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Mamabudz

IN THE GOOD OLE DAYS, WE SMOKED POT
Tallahassee Democrat | Gerald Ensley | Sun, 25 Apr 2004

There are two things you can count on at 3:30 a.m. at our house: I'll get up to use the bathroom and the college kids in the nearby apartment complex still will be whooping it up at the top of their lungs.

Today's college kids party late, and their drug of choice is alcohol, which tends to make people loud. Starting about 2 a.m., the kids roll in from the bars, set the stereo speakers on the deck, crank up the tunes and yell delightedly until daylight.

We're two blocks over, so it's not too bad for us. But the neighbors alongside the complex are going crazy. They call the cops, the cops chase one party inside and a half-hour later a different party erupts outside. Some neighbors have called the cops three times in one night and still not gotten much sleep.

I'm all for young people and partying. But I tell you what, that kind of thing didn't happen in my day. No, sir. When I went to college, we smoked pot then we partied. That kept us mellow and quiet. The last thing we wanted to do was go outside, make a lot of noise, annoy the neighbors and have them call the cops.

We need to get back to those days. We need to legalize marijuana.

We should have done it already.

It's chic to complain about the baby-boomer generation. To say we are self-indulgent and materialistic. To say we haven't fought a great war, haven't written the great American novel and haven't put an imprint on society.

I say baloney. Baby boomers demanded sensitivity, tolerance and equality from society. We made this a better world for black people and women and gays and gave voice to a dozen previously ignored issues.

But we didn't follow through on drugs. We smoked pot and said we would legalize it when we ran the world. Well, we run the world now, and we haven't done anything. We should be ashamed.

The war on drugs is killing us. More than 5 million people have been arrested in the past decade for marijuana violations. We spend $25 billion a year for law enforcement, legal fees and incarceration of drug offenders.The laws and penalties against marijuana violate a half-dozen constitutional guarantees (privacy, due process, equal protection, freedom of religion).

We are ruining lives and wasting money in a fruitless defense of a false morality. The urge to intoxicate is as old as mankind. The majority of those who use drugs recreationally also conduct productive lives. Those who become addicted to drugs have medical and psychological problems that need treatment, not punishment.

We should legalize all drugs. But marijuana would be a good start: Statistics show only one in 100 of those who regularly smoke marijuana goes on to regularly use cocaine or heroin.

There are two reasons why boomers haven't changed the drug laws.

One is they became parents and became just as fearful and hypocritical as their parents. They bought into the scare tactics of drug opponents and didn't trust their children to make wise choices. The other reason is drug prohibitions lost resonance with baby boomers. They got older, quit smoking dope and quit caring about the issue.

They need to care again. We made the world better for black people and women and gays by sustained support of legal changes.

We can make the world better for everyone with sustained support of marijuana legalization.

Then maybe we can all get some sleep in my neighborhood.

 

sodak moment

i dont know if i like the idea of having cocaine and heroin and meth and all those hard drus legal. it just seems odd to me to legalize something that if you dont regularly use it after the first time you use it, you become violently cold and it looks like you are going to die.

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xxdr_zombiexx

I would like to point out that legal or illegal, these real drugs are simply going to be problems.

Education, not incarceration is the key to reducing people's intereest in such substances, but there will always be somebody who thinks the reality of addiction wont affect them. There is no reasoning with those people, but that has nothing to do with why these drugs are illegal.

Legal, more people will have access.

Illegal, Black market operartions make billions off them, including our own dear CIA, which uses them to provide extra financing for ugly illegal sh*t they do in the name of "murica".

Money for a few is better than healthy choices for many.

As always, look at the netherlands and how they separate the markets to kep youngin's away from the bad stuff. They have the only - so far as I know - declining and aging addict population in the world, while the US and UK have absolutley needless epidemics. Prohibition CAUSES people to be more interested...

Lying about marijuana makes those people experiement when they find out they have been lied to.....

blah blah blah....

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Alien Space Signal

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel

Fear became the ultimate tool of this government - V.

beats

What does that? PM it to me if it is off-topic. I'm just curious

And yes, legalizing pot is a good idea.

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Mamabudz

Coca from which cocaine is produced is legally in this country for forms of anesthetic drugs used by periodontists and otolaryngologists.

Opium from which heroin is produced is legally in this country for forms of narcotic pain relievers and spasm suppresession.

Methampetamines are made from pseudo-ephedrine which is a popular legal over the counter medication for decongestion.

So whether you like it or not, in some form or other, at least each of them are legal.

Marijuana isn't. Marinol, by the way, is not made from cannabis (marijuana), it is synthesized from it's component molecules. I have been told by some patients who have taken Marinol daily for over a year that it causes them stomache upset if it is discontinued for any reason.

 

melanotaenia

what a great article. Now I know why my suite in college was always so low key while just the other side had kegs flying out the back window, needless to say, the campus security never seemed to care about us smoking weed, more about the alcoholics who were hanging outside on balconies that were stories high and could be deadly to those who are drunk and stumbling. About ten years ago a fraternity brother fell off one and died, he was completely drunk at the time.

It is so true about the addictions, if everything (drugs) is made available, I feel that less people are going to go to extreme measures to get them, leading to a a decrease in violence and killing due to having to avoid the law in order to score the stash.

I mean, if someone wants to do something to their body like take drugs, who are we to tell them they can't? I mean, if the Netherlands allow people to use them, why does the USA make them illegal?

The world is just not fair (and yes, I knew that already )

AlucardOrange3

A major logical flaw in illegal marijuana and legal alcohol is that the distinction between the two drugs is entirely arbitrary. There's no reason that a government has the right to decide that one intoxicant is legal and another is illegal. The majority of people want to get high, period. Not just on marijuana, not just on heroin, and not just on alcohol, but on anything that's fun and has a danger level that's acceptable to the user. That being said, I can provide a list of at least 3 dozen cheap, safe, fun intoxicants that are legal in the United States of America. I can also provide a list of 3 dozen cheap, DANGEROUS intoxicants that are also legal in the USA. Who exactly is being protected by these bull**** prohibition laws? Who needs to be protected from the danger of a PERSONAL CHOICE, especially at the expense of billions upon billions of tax dollars and the largest prison population in the world?

Anyway, to directly respond to Sodak Moment, people are going to use Crystal Meth, Coke, and Heroin anyway. The only real choice the government has in the matter is whether to provide treatment programs and education (proven high rates of success) or provide jail time and ridiculous fines (proven a disastrous failure). If you're going to use heroin, you might as well be fully educated about the pros and cons, and you might as well use pure, uncut, "clean" heroin, as opposed to the absolute **** that you buy on the streets. The purity issue becomes huge with Ecstasy (MDMA), because pure MDMA is actually extremely safe (see the website www.theDEA.org for unbiased, scientifically backed up data) whereas the **** that you buy as "Ecstasy" from virtually every dealer in America is either not pure MDMA or not MDMA at all, which drastically increases the risks of use. Will people still use it? Yes, but they'll be in more danger. Prohibition isn't just an affront to personal dignity and freedom, it's also incredibly stupid. How long will it take for mainstream America to realize this?

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"When a true genius appears in the world, you shall know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him." Jonathan Swift

king cola

I still think the people who fight to keep pot illegal are some of the few who are secretly supportive in the illegal trade.

As for the CIA, that's definatly true. I watched a interview on tv, some guy was a big cocaine smuggler and was caught. He never did do jail time, he started selling coke for the CIA, it was getting onto the streets and it was helping to get money circulating and they were letting him do this as well as keep his profits. He never was put in jail for it.

In this case we are talking about legalizing pot though not man made drugs. As far as asthma goes, has anyone heard of someone dying from smoking straight pot? No one has, some people seem to forget that it was at one time legal. Even in the 1930s, obviously slavery was over by this time but let's face it, our country still had a racism problem. Many jazz musicians smoked it, they were black, Ed Rosenthal mentions things like this in one of his books. They became a target for marijuana propaganda, then a lot of white people started smoking it too. Then they considered anyone who started smoking it to be evil. They put all kinds of propaganda saying it made people nuts, etc. I remember reading one of the propaganda sayings which talked about guys having breasts from smoking. Lies like this and it still remains illegal because some people are too stupid to realize what was going on.

People that never smoked a joint in their life should have no say in if it should be legal or not! Alcohol was legal, then illegal, then made legal again because it was a war they couldn't win, hell the kennedys got most of their money thanks to alcohol prohibition. Pots a good prohibition buisness even today because much like alcohol anyone can produce pot with some knowlege.

I would like to know who said pots a drug, our 4 fathers never said that, it was legal for a long time up until the tax act of 1937. The gov allows people to get stamps to sell it but yet it remains illegal, that makes a lot of sense! Cigarettes cause cancer, no matter what you smoke theres the risk of health problems. Theres drowsiness from legal medications we take when we are sick, there really is no reason why pot should still remain illegal except for in my opinion like i said before, the ones who keep it illegal are probably the ones involved with the drug trade itself and turning a profit. I'm sure drug money helped fund some of the wars we've had in the past, besides that legalizing a product like pot would boost our economy.

Someone might know someone who died from drugs such as cocaine and then they turn around and blame pot and say it should never be legal, etc. I started drinkin alcohol and smoked some tobacco before i tried pot, but we don't call those gateway drugs do we? Only other thing i tried was hash, but it comes from pot anyway, i never moved onto other drugs.

I guess the billions this country invests in the drug war is more important than health care. They always say think of the children, well what about those hospitals that treat children for cancer that can use a few good donations!

Then these police organizations call our houses asking for donations to help support their families, they wouldn't have this problem if they put the money toward them instead of putting it into the drug war. By the way a lot of harmless people smoke pot and get arrested for it, like these people are really going to donate money to the cops after they sent these people to court only to pay large fines!

In conclusion pot shoud be legal because it's costing more to keep it banned. Ever since they made the announcement to legalize it for medical use there have been more and more propaganda commercials about pot to keep it from being legalized! We never see anything about coke or heroin anymore, now about 99% of the commercials are only about pot itself.

king cola

meant to say 99% of the drug commercials are just about pot.

theherbalist

one of the main problems back "in the day" with open usage of opiates was doctors were using them regularly. Do you really want somebody cutting you open and preforming very technical operations on you while full of morphine or heroin?

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