Thanks for this perspective. We each make choices which have consequences. Our choices are often made within the consequences of someone elses choices.
Intent and motivation do matter.
My thread might be “Paying taxes funds terrorists and murderers.”
How responsible are we?
Human beings of various cultures have been using intoxicants for, AFAIK, all of recorded history. Find one ethnogenic plant, fungus, or toad, and you’ll find at least one culture and probably several that used it, or still uses it today.
Read up on Alcohol-Acetaminophen Syndrome to find out how Tylenol can rot your liver. But you don’t even need alcohol to kill yourself with acetaminophin.
There has never been a recorded death from marijuana toxicity. The issue has been discussed on this board many times. Here is one of the most recent discussions. A search will bring you many more.
Marijuana won’t kill you, no matter how much you smoke. If you take too much Tylenol, it will kill you. Therefore, I conclude that Tylenol is more dangerous that marijuana.
Kennedy had mob connections. Whether or not you believe that he asked them to kill Castro or they killed Kennedy or they won the election for Kennedy at Frank Sinatra’s request, it was certainly possible for them to get the President’s attention.
Which nullifies the concept the the end of Prohibition nixed the possibility for them to have political influence.
I don’t recall saying this wasn’t true. By Western Civilization, I suppose I meant “European Christendom and its offshoots”. Lotsa alcohol in the tradition there. Not so much the other stuff.
Prohibition of alcohol, just to use one example, raises the question of what a church does about Communion, which would be a widespread issue. Alcohol has been a well-known and widely-used social lubricant in this culture for centuries, and its prohibition led many to have to change their lifestyles, or not change them but have to do things on the sly all of a sudden. Hence the Prohibition Amendment was repealed more or less by the weight of the culture against the idea.
The illegality of pot has no such effect on mainstream society. Despite the efforts and habits of many born in the last 60 years, pot remains illegal. There’s no weight of historical cultural practice in its favor, at least not anywhere near the weight that alcohol has.
It depends on how you classifiy “dangerous”. You are absolutely correct about THC not being able to reach toxic levels in humans by any inhalation method. However, there are chronic health issues with the accompanying chemicals, as with tobacco, that with heavy use could lead to emphysema or cancers of the mouth, esophagus, or lung.
It is certainly less harmful, and much, much less likely to cause the toxic effects and atavistic behaviors associated with America’s favorite legal drug of choice, alcohol. And worse, from a Constitutional standpoint, the prohibition of marijuana was the spearhead for a movement to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3) as a method of expanding the Federal government’s intrusion into matters that were traditionally the purview of the state and local governments, often to the detriment of individual rights and choices. (Whether we should dispense with often corrupt and largely irrelevent state governments is another issue entirely.)
Really, the argument against marijuana legalization is just a reflex from the days when somebody to the claims outlined in “Reefer Madness!” seriously. These days, the idea that it is a “gateway drug” is a rather disingenuous attempt to apply a suppressed correlative in terms of legal drug use. In a society where people boast of getting drunk and puking their guts out, or get “the jitters” from not having their morning triple latte espresso caffine injection, to claim that marijuana is somehow more harmful is absolute bolsh.
Stranger
What’s disingenuous about this argument is that this is not related to cannabis per se, but with the act of smoking. All a stoner wants is to ingest THC and maybe a couple other cannabinoids that modulate the intoxication. Smoking is a crude, primitive historical leftover that hasn’t been replaced because there is no commercial incentive to develop asafer ingestion methods (weed’s illegal, tobacco’s reviled). However, there are some openings: Sativex and related products for weed, and NicStic for nicotine. IF pot’s legalized or IF a govt. gives assurance that it will be, then quickly (within a couple of years) you’ll have safe ingestion methods.
I don’t recall suggesting you did. 
My emphasis. Interesting interpretation of “culture,” I think. I don’t intend to argue the point, but it suffices to say that the continuation of a practice despite its illegality might indicate what is not necessarily commonly recognized. Marijuana has a long history. Of particular interest is this, “2727 B.C. First recorded use of cannabis as medicine in Chinese pharmacopoeia. In every part of the world humankind has used cannabis for a wide variety of health problems.” And then, “430 B.C. Herodotus reports on both ritual and recreation use of Cannabis by the Scythians. (Herodotus The Histories 430 B.C. trans. G. Rawlinson).” And again, “900 - 1000 Scholars debate the pros and cons of eating hashish. Use spreads throughout Arabia.” History is where you find it.
But the point I was trying to make was a broad-based intoxication one. I know plenty of people who don’t drink. In general, humans have been using intoxicants for a long, long time. What those are varies somewhat, especially given the conditions under which some plants may grow. There is always the nifty suggestion that George Washington grew marijuana for not just its fibers, though whether this is true is not, as far as I know, settled.
Nearly 50% of people try marijuana before the age of 18. The last two U.S. presidents have used it. The 2000 presidential election was a race between two former pot smokers. Since drug tests have become ubiquitous, so too have innumerable companies selling claimed methods to beat them. If these things are not mainstream, I’m not sure what is.
Marijuana also has a history in Western medicine beyond what you’d think. It was prescribed to Queen Victoria, and I have a reprint of the first Merck Manual from 1899 that lists cannabis as an effective medicine for a number of maladies.
It’s still Guilt By Association in my eyes. Not all pot growers or dealers kill people. In fact, the vast, vast minority of pot growers or dealers kill people. I’d be willing to wager money that the statistics aren’t all that different from the average population.
That’s the problem with a lot of the logic surrounding drugs: If a criminal is in any way connected to a drug, then the drug gets blamed for the criminality. It’s a classic case of mistaking correlation and causation.
It’s true that organized crime was present even in the days prior to Prohibition. What Prohibition did was allow criminal organizations to attain power on a scale that was unheard of. Demand for alcohol was high and the profits to be made were simply astronomical. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that organized crime would disappear once drugs are legalized. I do think they would become a shadow of their former selves.
Marc
The phenomena you mention here spring more or less from nowhere about 40 years ago. Before that, I don’t see marijuana holding the same lofty place in society, that alcohol has held for millennia: that is, something the average joe non-enthusiast of the chemical is likely to encounter in the course of everyday affairs.
Brides and grooms across the nation are discussing what sort of drink will be available at the open bar: if hard liquor will be pay-only and wine will be free, for example. Even if pot were legal right now, I don’t think most would be discussing whether Maui Wowie would carry an extra charge, or whether the hashish steward’s station should be placed near the cake table or the band.
A roomful of acquaintances of all ages will drink someone’s health, and have been for centuries across the globe. Only in very small circles will you find a roomful of people dragging on roaches to celebrate something similar, and I don’t think legalization would change that.
“Drink this wine, for it is my blood”. I don’t think the most earnest bible archaeologist is going to come upon a deleted “Smoke this reef, for it is my hair, man”.
That’s the kind of mainstream I’m talking about. Marijuana simply doesn’t hold a Zippo, much less a candle, to alcohol in that regard, and probably never will. I think the only hope of pot attaining legalization would be as a medicine, and even then, proponents will probably still have to accept the problem of “self-medication” being looked upon as some sort of offense.
As long as there are vices of any stripe, the Mob will exploit them.
The end of Prohibition did not hurt the Mob or diminish them, except for perhaps extremely temporarily. They controlled Las Vegas in the 50’s and 60’s, long after Prohibition ended in the 30’s.
Fortunately for the Mob drugs were still illegal and profitable. I agree that organized crime will always exist in one for or another. They’ll always be able to make money with protection rackets, hijacking, prostitution and other ventures but the amount of money they can make via the drug trade is staggering. The cocaine trade during the 1980’s and 90’s were measured in the billions. Pablo Escobar may still have been a viscious bastard if coke were legal but he wouldn’t have had nearly as much power.
I certainly don’t believe we’d be living in a paradise as a result of legalization of drugs. I do think it’d be a serious blow to organized crime if the profits from the illegal drug trade were eliminated and we’d all be a bit safer. You don’t see Bud and Coors murdering one another to shill their stuff on street corners, do you?
Marc
And for forty years, it has remained consistently popular with a very sizable minority of the American population, with absolutely no signs of going away. In national polls, the percentage of people who believe it should be at least decriminalized is higher than it’s been at any point since they’ve been keeping track.
Maybe not. That the percentage of people who like pot happens to be smaller than that of alcohol does not mean that organized crime doesn’t make a tidy profit from it. It also doesn’t mean that the dim view of marijuana smokers held by society in general won’t change, especially when the public keeps hearing about pot smoking presidents and NBA stars.
IF it is legalized, pot will replace alcohol as the drug of choice (certainly for 13-30 age group) within 20-25 years.
I think you grossly underestimate the collective trio of revisionism, normalization and rationalisation.
Highly unlikely, in my opinion: alcohol simply has too many cultural attachments to it for this to happen. And during my potsmoking days, the best Oregon greenbud I ever had didn’t hold a candle, flavorwise, to the microbrew I could pick up for seven bucks a sixpack at the local grocery store.
Daniel
Cultural attachements which are maintained and propagated because of the social/legal acceptance and ubiquity of alcohol.
After a few years of legalization, watch out for flavored THC inhalers, candy, liquids, smokeable extracts…etc.
Cultural attachments which are maintained because they’re about ten thousand years old. I expect the flavored THC inhalers etc. to be as far along here in twenty-five years as they are now in Amsterdam; can you do a little research and tell me whether pot is as popular as, say, wine in that fair city?
Or can you look back at our history and tell me whether, prior to the outlawing of marijuana, there were more people who smoked pot than drank beer?
I think your claim is bizarre. Wine has got literally millennia of history behind it, and is tied into many cultural traditions. People devote their lives to making new varietals; the matching of wine to food is an artform so respected that a restaurant’s sommelier is a mark of sophistication. Several major religions use wine in their ceremonies. People will pay thousands of dollars for a single bottle of vintage wine.
And that’s just one form of alcohol. Look at India pale ales, at single-malt scotch, at lambic, at the myriad other forms of alcohol perfected over the history of agriculture.
And you think marijuana will replace these forms inside of three decades?
What possible support for this argument can you marshall?
Daniel