Marijuana is legal here in 2 months - please help

[underpants]

[NNadir]

1. It will seem to make more sense when you're stoned.

That's probably a good reason not to get stoned, but that's just my opinion.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

4. Your initial conjecture sounds anecdotal NNadir my man ...

I expect better science from a man of your esteem

[NNadir]

6. I came of age in the 1970's.

It was, polyester and all, a decade worth forgetting, particularly because it became clear where my generation was going.

I came of age in the 1970's, but I was born, for practical purposes, midway through the 1980s.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

7. So is what you're trying to say is you've seen people get so stoned on the marijuana

that they'd literally think planting an actual cooking pot in the garden would have some sort of functional utility?

Or been that high yourself?

Inquiring minds want to know

[NNadir]

10. Why would anyone be interested in me? In the 1970's...

...I was some times a laborer, at other times a clerk, at still other times a delivery guy, and for a stretch that seemed like forever, and was forever, not in the least, psychologically, caretaker for a dying woman.

I fancied myself to be a folk singer/song writer/poet, a rather silly and common affectation in those times. Sometimes I got paid for it, but never enough to live on.

I was, in short, a dullard, uninteresting in the extreme.

While I am still uninteresting, I'm slightly less so now than I was then.

As for marijuana, I sometimes feel that people who want to report that it's harmless, or even "good for you," have never been stone cold sober in a room full of high people, many of whom liked to confuse themselves with Bob Dylan. I can report that I have done this.

"Everybody must get stoned..." and all of that.

I don't approve of marijuana use. I'm sure that I believe that people should go to jail for possessing or using it, but for me, there is such unfathomably beautiful things associated with reality, that I really can't see why one would like to smear one's senses in the face of it.

While I don't approve of putting people in jail for drug use, I'm not sure I'd like a pot store in my neighborhood. It appears now that there will be two of them as of this writing, both ten minutes or less away by bicycle.

I sometimes get in trouble around here for saying as much, but I don't approve.

People like to carry on with me about how cigarettes and alcohol are worse than pot, and both are legal. These statements are true, and to the extent that these two legal drugs each represent much worse social problems than pot is now, to me is an argument against full legalization.

The most depressing trip to Europe of my life - I only went to Europe on business, never for pleasure - was walking, in an evening during a professional event in Amsterdam, where there were women displayed in windows - some of them not so much women as girls, clearly imported from third world countries - with all kinds of stoners mumbling to one another in the streets around them.

I've actually been moved to weep just thinking of it.

I'm not sure that I have any fascination with Allen Ginsberg, but the most eloquent phrase I ever read of his, was the opening to one of his "poems," such as they were.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

So be it.

There are plenty of ways to lose one's mind, sometimes by disease, sometimes by trauma, and sometimes by practice and sometimes by deliberate administration of mind altering substances. I don't feel that we need more of them.

These are very dangerous, very hard, even frightening times. They call, in my view, for more sobriety, not less of it.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

11. That's what I thought ...

I respect your intellect and opinion, but on this particular subject, you don't know WTH you're talking about.

Specifically, the only person who'd plant a pot in a garden is someone making a joke, or someone on way stronger drugs than pot (think LSD).

Pot doesn't distort your thinking to this level. Sorry, it just doesn't.

And pot is 'good for you' at least in terms of being an effective and relatively safe medicine to ease symptoms of certain ailments (which is what 90% of all drugs are for).

And there is reasonable debate that consuming cannabis (probably not, in the net, smoking the plant, but consuming it) may in fact be 'good for your health'. My dad smoked pot pretty much daily from the 1960's onward, and lived to be 76 ... despite also being an opioid addict the last 25 years of his life due to chronic pain. He didn't exercise, he ate like shit ... and consumed opioids and pot constantly. Lived to 76. I think the pot kept him alive that long, personally.

For the record, Bob Dylan has repeatedly said that song isn't about pot smoking.

It's about biblical stoning, hence the 'Salvation Army' sound of the band.

[NNadir]

12. I think I got the "joke."

For the record, I didn't find Cheech and Chong all that funny. I guess you had to be in a certain state to do so.

I have worked as a medicinal chemist, so I think I understand "effective and safe," since I am still involved, at least, peripherally, in clinical trials, including clinical trials involving opioid addiction. Nobody's cheering for the Sacklers. I met, and interacted with Purdue scientists; in the end they proved to be like "scientists" at Phillip Morris, the company that I hold responsible for my father's early death. Unsurprisingly some of them were real assholes.

My email every morning contains several references to cannabis analytical issues, some of which are quite ugly. Occasionally, when facing commentary here in response to the remarks I make on this subject - which always raises objections often passionate objections - about whether "pot is 'good' for you," I refer to the scientific literature which is quite rich with commentary on cannabis and its effects, and to which I generally have pretty complete access. I find the references disturbing, particularly with respect to the effects on young people, since there is evidence that "developmental" phases of neurological development don't really end until the mid twenties.

Nor am I arguing that Cannabis shortens lifetimes, but I would note that the anecdote that George Burns lived to be 100 proves that cigar smoking is "good for you." Anecdotal accounts can, and often do, get people in real trouble. This morning, in the JAMA update there was a paper on facial paralysis from RNA vaccines, which some people were running around saying was a "thing." There was, according to the authors of the paper, no statistical indication that this was in fact "a thing." Anyone who points to "facial paralysis" anecdotes to justify not getting a vaccine is a fool.

I'm sorry, but I don't consider there to be any "reasonable debate" about cannabis being "good for your health." My sons are in their twenties, and I would be extremely upset if I found out they were smoking pot. For the record, my oldest son is a big advocate for legalization, which is not to say that he is a user. We have this argument all the time, both seriously and jokingly. I would know if he were a stoner, since anyone in my generation is fully aware of what being stoned is.

It's not like I have never spoken to a stoned person. Like I said, I've been in rooms full of them. Now that I am reaching the end of my life, I wish I could have those hours back to have done something useful and meaningful.

For me, it's depressing when a really stoned person struggles to find the next word and one has to wait for it, although most of the time it really isn't worth waiting for...

Telling me that Carl Sagan smoked a joint every day also doesn't impress me. Even if as a scientist he was, in spite of that, a good scientist, even an excellent scientist - although media star scientists are often in my opinion "too much," don't ever get me started on Michio Kaku - this anecdote does not show that he may have been a better scientist if he didn't smoke pot.

As for Bob Dylan...

I used to play a lot of Bob Dylan songs in clubs when I was a stupid kid. I still know most of the lyrics. Sometimes the images were quite beautiful, but they were generally nonsense, to Jan Wenner's shock and dejection, about nothing at all. One song I played a lot was "Visions of Joanna," which according to Bob Dylan was not "about" Joan Baez. As it happened, playing that song, as well as "Desolation Row" was always the um, "high point" of my evening "gigs" such as they were.

I don't think it matters at all for the present context, but Bob Dylan has always been cagey about his work. There really isn't a deeper point in many cases of what they are "about." "Visions of Joanna" is a beautiful song, and it played a role in my life, since I played it for someone I love more than myself, and it made a difference. We can speculate whether it was about Joan Baez specifically, but it is clearly "about" a former lover, one of whom is known in Bob Dylan's case to have been Joan Baez. To me, it seems transparent, particularly the third verse, about "little boy lost." What does it matter?

The cultural context in which "Rainy Day Woman" was played loudly when I was a kid is clear enough.

This verse is clearly not about Hebrew Biblical judicial practices:

Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end

Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again

They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car

They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar

Yes, but I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned

I know that many people assume that Jesus was God, but I can't recall any Biblical precognizant verses in any of his "sermons" about Buicks or Toyotas. I don't think Jesus ever spoke about Gibson Les Pauls or Stratocasters. Rather many of Jesus's sermons seem to be about sheep herding and fishing. Maybe that's why, as a child, I was required to spend so much time reading the Bible. My father loved fishing; sheep herding, not so much.

I'm not familiar enough with Bob Dylan's entire catalogue to know whether he ever wrote a song about sheep. Dylan may have wrote "about" fish. I don't know. I think Dylan once had a thing for Jesus. Where that went, and how it compares to Joan Baez, I'll leave that to people more interested than I am.

Whether Dylan wrote about sheep or not, nevertheless, there were and are a lot of sheep in my generation. My generation proved to be as disappointing as hell, and I think that future generations will have hell to pay because of us. There are many things that should have been at least as important to us as marijuana laws and marijuana use seem to have been. We were a failed generation, and as I often say in different contexts, "history will not forgive us, nor should it."

If there's any consolation about us, we raised this current generation now coming into adulthood. For all the crap thrown at them by old farts in my age group, these kids are as impressive as hell, much smarter, over all, than we had any right to claim. Mostly they seem pretty sober. Like any generation, they include some asses, but overall, they're fabulous. I regret what we did to them.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

14. I meant it's the biblical use of the word 'stone', like that action, aka rock throwing at those

supposedly doing something wrong. Not that the whole song is based on the Bible

Those lines are theorized to be referring to the fans rejection of him switching from folk to rock. It was a big to-do as you probably recall.

It really doesn't matter.

The data on potential negative effects on young folks development ... dude, I remember being like 14 (so 40 years ago) and my dad telling me I was too young for pot (as he was getting high) because studies show it stunts brain development of young people. Dude didn't even go to college or really ... read anything. And somehow he knew this factoid you're telling me, 40 years ago.

So 40 years go by and you, Mr. Scientist Man, has access to ALL the literature and you're all 'up on it' ... and yet you're coming at me with that same shit he did, now?

All those years of research, and that's still the best you lot can do, some hazy (and almost certainly not empirically provable) assertion about kids mental growth being stunted?

Look man, it's a drug, people like to get high on it, yes. But it's almost certainly THE LEAST harmful way to catch a buzz, and people generally still act responsible when on it. Not like drunks or meth-head's or (some) opioid addicts.

I sense your outright disdain for anyone who doesn't want to be fucking sober every minute of their lives, but as far as drugs go, the shit is pretty freaking remarkably benign, dude, if you just try to be objective on that particular fact.

And I am absolutely not convinced it might not have positive health effects. It might NOT, but it might. And it definitely can if person switches from other more dangerous drugs, to only pot, for certain medicinal purposes, or even as a substitute addiction. It's called harm reduction. I'm sure you're familiar

BTW, your example case of the person so incapacitated by pot that they can't talk and it's so depressing? Have you considered maybe they were on MORE than just pot? Or maybe a very THC naive user (one of their first times of smoking the stuff)?

I'd wonder, if you were to go back and read what you wrote in those posts and consider, with your scientific side, if maybe, just maybe ... you are really only looking for 'the bad' to back up your personal animosity against pot, and Dylan, and your whole Generation (buncha wastoids, who so depressed you)? Would you ever actually go out of your way to see a positive in this drug? I don't think you would, no matter the evidence. Your mind seems made up, but I'm not convinced that it's based purely on science. I'll leave it at

[NNadir]

16. OK. Here's a positive.

People high on pot never noticed that the Grateful Dead often played out of tune.

In my career I've been involved in the development of hundreds of drugs. When Magic Johnson announced that AIDS wasn't going to kill him in the near future, felt a special joy, because I was involved.

Why am I constantly badgered here about finding something positive to say about a recreational drug?

No one expresses so much passion for sildenafil or prospecia?

Do I have to spend oodles and oodles of the last years of my life looking for something that I feel has already wasted too much attention?

If your old man was actually right about a topic, and I repeat his correct statement 40 years later, even if he stumbled into being right with no real information, whether or not this annoys you had no bearing on whether his statement is or was true either then or now.

If one searches on Google Scholar using the words Cannabis adolescent and brain, one can get 47,900 hits in 0.11 seconds. I'll bet that many of the authors of these 47,900 hits agree with your late father, as do I. Some of them certainly had spectacular educations, other less so.
I'm not sure if they'd annoy you, but anyone who really wants to spend their time and lives thinking all about pot, can certainly do it.

I have other things to do, some of which are involved with saving lives.

[WA-03 Democrat]

2. Looks like you got it!

Some sunshine and water every other day and your harvest will come in 9 weeks

[PoliticAverse]

3. Looks good - ready to harvest! n/t

[ret5hd]

5. All that effort and you go with steel vs cast iron.

What a newb!!!

[bluedigger]

8. That appears to be a male.

You're going to need that old copy of The White Album for deseeding.

[central scrutinizer]

9. No, it's like garlic

You’ve planted it upside down.

[Laffy Kat]

13. You may have enough there for a lid.

[underpants]

15. 👏