Why are only illegal drugs considered to be “Gateway Drugs?”
Most drug users (if not all), before they got involved with arbitrarily illegal drugs, were users of the highly addictive and physically and socially destructive drug – alcohol.
And, most of them were also users of the highly addictive and physically and environmentally destructive drug – tobacco.
Most all of them also used the highly addictive drug – caffeine.
Oh dougie - your paranoia is showing. What benefit would there be for me in that? You think I’m going to start internet drug sales? You been taking LSD and not telling us? Cause you seem to be hallucinating!
I don’t care what you believe about drugs, just stop trying to impose your beliefs (instead of facts) on us.
Oh that’s cute, sincerely. Generally I’d report ad-hominum attacks, but I’m truly amused!
I love it when people can post to threads like this and be rational. And even think for themselves, uninfluenced by “the drug subculture” or the “anti-drug hystericals.”
I remember when I was a kid, and though I was scared shitless, someone finally convinced me to try marijuana. I tried it again, cause none of the things the “antis” told me came true! And I didn’t get addicted (cause it’s not addicting, unlike cigarettes, which I was hooked on).
Years later, the chances came to try heroin, and I was tempted, because (and this is a biggie): Well, they lied to me about marijuana, so they’re probably lying about heroin, too!
Luckily, I was able to observe some long term heroin users, and decided I didn’t want to end up that way. I started making my own decisions, first observing casual users, then long time users, heavy users and everything else. I made my decisions based on first-hand evidence.
I don’t use drugs now, not even tobacco and alcohol, for the same reasons: observation. But that’s me, for my reasons.
I have kids, and I tell them the truth about drugs, and expose the lies of the antis, because I want them to survive, and if they listen to the antis, I think they are more likely to use drugs. Truth works better than fear.
The use of drugs is dependent upon a lot of things, personality included. Some people can use drugs responsibly and intelligently, some can’t.
Casual use of marijuana isn’t harmful. Overuse of marijuana (like alcohol) is. The same laws that apply to one should apply to the other, and I think that would be more successful – also, marijuana use wouldn’t be associated with “other drugs” so one would not necessarily lead to the other.
I have used pot, LSD, mushrooms, peyote, and speed, all long ago, and in moderation. There are two of those that after the first use I decided I’d never use again: speed and peyote. I no longer need to use the others, but I consider them instrumental in my growth and learning, and I would not be upset if my children reported they had tried them.
For the record, I counsel my children that it is not necessary for them to use these drugs, and I teach them how to meditate to get high instead. So far, so good.
I think that LSD and mushrooms could be approved for recreational use with appropriate controls, i.e., legalized, but available after… licensing? in controlled situations? But I know it ain’t gonna happen. The government would rather it remain available illegally so more people could abuse it. Legalizing it and monitoring it would dry up the illegal trade, and better control the misuse. I think that is a better way to save lives from going down the road to ruin.
Bringing this sort of back on topic, this Slate article describes the severe decline in LSD use recorded over the last couple of years, apparently stemming from a DEA bust that netted two guys responsible for 95% of the LSD production in the US. They were caught with enough acid to supply from 400 million to 2 billion doses. Yowza. :eek:
Thereby driving potential users to other, more available, and often more destructive drugs. Demonstrating the lopsided perspective of our nation’s efforts to “help” people.
Here in Hawaii, the ease of manufacture and relative availability of “ice” (crystal methamphetimine) has cause a rise in burgularies, increased traffic deaths/injuries/accidents due to drug use, increases in drug-related violent crime, etc. It is marketed even in f’ing elementary schools!
Fortunately there has been a groundswell of community support for the eradication of this menace, and this has made a dent, but not enough, not yet.
And to think that a few posts agodougie_monty was accusing me…
Here where I live, it’s a fact that every single psychotic axe murderer ever known has in fact been a life long user of oxygen. It’s scary man, I tell you it’s fucking scary. I wouldn’t even start with that stuff if I were you.
As to the OP, hasn’t the question been answered? A pound of LSD will kill you.
Acid doesn’t kill people, people kill people. You can have mine when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Otherwise, I see us going down a slippery slope. Next thing you know, they’ll ban oxygen.
Art Linkletter’s daughter very likely did not jump out a window on LSD. I read the article on www.snopes.com about her (they have a search engine) and it’s quite likely Art stretched the truth–which is unfortunate, given his general reputation, especially as I have gleaned it from books he has written (Confessions of a Happy Man, The Secret World of Kids, People Are Funny, etc.)
And I stand by the Dragnet quote I used, concerning the potency of a kilogram of LSD.
Having tripped pretty hard myself, I can easily see how the experience could turn very unpleasant. LSD is not something I would take lightly, and certainly a drug I would never do by myself. Mushrooms gave me a nice little color show, but acid, ho-lee crap, that stuff made the floor melt, the walls breath, the floor breath, the walls melt; it made my CDs jump out of their cases and seem to dance in the air; it made the sun into a burning Alien Mothership in the sky; it turned a plate of spaghetti into some infinite tunnel of molten red weirdness; there was this wild computer-vision graphics stuff flying by in my peripheral vision; I can’t even describe what I saw in the mirror…and after what seemed like forever, when I was tired and really quite ready for it all to stop, uh-uh, it just kept going and going and going. I think I slept about twenty hours straight after my first hit of acid, and woke up feeling like someone had taken a Hoover to my brain; not a bad sensation really, like the pipes had all been blown out or something. The second time was equally entertaining and exhausting, and I just never had the desire to do it again. I never had a bad trip, nor did I ever see one, but I’m told, and I have no reason at all to doubt, that a bad trip would be really, really bad. I don’t ever want one.
Only the drugs prescribed (in mass quantities) by your doctor are acceptable. If it comes in a little brownish bottle from the pharmacy, it’s perfectly OK, socially and morally. If you don’t take massive quantities of prescription medicine, you should see your doctor immediately.
Keith Moon, the Who’s drummer, drank himself to death; Edward R. Murrow, the host of Person to Person in the 50s and early 60s, died from lung cancer. (So did William Talman and Nat King Cole, for that matter.)
As for the others, even there I wasn’t saying they all died from LSD. I was going to add the name of Freddie Mercury, of Queen; but I don’t even know that he died from a drug overdose…
Oh, thank you SO much. Do you contract yourself out as a typo man? I’m sure there’s some misspellings out there in other posts of mine that could use your eagle-eyed skills. :rolleyes:
I’m sorry for your loss, but you are WAY out of line to presume that I was in any way belittling your personal tragedy by simply stating that one episode of Dragnet was hilariously bad, especially since I could not have possibly known from your post that this man died as a result of his abusing LSD. If you say in another thread that Mommie Dearest was over-the-top funny, should I reply “my brother and I were abused, can I get your address so I can tell my brother how funny you thought it was, how dare you”? Shame on you.
And FYI it was hilariously bad. That episode was utterly and completely over the top and so absurd that to see it is to laugh. The episode in question was aimed squarely at the level of School Film Scare-tactic nonsense. Blueboy sucking on a paintbrush and painting his face half blue / half yellow and sticking his head in the mud like an ostrich and mumbling “blue…red…blue…my hair’s green and I’m a tree!!” and proceeding to eat bark off a tree, indeed. Quote 1965 newspaper articles and classroom discussions and one incident from a 1950’s news program of someone OD’ing on “goofballs” (whatever that is) at me all you want, but that episode in NO WAY depicted reality.
Kudos to your parents for steering you clear of drugs, but you are far, far away from fact when you continue to use Dragnet and Classroom Propaganda as your sources.
D_M, you have a perfect right to your opinion(s). As does everyone else here.
However, in the interest of “spelling it out” as you put it:
(IMHO), snippy corrections of other posters, particularly when it advances no cause beyond your own pedantry, seems a bit childish. And as I am a very childish person, here is a bit of your own back to you:
The spelling, “for your information”, is “ways”.
The expression, “for your information”, is “vent my spleen”.
Venting one’s bladder is, well, something else entirely. And frankly, I don’t see what South Park has to do with either one. No need to explain - I will live on in my ignorance.
A sentence, “for your information”, always starts with a capitol letter.
The spelling, “for your information”, is “brother”.
Snake Sprit’s comment (at least the one that refered to your earlier post as illustrative of his point), “for your information”, does not qualify as “rhetoric”. An allusion or even a sort of corollary would be a better term. Therefore claiming to not understand “rhetoric” as a response to SP’s post is nearly semantically null.
There is nothing wrong with expressing a vigorous opinion.
But it does not enhance one’s credibiilty to to indulge in mean-spirited nitpicking and dubious vocabulary - unless you’re very good at it.
(I choose to keep my personal assessment of your skill in this regard a closely guarded secret.)
Since I have no credibility to begin with, I indulge in this pursuit freely (as well as my shamless abuse of parenthetical comments). You however, strike me a as someone who (right or wrong), values thier credibility quite highly.
So perhaps avoiding editorial comments and sticking to solid facts is your strongest strategy.
All this IMHO - of course.
