marijuana, what is the big deal....

I don’t get why we waste so much money, time and resources to try to keep marijuana in the illegal column.

Our prison systems are overflowing with people who are there for dealing it or using it.

Now I am going to be real truthful. I love the stuff. Don’t smoke it like I use to but pick it up now like I would a big serving of crème burlee, every now and then.

I would whole rather get stoned than go out and get drunk. Besides the repercussions the next morning are downright non-existent with marijuana.

My brother has a real problem with it because he says it is illegal. Well yea it is but so is speeding and he does that all of the time on top of numerous other minor law breaking…

Yea I know that having a certain amount of it is a felony and speeding is a traffic violation…

It sure as hell cannot be any worse than liquor and at least if you are going to smoke something your getting more than a major addition to nicotine. I mean for the love of god, I think marijuana is cheaper now than cigarettes if I was going to placed a good bet….lol

I am sure there will be those on the board that think it is just ghastly and then those of us who are like big deal get over it.

Prohibition did not work in the 20’s and it looks like keeping this illegal is a bit of an up hill battle too.

I wonder if it will become legal in this country in lets say the next 20 years since so many other countries seem to be relaxing their laws if not just not enforcing them?

I am all for it. Tax the hell out of it. It has more than one use to it other than sitting around making those doretos taste better…

Besides it is like most anything else that is illegal. If you really want it you can get it…

A friend of mine sent me this article. Now I know you are suppose to post links instead of the whole thing but it was mailed out and I do not have a link (if this is a violation of the rules please except my apology).

A HISTORY…

[Text of article replaced with link. – MEB]
[Advice on preparing marijuana deleted. – MEB]
:smiley:

>> if this is a violation of the rules please except my apology).

I do not “except” your apology but I accept the premise that weed is not as bad as they make it out to be.

sorry for the typo…lol

and no i am not stoned, I wish…:slight_smile:

I don’t smoke and I drink maybe four beers a month.

If I recall correctly, Carter was for the decrimalization (or was it legalization?) of marijuana until drug advisor (Borne, was it?) was caught up in some cocaine scandal. I don’t think it’s as bad as Nixon made it out to be. I don’t think it’s any worse than cigarettes or alcohol.

Legal or not, though, I still wouldn’t touch the stuff.

“I don’t get why we waste so much money, time and resources to try to keep marijuana in the illegal column.”

Because if marijuana was legal, the tobacco companies would face stiff competition? :wink:

Didn’t you guys see Reefer Madness, truly one of the most accurate documentaries made in the past 100 years, worthy of Michael Moore’s standards?!? Marijuana is the WORST DRUG IN THE WORLD!!! It turns good little church-going god-fearing homework-completing boys into MINDLESS MONSTROUS RAPIST BABYKILLING THUGS!!!

::sigh::

Anyway… apparently, a recent study has indicated that marijuana’s apparent brain damage effects are erroneous, meaning that the biggest health problem with the drug lies in the fact that it’s still very carcinogenic (ever see the leftover resin on the inside of your pipe? That’s what gets in your lungs, buckaroo).

Still a lot less damaging that alcohol, in my opinion. Frankly, I’d suggest that if all those wife-beating drunks (not saying that all drunks are wife-beaters) were to toke up a little instead of drinking themselves into oblivion, they’d be too relaxed to actually go scream at or hit anyone.

I don’t think it’s much of a big deal. Let people do what they want as long as they’re not harming anything/anyone else.

A question though, is the history of cannabis in the OP from a quotable (and non-referenced) source or did you write that yourself? (I saw the beginning quotations and wondered…)

Good point. We should outlaw whole milk while we’re at it.

Whole milk gets into your lungs? I don’t think you’re drinking it right…

Who do you think would be first in line to start manufacturing packs of MJ cigs? They have the whole infrastructure and distribution system in place. Instead of only trucks full of brown leaves pulling up to the factory, there’d be trucks full of brown leaves and trucks full of green leaves. There’s no reason to think they would not jump into this the minute it was legal.

I really the the tobacco companies should be pushing for MJ legalization. It would open their market up wider and be more profitable for them.

If you watch the documentary “Grass,” you’ll see just how ridiculous the War on Some Drugs can be. If you’re a smoker, you’ll be surprised at how fast your blood reaches the boiling point.

For example, in looking for reasons to increase marijuana penalties, Nixon commissioned a marijuana study. To his surprise, the study came back with the conclusion that pot was mostly harmless and that it should be decriminalized. Nixon’s response? Ignore the study and increase the penalties anyway, of course!

When pot smokers say they’re sick of getting thrown in jail, the government invariably responds with assurances that they’re only going after dealers and that users rarely go to jail.

It makes a nice soundbite until you realize exactly how little you need to do to be considered a dealer. There’s no state in the country in which you actually have to get caught selling pot to be considered a dealer. Not a damn one. It’s all based on weight, and rather unfairly, I might add.

In most states, the line between user and dealer is drawn at 30 grams. Assuming low quality and a heavy smoker, this much pot could be gone in three days. Hell, I’ve known people who would buy upwards of 100 grams at a time for personal use, just because they didn’t like dealing with the criminal element and liked the bulk prices. This makes them automatically dealers, no matter what their intentions are.

And then, of course, theres the wonderful drug testing. See, it’s possible to get drunk all you want, totally screw up everything about your job, and still keep it. If, however, the employee of the month tests positive for THC, it’s bye-bye, buddy. No, your on-the-job performance is irrelevant. We saw some metabolites of a drug that doesn’t kill brain cells, give you hangovers, or make you stumble over your own feet, so we naturally decided that you were unfit for the job. Yeah, we know that you didn’t smoke it on the job. Doesn’t matter.

Next week, we’ll be putting sensors on your personal vehicles. Any employee caught breaking the speed limit, even on his personal time, will be immediately terminated. Have a nice day.

The article was sent to me by a friend but I have read it before and cannot remember where… It was in the New Yorker many moons ago I think but dont quote me please…

It was not in high-times magazine though…lol

I do not have a link or who wrote it I am sorry. :smack: :rolleyes:

I can see it now, in 10-20 years, when Nextel bails out.

The “NASCAR Acapulco Gold Cup”

It’s either a big ole’ chunk or the whole darn thing, but it’s a huge block of copyright violation and unatributed source material.

I found it here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rastareasonings/message/894?source=1

It’s either a big ole’ chunk or the whole darn thing, but it’s a huge block of copyright violation and unatributed source material.

I found it here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rastareasonings/message/894?source=1

Most people here are correct.

Pot is harmless. It won’t send you to the hospital, you won’t overdose on it, it doesnt give you nasty headaches the next morning, and everything the government says about it is bullshit.

That being said, if marijuana was legalized like it should be, it would have tons of more uses than just smoking it. You can make clothes and jewlery. Farmers could harvest it and make millions off of high demand. You can make anything with hemp. And by anything I mean something like oil. (hemp oil) you know, that stuff which caused a big war in the middle east because we want some. The solution could be as easy as making marijuana legal and processing our own oil from it.

There are so many positive uses for legalizing marijuana. Keep a 21 year old age limit on it (kind of like alcohol) and the government can tax it. And besides spending billions of dollars fighting pot smokers, they will make billions of dollars more by taxing.

Why the hell isn’t this country doing this?

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by SPOOFE
Anyway… apparently, a recent study has indicated that marijuana’s apparent brain damage effects are erroneous, meaning that the biggest health problem with the drug lies in the fact that it’s still very carcinogenic (ever see the leftover resin on the inside of your pipe? That’s what gets in your lungs, buckaroo). *

Very carcinogenic? A google search on mj and cancer yields lots of opinions on this subject and the very strongest wording linking mj to cancer regards data being “highly suggestive” of a link between cancer and mj smoking (this, posted on the NORML site). And the ingredients of concern are not the psychoactive ingredients.

Even though this has been a subject of intense scrutiny for decades, there remains virtually no case where a person’s cancer was thought to be directly attributable to the smoking of mj.

http://www.ukcia.org/research/cancer2.htm

Granted, the above is a biased cite and appears to be somewhat old, but google the topic yourself to see if there are any credible claims that mj smoking is known to cause cancer. (Interestingly, you’ll find studies that indicate that mj reduces the size of cancer tumors.)

You may note that I’ve referred here to mj “smoking”. What is frequently lost in this is that if the legal prohibitions against mj were removed, many mj users would opt to ingest mj instead of smoke it. This would essentially make the “cancer” argument against mj moot.

Myself, I frequently take 1 hit on a hitter after work, and I typically take about 3-8 hits over the course of a weekend. I’m 44 and have followed this pattern for the better part of 26 years (a couple of year-long stints abstaining, more frequent use when I was younger). I realize that smoking anything would seem to logically carry some risks, but I have no bronchitis and no cancer (knock on wood).

Sprial Out3, probably my biggest problem with the hemp movement is dishonesty. Now, I’m not saying that hemp advocates are deliberately dishonest, but they do tend to be misinformed. Hemp does have a lot of uses. That much is true. The only problem is that for every use hemp has, some other material can do it cheaper better. Of course, if we’d spent the last 70 years developing hemp processing tools, who knows where we’d be, but right now hemp is pretty much a niche market. See Cecil’s take on the subject.

[aside]Three Louisiana residents in one thread? That’s gotta be a SDMB record or something. Smokeout, anyone? :smiley: [/aside]

OK, this is fairly accurate, but a bit of a whitewash. Hemp is not immune to deterioration. The reason cotton was not used is because cotton was very expensive and hard to grow. Hemp also had better 'weave" if you will. However, Hemp is a royal pain to sew. Most seamsters who work with it in these modern times would honestly prefer sewing leather.

Innaccurate but with a vague grain of truth. Vegetable Oil was considered a fuel at these times, but the ease of drilling for oil and the need for food crops as, well, food pretty much doomed the idea of running cars of plant oils. This idea was stillborn, had history been rewritten with cars running on vegetable oils, the lack of fuel would have cramped the early development of the car.

All of this of course makes the presumption that Hemp was a threat to these companies. It was not.

Ford’s experiments in the 1930’s were along the same lines of many others of the time. The idle rich of this era almost universally had some interest in agronomy. Keep in mind that Ford actively advertised against a real competitor, the Stanley Steamer, and the lieklyhood of cars changing over to biomass was a pipe dream.

THis is true, but has nothing to do with Hemp.

Nonsense. Nylon had a versatility that Hemp could only dream of. Most Nylon production went to nylon stockings. For Hemp, the vast majority usage was heavy-duty clothes and rope. Dupont was into making Nylon rope when they had such demand for nylons stockings taking up their supplies.

All of this assumes that the world would have jumped into depending on its fuel supplies coming from a plant that wrecks the equipment used to harvest it? I don’t think so.

There is no magical world with hemp. Not that MJ should be outlawed, but the MJ laws did not prefvent some kind of eco-utopia.

The master speaks

http://www.tnclearinghouse.com/factsheets/PotFacts.htm

And…