Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
This is serious guys, stop joking. Kids are texting and smoking pot, AT THE SAME TIME!
http://youtu.be/KSnwOoujQ9g
http://youtu.be/zw062fU8sR0
What I don't get is, if you've legalised it, why are there restrictions in place for it, relative to other substances of it's kind ?
or is it just a warming up, roll out phase atm ?
Absolute garbage.
If we stop pretending ice makes people violent will people stop taking it.
There is not enough space here for all the a’s in my faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark me.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
When my dog takes a ■■■■ she walks in circles. Maybe her compass is broken.
Absolute garbage.
If we stop pretending ice makes people violent will people stop taking it.
There is not enough space here for all the a's in my faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark me.
Funnily enough, in my younger days… Weed made me aggro, ice just made me chatty with violence the last thing on my mind.
I preferred me on weed to ice so I stopped doing both after a couple of trys. It's one thing to wake up and realise you clocked your best mate, it's another to wake up and realise you spent half the night talking absolute garbage and thinking it was meaningful... :)
I think I'm the complete opposite of what drugs are supposed to do. I have caffeine and start yawning, and something like two red bulls will have me yawning so hard I have tired-tears going down my face and struggling to stay awake. Codeine (i.e. nurofen plus, panadeine) and I can't sleep - like literally, if I had a couple of nurofen plus right now I would not sleep all night.
As to that article… I think there is a shred of truth in there, even if I don't completely buy into it. Where I grew up (small town in east gippy) was a BIG drinking town, but beyond bragging about how much you drank no-one did it to go off the wire, and people rarely did. It was not uncommon at all for us to drink a slab in an evening each without getting off the couch on the veranda or raising our voices above regular conversation levels. Then I went to uni and saw people from Melbourne who'd have 3 beers and start dancing on tables and carrying on like retards.
But for all that, I still don't completely agree with the article. There is certainly a cultural element to the effects of grog (try drinking with some young Americans one day), but to suggest it's almost all cultural is just wrong - just look at what it does to our indigenous Australians for proof of that.
Ice? That's heavy dawg
Absolute garbage.
If we stop pretending ice makes people violent will people stop taking it.
There is not enough space here for all the a's in my faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark me.Funnily enough, in my younger days… Weed made me aggro, ice just made me chatty with violence the last thing on my mind.
I preferred me on weed to ice so I stopped doing both after a couple of trys. It's one thing to wake up and realise you clocked your best mate, it's another to wake up and realise you spent half the night talking absolute garbage and thinking it was meaningful... :)
I think I'm the complete opposite of what drugs are supposed to do. I have caffeine and start yawning, and something like two red bulls will have me yawning so hard I have tired-tears going down my face and struggling to stay awake. Codeine (i.e. nurofen plus, panadeine) and I can't sleep - like literally, if I had a couple of nurofen plus right now I would not sleep all night.
As to that article… I think there is a shred of truth in there, even if I don't completely buy into it. Where I grew up (small town in east gippy) was a BIG drinking town, but beyond bragging about how much you drank no-one did it to go off the wire, and people rarely did. It was not uncommon at all for us to drink a slab in an evening each without getting off the couch on the veranda or raising our voices above regular conversation levels. Then I went to uni and saw people from Melbourne who'd have 3 beers and start dancing on tables and carrying on like retards.
But for all that, I still don't completely agree with the article. There is certainly a cultural element to the effects of grog (try drinking with some young Americans one day), but to suggest it's almost all cultural is just wrong - just look at what it does to our indigenous Australians for proof of that.
All that seems reasonable.
There's a line between use and abuse.
The best description of alcohol that I've seen was that it doesn't take away your ability to see repurcussions (whether from what you do or what you say) it takes away your ability to care about them.
That doesn't happen to me every time, but it happens when I go hard.
The most embarrassing effect alcohol has on me is that it prevents me from accepting even the mildest criticism. I'm not too loud, you're just a prick.
I have a mate, a good mate. Known since high school. However I refuse to hang out with him in any social situation that involves drinking. Two drinks in he's gets super 'eager'. A few more drinks in and every comment in any conversation becomes an argument and will argue the most trivial of facts to the nth degree. Cant stop after a few either, has to keep going to the early hours. Our group of friends have even stopped inviting him to get togethers as we have families and don't want the stress. Great bloke, just not on the sauce.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
Please explain how referring to the subject of an article and providing a link to said article is illegal. I copied and pasted the entire address line. which someone has removed. Your imperative is as clear as mud.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
Please explain how referring to the subject of an article and providing a link to said article is illegal. I copied and pasted the entire address line. which someone has removed. Your imperative is as clear as mud.
You have all been told a million times how to do it. In future, holidays for those too lazy to bother.
So, for the very last time, you must cut and paste the entire article, plus supply a link back to the original.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
Please explain how referring to the subject of an article and providing a link to said article is illegal. I copied and pasted the entire address line. which someone has removed. Your imperative is as clear as mud.
You have all been told a million times how to do it. In future, holidays for those too lazy to bother.
So, for the very last time, you must cut and paste the entire article, plus supply a link back to the original.
I definitely provided a link (gone) but I did not know about providing the entire article. That seems a bit over the top. I would have thought a link would be sufficient. Too lazy to bother does not describe me.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
Please explain how referring to the subject of an article and providing a link to said article is illegal. I copied and pasted the entire address line. which someone has removed. Your imperative is as clear as mud.
You have all been told a million times how to do it. In future, holidays for those too lazy to bother.
So, for the very last time, you must cut and paste the entire article, plus supply a link back to the original.
I definitely provided a link (gone) but I did not know about providing the entire article. That seems a bit over the top. I would have thought a link would be sufficient. Too lazy to bother does not describe me.
I don't care what you think is over the top; the law is the law. End of discussion.
And then the main reasons against are that it's hard or perhaps impossible to test for at say a booze bus situation, and that it's a "gateway drug". Personally I'd say some slapper who's had a litre of Vodka would be more suggestible to some other drugs than someone who's high but yeah that's what they say. I also think removing the illegality of it takes away from a lot of the "gateway drug" factor.
I'm going to try and not buy into this thread ..... fair chance it'll do my head in. But ......... this whole "gateway drug" thing is just preposterous. Which rabid loony came up with that? Because in a country like Australia/America etc the "gateway drug," if there were such a thing, would be alcohol. That's where everyone starts.
Friendship is the real gateway drug, 'Boot.
Metallica is a gateway band to homosexuality.
Some stupid comments refuse to leave my brain. That's one.
Says the dude with half a hectare...I don't care what you think is over the top; the law is the law. End of discussion.
I definitely provided a link (gone) but I did not know about providing the entire article. That seems a bit over the top. I would have thought a link would be sufficient. Too lazy to bother does not describe me.
You have all been told a million times how to do it. In future, holidays for those too lazy to bother.
Please explain how referring to the subject of an article and providing a link to said article is illegal. I copied and pasted the entire address line. which someone has removed. Your imperative is as clear as mud.
Yes, I believe I have indeed disagreed. There is a much more interesting article in today's Guardian about a study that found that dogs defecate (and urinate) according to where magnetic north is. They line themselves up to be north-south, as do some other animals apparently. In my view, an essential bit of knowledge.
quoting properly is a legal imperative
So, for the very last time, you must cut and paste the entire article, plus supply a link back to the original.
At this point I should point out that 'Boot is not happy that some of this year's "widows" are suffering severe heat stress.
Well good, the law is the law!
Well good, the law is the law!
I don't mind sticking my own neck out HAP; I'm just not keen on others sticking it out for me.
Absolute garbage.
If we stop pretending ice makes people violent will people stop taking it.
There is not enough space here for all the a's in my faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark me.Funnily enough, in my younger days… Weed made me aggro, ice just made me chatty with violence the last thing on my mind.
I preferred me on weed to ice so I stopped doing both after a couple of trys. It's one thing to wake up and realise you clocked your best mate, it's another to wake up and realise you spent half the night talking absolute garbage and thinking it was meaningful... :)
I think I'm the complete opposite of what drugs are supposed to do. I have caffeine and start yawning, and something like two red bulls will have me yawning so hard I have tired-tears going down my face and struggling to stay awake. Codeine (i.e. nurofen plus, panadeine) and I can't sleep - like literally, if I had a couple of nurofen plus right now I would not sleep all night.
As to that article… I think there is a shred of truth in there, even if I don't completely buy into it. Where I grew up (small town in east gippy) was a BIG drinking town, but beyond bragging about how much you drank no-one did it to go off the wire, and people rarely did. It was not uncommon at all for us to drink a slab in an evening each without getting off the couch on the veranda or raising our voices above regular conversation levels. Then I went to uni and saw people from Melbourne who'd have 3 beers and start dancing on tables and carrying on like retards.
But for all that, I still don't completely agree with the article. There is certainly a cultural element to the effects of grog (try drinking with some young Americans one day), but to suggest it's almost all cultural is just wrong - just look at what it does to our indigenous Australians for proof of that.
The concept is growing on me. I don't think anything can be 100% one way cos of x factor, cos you'll always get people who are different for different reasons.
but you have to wonder if when our drinking culture was being set up, that people went, you know what, you can't hide behind alcohol creating x bad behaviour, would we be in the same poisition we are today ?
Also if there were harsher consequences to bad behavoiur (relating to breaking the laws while intoxicated) would our culture be different ?
Going off on a small tangent, but there IMO seems to be a perception that there is very little consequences to your actions, esp when intoxicated.
They say don't drink and drive. yet what you hear of people doing that and getting a suspended licence for 12 month. Actually killing people while doing it and again you hear about people getting 2 to 4 years, for taking a life.
Then you continually hear about all the alcohol related violence, and agin similar pissweak sentences, and really, what incentive is there for people not to go out and behave badly on alochol ?
anyway i think that's prolly turned into more a rant about todays society. but still, tis interesting to think about how things would be different, if our culture was inbreed from different viewpoints.
http://www.thefix.com/content/Maia-Szalavitz-pot-addiction-health2100
Don't Believe The (Marijuana) Hype What most people think they know about marijuana—especially media columnists—is just years of unscientific, paranoid, and even racist government propaganda.Reefer madness is contagious. Photo via
Everyone thinks they know something about drugs—whether from personal experience or from 8th grade prevention classes or simply because the media presents so many stories about them. Unfortunately, most of what people think they know is inaccurate, and comes from years of government war-on-drugs propaganda, with little understanding of its medical and historical context.
Take last week‘s absurd anti-marijuana columns and tweets from some of the backbones of the media establishment: the New York Times‘ David Brooks, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Tina Brown, former New Yorker editor and founder of the Daily Beast.
Both Brooks and Marcus told stories of their own youthful pot smoking—neither of which seems to have led to any lasting negative consequences as is the case for the overwhelming majority of marijuana users. Yet both claimed—without apparently understanding that relying on a single study that has been questioned in a follow up by the same journal is not accurately reporting “factâ€â€”that marijuana definitively lowers IQ.
And neither mentioned the elephant in the room: the fact that marijuana laws are mainly enforced against black people and that arresting millions and saddling them with criminal records hasn‘t prevented around half of the adult population (white and black) from trying weed. It has, however, meant that black people have reduced opportunities to get jobs with organizations like the Times or the Post while Brooks and Marcus never faced arrest.
Conveniently, the columnists also left out the fact that countries like Portugal that have decriminalized marijuana (or countries like Holland that tolerate some commercial sales of marijuana) actually have lower rates of youth drug use than we do.
Meanwhile, Tina Brown also tweeted that marijuana makes people stupid and legalization will reduce our ability to compete with China. Suffice it to say that she has little evidence for such a claim—one might argue based on equally flimsy data that it enhances creativity and popular culture, which is one of our true strengths—but that wouldn‘t sound appropriately “serious.â€
And right there is the problem: columnists and journalists who write about drugs rarely question conventional wisdom or go beyond cherry-picking of data to support what they already “know.â€
But why are we so gullible in this area, when reporters are supposed to be skeptical? One reason has got to be the fact that over the last 40 years, the government has spent billions of dollars on advertising and even planted media articles and messages in TV shows aiming to get us all to “just say no.†While these campaigns are often ineffective at preventing use, they do seem to work at clouding perception.
And the truth is seen as immaterial in the drug war. Written into the job description of the “drug czar†by Congress is that whoever heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) must “take such actions as necessary to oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance (in any form)†that is currently illegal, regardless of the facts. When asked about its distribution of “misleading informationâ€â€”by a Congressman, in fact—ONDCP cited this provision to justify doing so, saying that this is “within the statutory role assigned to ONDCP.†In other words, they have to lie.
Rare is the journalist who will admit to having fallen for this outright propaganda, which is why last year‘s confession by CNN‘s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that he was wrong about marijuana was so stunning.
On CNN‘s website, he wrote:
I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have "no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse."
They didn't have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications.
The truth is that our perceptions of marijuana—and in fact all of our drug laws—are based on early 20th century racism and “science†circa the Jim Crow era. In the early decades of the 20th century, the drug was linked to Mexican immigrants and black jazzmen, who were seen as potentially dangerous.
Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (an early predecessor of the DEA), was one of the driving forces behind pot prohibition. He pushed it for explicitly racist reasons, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men,†and:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
The main reason to prohibit marijuana, he said was “its effect on the degenerate races.†(And god forbid women should sleep with entertainers!)
Although it sounds absurd now, it was this type of propaganda that caused the drug to be outlawed in 1937—along with support from the Hearst newspapers, which ran ads calling marijuana “the assassin of youth†and published stories about how it led to violence and insanity. Anslinger remained as head of federal narcotics efforts as late as 1962, whereafter he spread his poisonous message to the world as the American representative to the U.N. for drug policy for a further two years.
Before marijuana was made illegal, the American Medical Association‘s opposition to prohibition was ignored, as was an earlier report on marijuana in India by the British government, which did not find marijuana to be particularly addictive or dangerous. That “Indian Hemp Drugs Committee†report had concluded way back in 1894 that, “The moderate use of hemp drugs is practically attended by no evil results at all.â€
Pundits and columnists who make pronouncements about marijuana‘s dangers seem willfully ignorant of this history, which is easy to check via any online search engine. Its seems unlikely that Brooks, Marcus and Brown would want their names associated with a law that is both explicitly racist in intent—and continuingly racist in outcome.
But until we treat drug issues as medical and scientific questions, we will be doomed to continue this bigoted legacy—and we will not be able to treat addiction as the health issue that it is.
So, just say know when it comes to drugs—and be sure what you know is based in science, not ancient biased nonsense. (Though, on second thought, Anslinger may have had a point about the inadvisability of sexual relations with entertainers, particularly musicians.)
Maia Szalavitz is a columnist at The Fix. She is also a health reporter at Time magazine online, and co-author, with Bruce Perry, of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered (Morrow, 2010), and author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead, 2006).
