms in my back yard. They are all used as recreational drugs. So according to you those things are all less dangerous overall than cough syrup, nitrous oxide or oxygen, which are all recreational drugs which require a laboratory and shit tons of hazardous chemicals to make.
This sounds like absolute nonsense to me, so I’m calling cite. This is GD, not IMHO. Can you please present some evidence to back up the claim that things that can be grown in the garden are less harmful than things that require a laboratory to manufacture.
Is there something in the water around here that makes people unable to see clear qualifiers in a simple declarative sentence? Cite yourself. Pot is less hazardous than meth. There you go. :rolleyes:
And I’d like a cite that you can grow peyote AND magic mushrooms AND toads in your backyard–you must live in a really unusual microclimate.
Hang on dude. You claimed that “Things you can grow in your garden by yourself are much less dangerous, overall, than things which require a laboratory and shit tons of hazardous chemicals that can blow up to make them”.
You never said that one thing that you can grow yourself is less dangerous than one thing that is made in alab. you said that overall such things are less dnagerous.
So, do you have evidence for your claim, or are you just making this up. Because it sounds like patent nonsense to me. This is supposed to be GD, not IMHO. In here you’re supposed to be able to back up your claims with evidence.
So can we please see that evidence? The evidence that overall, than things which require a laboratory are more dangerous than things that do not.
WTF? Pretty much any where in the subtropics or tropics anywhere in the world world will allow you to grow peyote AND magic mushrooms AND toads in your backyard. Have you never heard of a greenhouse? The only real requirement is that you don’t get days of subfreezing temperatures with no sun at all.
Or that simple, stupid, mistakes have disasterous results,
and ya can’t tell if there’s MPTP in your MPPP by looking at it. On the other hand if the guy growing your “hydro” screws-up it might, say, get moldy which ya can see.
The problem with talking to young folk is we say “drug are bad.”
This isn’t true. Even bad ones aren’t that bad. We have had 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00’s full of people who take drugs. We have had presidents who smoked marijuana now.
Drugs are not black and white. The same way you can see lots of people who abuse alcohol and still come out on top and some who abuse alcohol and are a complete and utter mess.
I don’t see how the personal use of a joint or a valium in the privacy of your own home is worse than a drink.
But the counter argument is we already have one legal drug, alcohol, why add another one. Yes there are lots of people who can use marijuana and do fine, but there are lots who get messed up on it. Yes, I know them. I know pot heads with so much potential that live to smoke pot and do nothing else. They’re not on any other drugs.
But just like alcohol, some people can use it correctly and some people cannot.
I’ve lost 7 high school friends to drugs, namely heroin and meth. I’m only 35. Yes, some of the “bad drugs” ARE that bad.
ETA: Please note, I don’t think that means they should be illegal; I don’t. But I do think we should be realistic about the toll they can take on your body so people can make informed decisions about whether, when and how to use them.
I don’t think nicotine is as bad as heroin or cocaine, but it’s still not good. It’s way more addicting than alcohol and there’s no real benefit. No, you don’t turn into a raving lunatic from it, but considering all the horrible side effects, I don’t know I’d lump it in as not so bad.
I used to think that a sensible approach would be to legalize the ‘softer’ or “less dangerous” drugs, such as cannabis or extacy, but keeping the dangerous stuff like heroin and cocaine illegal.
Now I’ve come to the realization that it’s better to legalize them all. In fact, it’s more important to legalize the more dangerous drugs. Because people won’t get hooked on, get used by, and die because of marijuana. They will because of heroin. And that’s why it needs to be regulated by the government, not run, supplied and profited on by criminals.
First off, I’m not a dude. Secondly, did you not see the part where I mentioned that meth houses are quite often required to be condemned due to toxic contamination from the chemicals used to cook meth? Pot grown in a house can do nothing worse than maybe encouraging mold growth from excess humidity, but that’s a fault of setting up the grow room and has nothing to do with the plant itself. Likewise, growing opium poppies in a flower bed has no more deleterious consequences than growing any other flower, but if a lab were to dump its waste products onto your vegetable garden I could foresee any number of bad outcomes that the flowers themselves couldn’t possibly cause–even composting the entire flower and seedpod isn’t going to cause an uptake into your tomatoes.
There’s also a handy-dandy list of the likely substances you’ll encounter in a meth lab along with the usual symptoms of exposure. So there you go–pot is nowhere near as dangerous as meth.
You might want to zip up there, homes, your ignorance is showing. If you think you can reliably grow psilocybin mushrooms in your backyard in a greenhouse you’d better have a liver donor handy. You need sterile substrate and a very controlled environment to make sure wild spores don’t infect your operation, giving you completely different mushrooms entirely–ones which are likely to cause you some serious grief. I’ve grown the things and it’s tricky as fuck and I’ve never been completely comfortable with the process or the result, which is why I gave that up long ago.
So you are completely unable to present evidence for your claim that 51% of drugs grown in the garden are safe, and that 51% of drugs comeing from labs are unsafe.
Just as I thought, you are making shit up.
You are arguing my case for me beautifully. A drug grown in the back yard is just as likely to contain lethal contaminants as one produced in a meth lab.
I for one can tell you what doesn’t work. Telling a teenager to never do drugs will make them curious and want to try them. What is better is to make sure they know the dangers of drugs but do not forbid them to do drugs. I was very sick after watching what Meth was made of. It was just a stay awake party drug or so I thought? I think kids should be shown what meth is made out of. Also play the vanity card and show how meth ages a person and what it does to your teeth.
Growing up in the 70’s everything was forbidden and therefore we were all the more curious. I tried the usual drugs but did not care for them. What almost killed me was totally legal. Ethanol alcohol.
Alcohol kills more people in the US then all the illegal drugs combined. Half the people that are incarcerated are there for getting drunk and doing something dumb. Prohibition did not work. Tobacco is bad news also.
I don’t see why the most dangerous drugs are legal and the least are illegal?
The concept of “hard” drugs or the idea that an appreciable fraction of drug-induced harm is due to “impurities” is just so much bullshit, which has been allowed to grow because of the terrible state of knowledge about addiction and substances in this country.
On one side, you have the moralists and the racists and the police state fetishists, acting through DARE to tell kids that anyone who has so much as touched a beer at age 16 is going to become a homeless degenerate murderer. Because this is obvious nonsense, you then have a ready-made audience that refuses to believe ANYTHING bad about intoxicating substances, and thinks that we should all expand our minds with ecstasy and that marijuana is “only psychologically addictive” and all that made-up crap.
Both sides are idiots, and until we rationalize the laws about drugs, we will never get people to understand what addiction is all about. Some drugs aren’t worse than others; some people are less able to use drugs than others. For the addict, wine at a wedding is worse than heroin would be for a non-addict. The idea that some people are not able to do what other people do, solely because of genetic luck, and that you can’t overcome your genetic hand by willpower or hard work or the fact that your parents are the right race or the right income tax bracket, is really scary to a lot of people, so the science on addiction is not very popular with the general public.
In Europe cannabis is often smoked as hashish rather than as marijuana. This usually means mixing the joint by adding tobacco. And tobacco is addictive. So you could argue that, in Europe, smoking pot is a gateway drug into a more dangerous narcotic (in fact, tobacco probably kills more people than all other drugs put together).
My kids, now in their mid 20’s have thanked my for my honest ‘drug talk’ that I had with them. I did use the “From my experience” reference to give them my take on what would do the least harm, and gave them personal examples of people they have known or heard of. It was basically a list like, pot, OK. Coke is addictive, and tough to stop with regular usage(with personal examples). Crack is bad and easily addicted, even harder to stop(with personal examples). Speed, meth, any kind of amphetamine, bad stuff and stay away from(wpe). I told them when I was young and experimenting, there were things I promised myself to stay away from, especially heroin and opium(wpe). I kept my promise. This conversation went on with about every illegal substance covered, including alchohol. I believe that most of the chemically created or altered drugs are bad juju when compared to organic ones. Of course there are Angel Trumpets that will kill you quick along with a list of other organic things that can kill you quick. Any chemical drug you buy on the street is a crap shoot, with no control or regulation to ensure what you are getting. That’s why I believe that manufactured drugs are more dangerous than known organics. Yeh, I know you can get “laced” pot…blah blah.
It worked for me. I have raised 3 responsible adults, who don’t use recreational drugs, and drink in moderation and have jobs.
In my opinion, yes, it works. Talk honestly with your kids.