Left Hand of Dorkness, from where I am sitting it seems like you are using the silence of marijuana growers as evidence of a lack of investigation.
But you are confusing subjects a bit either way. Alcohol is not strictly a matter of agriculture, but fermentation. The proper analog here is synthesis of illegal drugs, which I assure you is abound with experimentation and research; there is no need to take my word for it, though, if you search yourself you will find many fora dedicated to such investigations. Some discoveries have been found by reading the proper journals and applying tech in underground labs, other discoveries have been made in the labs themselves (as you might expect, they are not very quick to publish their findings!).
As far as the agricultural aspect is concerned, there has been plenty of investigation done by people over the years regarding the cultivation of variously active plants and fungi. Methods, strains, techniques, scaling production, and so on. You don’t find this information sitting out at the laundromat for what are probably obvious reasons. But if you only barely try to look, you’ll find the tip of a very large iceburg thanks to the internet and the first amendment. Even at that, agricultural practice in terms of the plants themselves is not a rapidly changing field, if we exclude genetic engineering which I think is fair to do in this subject. It takes quite a bit of time to domesticate or otherwise change plants by selection. This process will surely not speed up because of illegality.
I think you’re attached too much to the sense of “history” as a driver. You need to focus on memes, trendsetting, communication cascades and dynamics, education…etc, all of which are radically different in scope, maybe not essence, than during most of that 10,000 year period.
There would be a point doing such research if pot was legal in Amsterdam. As it stands, pot is simply tolerated when sold from designated shops. Production and promotion are still illegal. The Dutch are a merchant society who decided in the 70s that enforcing pot as strictly as coke or junk was a waste of enforcement resources, and decided to handle it as best they could under the constraints of the UN conventions they were party to. That’s all. Ask this question when legitimate enterprises are allowed to innovate and promote novel THC products at the groceries. From that point onwards, it’ll be 20 years to pot having a greater presence among under 30s than alcohol.
There would be, if Westerners knew about it. When the Marihuana Tax Act was passed in 1937, the entire conversation on the House floor was
and Harry Anslinger, the head of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930-1967) was able to make statements like these
He made these statements because obviously he thought he could get away with them at the time.
All in all, the point is after pot is legalized under the guise of “better approach for control” and people see that the sky hasn’t fallen, there will be a gradual softening of attitudes after which there be a culturoeconomic expansion of pot. 3 decades down the line, when most parents of then-16 year olds will also have grown up with legal pot, mindshare of pot will be much different.
Not at all. If pot is the dominant drug in five hundred years, I won’t be terribly surprised. But in the footrace of making drugs tasty, alcohol has got a helluva head start.
Il Gyan, I may be putting too much emphasis on historical precedent–but I haven’t seen any basis at all for your statements. What evidence do you have that supports your supposition that pot will become a drug more popular than alcohol?
This seems silly though. If I buy, say, a bagle, and the bagle-shop owner makes a lot of money selling bagles. Some criminal figures this out, and kidnaps the bagle-shop owner’s daughter. What’s the point here?
II Gyan II, as far as Amsterdam is concerned, pot is legal enough to say something useful about trends developing if they were legal. I’ve been in circles where pot and alcohol were equally available, but they rarely exclude each other, often are consumed together, and people prefer one over the other for different reasons, as the drugs have different effects. Under the circumstances, I’m figuring that making pot legal would lead to less consumption - certainly the Dutch consume a lot of alcohol, but their pot consumption is far below average compared to virtually any other Western country.
The only kind possible right now - anecdotal. Most of my friends who consume both, prefer pot. Many who comsume only alcohol, avoid pot because of social conditioning (“alcohol’s legal, pot’s not - there must be a good reason for that, you’ll are delusional”) or practical reasons(“I’m graduating soon, must be clean”, or “I can’t afford to have a pot habit”). Very few are people who don’t mind pot but prefer alcohol.
In terms of time. But they were mostly snail-like locomotion. Legalized pot will get its hopping start in the 21st century.
I don’t think it’s a valid comparison. If you don’t like government policy you can vote for someone else or write to your local your local electoral representative. Lobbying your local drug dealer for higher standards of criminal behaviour is unlikely to be effective.
The difference is in the case of buying pot you are directly donating your money to criminals. On average, a fair bit of your donation will make it back into the hands of organised crime.
But that is a matter of definition. Buy buying enough pot, or by selling it at all, you are a criminal. Inasmuch as it takes a distribution network to cover a larger area, you are more or less organized (wouldn’t be a word I’d choose for the few dealers I have known, but what the hey). Laws, like locks, keep honest people honest, give or take. Without a means for them to provide marijuana, of course you are getting it from criminals. By definition.
I must correct you here. Your facts are completely off. His crime is not in fact driving a little above the speed limit, it is in fact driving A LOT below the speed limit.
Thank you.
Onto the OP
What about the responsibility of the mounties who were invading someone else’s home to stop him from doing something that they or the organization they represent thought he shouldn’t be doing? Why are police officers absolved of personal responsibility when executing the will of the establishment they represent? Government is a protection racket. Taxes are protection money. To claim some inherent moral difference between governments and organized crime is hypocritical. It’s only a matter of entrenchment and size. The higher level mafiosos are very often left alone, even when a big bust is made it’s usually against one of the higher level traffickers who moves a lot of weight, but doesn’t have the same political connections. Everyone in this scenario is responsible, but the people who were shot, and the person who shot them hold the highest responsibility, following orders does not absolve one of personal responsibility.
As far as I am concerned by NOT buying pot for the reasons listed in the OP, then you are in fact supporting terrorists. (This does not apply if you are not buying pot because you don’t smoke pot, or because you’re cheap and only smoke other people’s.)
A terrorist is anyone who uses terror as a tool of manipulation. If the powers that be make drugs illegal, thereby forcing a smuggling culture to grow up around the product, then use propaganda to make you feel fear regarding the purchase of said product then they are in fact the terrorist, and so by capitulating, you are thereby supporting the terrorists.
For instance, the fact that Opium is illegal encourages the production of heroin, a much more dangerous and addictive drug, because heroin is easier to transport, and has a much higher street value. The difference is ridiculous, something like 500 dollars worth of Opium can be synthesized into a million dollars worth of heroin. Now those numbers might not be right, but it’s still a ridiculously small value into a ridiculously large value. So rather than people across the heroin trade route from asia to the middle east into Europe and onto America, are all doing heroin rather than smoking Opium. Whereas the Opium producers, arbitrarily labelled as terrorists by the US government are the Baluchistanis who produce about 90% of the world’s opium, and have produced the lion’s share of the world’s opium since long before the British were using opium to subvert the Chinese government. So in reality the Baluchi’s stock in trade is opium and not terror, whereas the DEAs stock in trade is terror, and not opium. So by not smoking opium because I fear that the producers might be killing someone in an unjust war of aggression against them, I tacitly support that war of aggression. Being that Opium is 40% of Afghanistan’s economy, it would hardly be fair for me to judge their business decisions, because some busy body foreign powers are making it hard for them to support their local economy.
Back to selling pot, pot is often transported from Canada into the United States, and while the production is oftentimes BC hippies, the supply train is oftentimes Canadian Indians, affectionately referred to as “Chugs” by their white counterparts in western Canada due to their propensity for drinking alcohol. In enlightened Canada where everyone is so nice, and kind and liberal and caring about their fellow man, the “Chugs” are arguably more repressed than they are on the US side of the border. The “Chugs” that bring the pot over the border use GPS tracking devices to drop the product off by traversing the mountains over the border into Montana, and to be picked up by the buyer in America based upon the GPS information. These “Chugs” are hardcore gangsters, because crossing the border with large amounts of marijuana can result in a quite cataclysmic life-change, so yes, the marijuana trade can be very dangerous, regardless of where you are. People dealing with quantities of less than a pound are generally in an environment that is less prone to violence, but quantities of over a pound brings about the same risks that trafficking in any illicit substance would bring into one’s life. A friend of mine that was involved with pot trafficking for a couple of minutes told me that the Canadian indians were the most hardcore motherfuckers he ever met, and that someone he knew was in fact killed in a deal gone bad. That’s when he decided it wasn’t for him.
So from my point of view to NOT buy pot for the reasons listed in the OP, is actually the immoral choice. Though commenting upon morality that does not apply to one’s own life is judgemental, and kind of a silly excercise to begin with.
It’s very easy to judge the illicit trade, but most of us are completely unaware of the factors that contribute to the illicit trade.
Yes, which is why I favour de-criminalisation of pot. As I said in a previous post I think the law is more to blame for the current state of affairs than the users. Pot distribution probably is far less connected to violent crime than, say, crack cocaine distribution. However, that does not change the fact that a fair bit of the money spent on pot ends up in the hands of serious criminals. I resent that.
How do you determine the connection to violent crime? If the drugs were legal then the connection to violent crime would diminish significantly for every drug. I think this thread has a pretty naive view of the drug trade in general. The drug war creates gangsters, the longer exists the more systematized it becomes. And there are hippies who will cut your throat if they think you’ll roll over on them for their pot distribution.
Pot and Crack have a significantly different character, as one is a mild sedative with hallucinogenic properties and the other is an addictive poison stimulant, so that character affects the type of people who will ingest it as well as the type of people who will sell it, but I’ve met dealers who have sold both, and it is the threat of police action against both that determines the level of violence. Even though both are illegal, Pot is still MORE socially acceptable than Crack. The violence that we have now is the drug dealers vs the system, whereas if crack were legal, the majority of crack related violence would be the users that rob people when they are jonesing or go crazy while high, rather than mobsters trying to protect their livelihood.
There is also one major difference. If they were both legalized the percentage of pot users might spike because pot isn’t scary without the threat of legal action, whereas crack in and of itself is scary without potential legal action. In my time I’ve been very experimental and have tried numerous hallucinogens, opiates etc… but drugs like Crack and PCP remain something I am not interested in trying.
In the end, they are serious criminals because their livelihood is illegal, and the drug war hardens people who might not become hard without it.
I’d rather choose one nug from this catalog , as opposed to any six pack the world over. Perhaps a
Blueberry x Romulan in a vaporizer At least, that’s what I would choose if MJ was legal.
Heh, alcohol doesn’t have a head start at all. There are countries outside of America for those who didn’t get the memo. If you go to an ashram in India they are likely to give you hashish. Native Americans smoked marijuana out of their peace pipes. I think making a marketing comparison is kinda silly. I know lots of people who smoke pot and don’t drink, lots of people who drink and don’t smoke pot, and lots of people who do both and lots of people who do neither. The reason you see more Molson ads on TV is because pot is illegal, and for no other reason.
We smoked pot out of a vaporizer with lavender mixed in. Mmm, it tasted like candy.
Also, smoking pot and hash out of a hookah with some strawberry shisha, and merlot in the chamber is downright divine. Combining the best of both worlds.
So, by having a good time were you supporting a bunch of killers? Was that also divine? Do you care (about murderers that is, it is clear you care about having a good time)?
If you are worried about people smoking pot, then there seems little reason to relate that issue to murder. Presumably you have some problem with it in its own right. If you are worried about murderers having a high-profit, ready-made field available for them, then get rid of the legislation that enables it to be vastly overpriced compared to the probable legal price in the face of protected competition. If pot induces anyone to murder, it is because the competition in a particular market is not recognized and protected, not because it is pot.
Today my friend picked me up in a BMW, we went to Coney Island to have Nathan’s Hot Dogs. By supporting BMW, we were supporting the Nazis without whom the model of German efficiency that is a BMW wouldn’t have conveyed me to my hot dog. When I got there I ate a hot dog from Nathan’s being that it’s made of pork, presumably they killed a pig. Let’s not forget about the gasoline we consumed to get there. I assume you’re an American living in Saudi Arabia. So you’re from the two largest oil producers in the world. Two countries willing to put down violently any insurrection in order to protect their hegemony over the world’s oil supply. So now they control Iraq, and why do they do that? What are they afraid of? Well that would be Iran. The War on Terror is really a way to dominate Iran without attacking them. Because Iran is the biggest force for Arab empowerment in the middle east, and has extensive ties to Russia, China, and India, three of the biggest dogs on the block.
So today, in a day I didn’t smoke pot I supported the deaths of many more people than I have on days when I did smoke pot, ate only veggies, and didn’t get into a car.
So please, if you’re going to play the half-baked propaganda game, you shouldn’t gloss over the contributions of the rest of the players. Ignoring the hands the other players put on the table doesn’t mean you win the pot.
If the drug war were the ‘oil’ war, those deaths would be called “collateral damage”.
You see, I see very little distinction between governments and the mafia. It’s all organized crime to me. It’s just a matter of where I place myself politically within that spectrum, and my ability to survive within it. If you’d bothered to read my posts before, I’d place myself on the side of the guy that killed the mounties, and not the mounties. I think the mounties going into his house was the crime, not his killing of them. If they hadn’t been trying to force their morality upon him, he would never have killed them or himself.
All products are bought by blood, get used to it, or change the system that tries to stop people from being free.
I don’t support the trade, because I don’t smoke it anymore, but I don’t see the end-consumer as supporting the murderers, any more than I"d say that of anyone who had a drink during Prohibition. It’s the illegality of the trade that creates the underground smuggling network out of which the bloody rivalries arise. But pot smokers still buy from dealers because it’s by far the least risky way of obtaining it.
At least, that’s what I would choose if MJ was legal.
If you go to an ashram in India they are likely to give you hashish. Native Americans smoked marijuana out of their peace pipes. I think making a marketing comparison is kinda silly. I know lots of people who smoke pot and don’t drink, lots of people who drink and don’t smoke pot, and lots of people who do both and lots of people who do neither. The reason you see more Molson ads on TV is because pot is illegal, and for no other reason.