The New Republic

Practically every Boomer smoked grass.  Most grew out of it and are doing fine.  Some are standing on corners asking for handouts.

There is plenty of evidence that marijuana has deleterious effects on performance and motivation.  Legalizing the stuff would lead sooner or later to the commercializing, promoting, branding, and marketing of the stuff.

That would inevitably result in much more widespread use than presently.  Given what we are spending to discourage the use of tobacco, it seems ludicrous to be proposing the legitimizing of grass.

- ChanRobt

August 4, 2008 at 4:05pm

Dude. I'm really hungry all of a sudden for some reason. Does anyone know what's in the Tupperware at the back of the fridge?

I don't really feel like going out. Maybe we should order a pizza.

- williamyard

August 4, 2008 at 4:13pm

It sounds like people are starting to read the writing on the wall: its been over criminalized and over prosecuted to the point of becoming excessively damaging to America's state penal systems.

There are better routes we can go, its not like Americans didn't figure out how to deal with the uber-popular recreational drug affectionately "refer"red to as booze.

- GSpinks

August 4, 2008 at 4:22pm

"There is plenty of evidence that marijuana has deleterious effects on performance and motivation."

Truth be told, I've never met a lazy, layabout, good-for-nothing pot smoker who didn't need the weed in order to lay about being lazy and good-for-nothing. On the flip side, Bill was a very successful POTUS, and yet I heard he knew how to fire up Arsenio Hall's "Green Room".

IMNSHO, the whole recreational drug thing is a product of a bygone era, when politicians who disliked American's who spoke out against the Vietnam War decided to criminalize these dissenters' favorite recreational drugs in order to throw them in jail where they can't be heard. It is high time to introduce common sense into the recreational drug debate.

- GSpinks

August 4, 2008 at 4:28pm

ChanRobt  said:

"There is plenty of evidence that marijuana has deleterious effects on performance and motivation.  Legalizing the stuff would lead sooner or later to the commercializing, promoting, branding, and marketing of the stuff."

There is a big difference between legalizing marijuana and decriminalizing it. Decriminalization would involve receiving a ticket rather than arrest, a criminal record and possible jail time for possession of small amounts. It remains illegal, but the result of being caught are less detrimental to people's future job prospects and their ability to get visas etc. In Australia, for example, where most states levy a $50-$200 fine for possession there is no commercialization or branding or marijuana any more than there is in the United States. Moreover, the number of users hasn't changed.

I agree that it's harmful to those who use it and has acquired an unfair reputation as having no serious health effects, but I don't see anyone proposing to criminalize tobacco or alcohol any time soon.

- liamvt

August 4, 2008 at 4:39pm

When I was in highschool. I smoked a tone of weed. Yes, weed - you should have seen the swag we were smokin in the 1980s. In any event, it was absolutely necessary to get high to endure the boredom of highschool. We called it Rock Hill prozac.

In college, I graduate to beer, then whiskey. I'm having a hard time distingushing the difference. Aside from a really, really bad brownie incident that I accidentaly stumbled into - I swear - I haven't gotten high in years. But I see no difference, except that when I got high I watched Save by the Bell and ate Captain Crunch, and when I got drunk I punched people and ate Denny's Moon over my Hammy. What's the big deal?

- mpatrickhendri

August 4, 2008 at 4:45pm

Channy writes, "There is plenty of evidence that marijuana has deleterious effects on performance and motivation" like it's a bad thing.

Personally, I don't smoke anymore--as Joe Walsh sings, "It's hard to leave when you can't find the door"--but I miss the drug's deleterious effects on my performance and motivation. I've had to make due with my well-earned contempt for my fellow humans and their devious attempts to convince me to waste what little time I have in this existence making somebody else rich, but it's not the same. A bowl of Humboldt County's finest gluing me to the sofa would prove a far more effective solution to competition, achievement, teamwork, and all those other motivational seminar posters that rip the heart out of glorious days doing nothing and appreciating every moment of it.

Yesterday I was leaning against my back railing staring off at my neighbor's mostly empty ranch when out of nowhere a hummingbird materialized, buzzed over to where I was standing and hovered at eye level about two feet in front of me. I mean, the little guy just hovered. For what seemed like forever. We just stared at each other. Imagine what went through my mind and my heart at that moment!

Although my pot-smoking days are behind me, I am forever grateful to the folks who turned me on way back when, thereby inoculating me against the worst of civilization. My immune system is about ready for another boost, however, so if I learn of a pharmaceutical (or, for that matter, any other agent) that proves similarly efficacious without causing me to suffer losing my house keys for three days or related adverse events, I will be the first to indulge.

- williamyard

August 4, 2008 at 5:05pm

Also: nobody ever stops using a drug because of its good effects. They only stop because the bad effects outweigh the good.

That's the dirty little secret that the War on Drugs holy rollers don't want anyone to discuss. Otherwise, somebody might design a psychoactive drug without negative physical or psychological effects that still helps people permanently internalize the fact that a large percentage of the information they're being fed--by their parents, teachers, bosses, religious leaders, politicians, marketers, and the mass media--is pure bullshit.

You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world...

- williamyard

August 4, 2008 at 5:14pm

Chan, nobody's arguing that marijuana isn't bad for you.  The question is whether that warrants its being outlawed.  By your logic, we should have stuck with prohibition, given the well-documented deleterious effects of alcohol.

- AlanSP

August 4, 2008 at 5:24pm

"Practically every Boomer smoked grass.  Most grew out of it and are doing fine.  Some are standing on corners asking for handouts."

You forgot the third category - some are still smoking grass AND doing fine. I'm not one of 'em - stopped decades ago - but I know more than a few VERY successful boomers and post-boomers who still get high recreationally and it doesn't seem to have messed them up at all. At least far less than some of the alcoholic boomers I know. I don't know what the numbers are, but they're big enough not to be ignored.

"Chan, nobody's arguing that marijuana isn't bad for you."

I am. Aside from the physical effects of the smoke in your lungs, I don't see any evidence that pot is bad for you at all. And that can be rectified by baking it into brownies or any number of other delectables. you just have to hide the rest so that the poor dude or dudette doesn't reach for the rest once they get the munchies from the first course. That can be problematic.. I got high for several years in my youth and, because of bad lungs, ate a lot more than I smoked. I never had any ill health effects from it.

Anti-pot laws in a country as addicted to EVERYTHING else as this one are quite simply absurd.

- ramboorider

August 4, 2008 at 5:44pm

There's a lot of folks in favor of legalizing weed that also want to outlaw trans-fats.  Don't they realize that pot is a gateway drug to Twinkies???

- drozenson

August 4, 2008 at 6:00pm

Actually there is some very reputable research coming out that seems to indicate that small amounts of marijuana a few times a week (there's the rub) is actually much more effective than anti-depressants for some sufferers of major depression (did they really need research to tell us that?).

The problem is not smoking pot, the problem is smoking pot every day - then it turns on you.  Just like booze.

- Wandreycer1

August 4, 2008 at 6:35pm

mpatrickhendri, "When I was in highschool. I smoked a tone of weed. Yes, weed."

mpatrick, I don't know about your high school days, but I guarantee you, the pot grown now in Humboldt with UC Davis sophistication, is a helluva lot stronger than the aptly named weed you likely had.

Frankly, I think the effect of mary jane is more interesting than alcohol.  And, no hangover.

But, there's something about it that causes most people as they get more mature to pretty much walk away from the stuff.

- ChanRobt

August 4, 2008 at 9:21pm

I am for the total legalization of marijuana, and I urge anyone who is against it, all you uncool people, to take a trip to Amsterdam and visit a place known as The Grasshopper, just go downstairs and ask for whatever's good that day from the guy in the little window.  They'll fix you right up, and get your mind right in no time.  :-)  

Grasshopper

www.amsterdam.com/index.php

Now if you're cool, all you cool people, check out De Dampkring, it's just a little coffee shop about a block behind the flower market in the center of town. You never know who you might run into there, American expatriate celebrities like Johnny Depp, sports stars from America and Europe, even European politicians, and the staff is the coolest.  Ask for some Amnesia, if you have no fear, but even if I do have fear, after you smoke some of that stuff I guarantee you won't.  And be sure to try the hash when you want to mellow out, they usually have the best around.  :-)

De Dampkring

www.channels.nl/.../dampkrin.html

- AaronBBrown

August 4, 2008 at 9:59pm

"But, there's something about it that causes most people as they get more mature to pretty much walk away from the stuff."

I suspect most people, as they mature, would walk away from booze and cigarettes too. If they COULD. Its the mere fact that pot is non-addictive that allows most people to just up and leave once they've had enough. If only booze and nicotine were so benign.  Bad for business, but good for the population as a whole.

To quote some software engineers I used to know well (who got high pretty far into adulthood), that's a feature, not a bug.

- ramboorider

August 5, 2008 at 2:36am

It is fundamentally absurd to suggest that we need a giant, multi-billion dollar, militarized, intra-governmental program in order to save people from themselves. The fact that this program is doing tremendous damage to important foreign policy goals of the US takes it way beyond absurd.

I worked in some of the worst inner-city neighborhoods in the NE during the height of the crack epidemic, and I can tell you that what changed the calculus wasn't law enforcement or some kind of "treatment"--it was the growing knowledge on the street that the stuff was dangerous, and that addicts were hapless chumps no one wanted to emulate. There is an irreducible, quite small, number of people who are going to destroy their lives with drugs NO MATTER WHAT. Let them. The idea that we should continue trying to shift blame for drug abuse from recreational users in rich countries to starving farmers in the Third World is deeply wrong, and is responsible for undermining some of our most important foreign allies while funding some of our worst enemies.

- Robert Powell

August 5, 2008 at 3:12am