The Top 40

It's better to eat one little candle than to curse the straightness.

Kids get into parent's liquor cabinet...
Kids get into parent's medication....

Wow.

Who could have seen that coming?

Must be BAD LUCK.

(Props to Mr. Heinlein.)

What? Everybody's acting all surprised, like "gee, do people really do things like that?" The naiveté is amazing. Here we are, grown adults (mostly) who have drank the wine, sniffed the coke, huffed and puffed the herb, dropped the little helpers, shoved the opium suppositories up our keesters for all I know, and we did not reckon that legalizing a psychotropic drug was gonna turn out different?

The active ingredient, THC, (google it up I'm not gonna spoon feed y'all) produces temporal and spatial distortion. Mild hallucinations, some paranoia, hunger, confusion, indecision. (That's what we usta call "getting ripped to the tits). Oh yeah, I say "we" because back in the day I probably smoked my weight of that dream weed. I do know what its all about.

Most people — men women, children, old, young, gay, straight, whoever — most people are fucked up enough when they are straight. Add some booze or in this case some dream weed and the fucked-upness gets worse exponentially. I slipped mention of booze in there to prepare you for this question: is it OK to let children have access to our liquor stash? To the dime bag of smack we got for a rainy day? To the designer drugs some of the more feeble among us use to get laid? Oops, that is more than one question, but I left room for answers.

You get the drift. I am a total abstainer, been clean and sober for 27 years, not pressing that on other folks. But, gee whiz, lose the innocence and idealism here. We are talking about drugs, right? Not some stuff at a salad bar.

Chasmatic,

The problem is not abstinence (and congratulations on being clean and sober for 27 years), the problem is enforced abstinence, a.k.a. Prohibition.

Weed is something of a problem right now, because people don't know how to handle it. And they don't know how to handle it because it was "off limits" for so long, with heavy penalties for not staying on the reservation. As it becomes more readily available (not that it was ever truly hard to find to begin with), and as Mr. and Mrs. America get some experience with it without fear of punishment in accordance with someone else's phobia, it will become just like booze -- dangerous if misused, but pleasant enough is used properly.

Best of all, re-legalization will help put the drug-dealers out of business. I get so tired of reading about kids getting killed in the crossfire between brawling rival gangs, or families being terrorized and killed for being "snitches".

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's Democratic Republic of Maryland

I promise you that legalization will not put the drug dealers out of business. All it will do is make the world a safer, better place for crude lunkheads. Kids will continue to be killed in the crossfire, families will still be terrorized by retards who don't know the actual definition of the word "snitch".

Case in point.

Read the comments from some of those miserable shitheels. They don't much believe in live and let live, do they? Yeah, catering to potheads is going to work out well.

Mike - "All it will do is make the world a safer, better place for crude lunkheads."

Absolutely.

Hale Adams, you sound like a guy who believes in the principle of "everybody should do what they want," without knowing anything about the reality of marijuana in its present form.

chas, I've got nothing but respect for your journey and your standup refusal to make excuses for it. It's the act of a man to get up and testify, but I must take issue with some of your conclusions. I may not have done the amount of drugs you have, but if you've been straight for 27 years I decidedly did it for longer.

There's nothing "mild" about the effects of designer marijuana. I remember pot from 40 years ago too, and I also remember pot from 6 years ago when I quit. The difference between 5% THC content sativa and 15% (or more) THC content indica is not just vast, it's a difference more in kind than degree. It makes you crazy, not mellow. And if any of you kid yourselves that it's not addictive, try going off it cold turkey after heavy usage, and come back and talk to me.

The astonishing thing about the "Libertarian" viewpoint as put forth by Hale Adams is that any stoner would immediately recognize that it comes from no experience. Great to excuse everybody their vices, but you just don't know what you're talking about, particularly if you insist upon equating THC with alcohol, particularly if you ignore the clear and present reality that (a) it fucks up adolescents and (b) the incidence of adolescent (and pre-adolescent) marijuana use is currently going through the roof with legalization.

"A safer, better place for crude lunkheads," indeed. Just wait around for a few years; the lunkhead population is about to explode.

Vote Libertarian. It may take them 50 years but they will repeal motorcycle helmet laws in 4 states and legalize pot in 2 states. In 500-100 years they will start working on the big problems, assuming the dope hasn't addled their brains.

Oh yeah, get the gov't involved in it, that's the ticket, everybody'll be so much better off.

Some of you folks are a little more than disappointing.

there is no aspect of a human's behavior or performance that is enhanced by any drug whatsoever. Motor coordination, judgment, sensory distortion, thought process, communication skill, emotional response, memory, this list not complete but you get the idea. Diminished capability is a nice term for it. So booze and now weed do not make positive contributions to society or family or self. They are debilitating, plain and simple. There is no excuse or alibi or justification or euphemism or bells and whistles that can be hung on the stuff to make it any different.

Rob, good to hear your voice. There's nothing like first person when communicating in these comments, eh? Some of the others come off as pontificating or putting in all the talking points, the buzz words.

I think I'll go into my movie collection, watch Reefer Madness, haw haw.

I really love a finely crafted ale. I can still taste my own Irish Amber, and that was from fifteen or twenty years back. Weed... well, my tiny experience always reinforced my suspicion of why they called it... "dope". Also there is nothing better for a quiet night in front of a fire than a single malt whisky and a good book.

But I can't do that. There is nothing wrong with a drink to finish the day or celebrate, commemorate, or mourn as the case may be... if that is how you are wired to operate. Good for you. It took me twenty years to figure out that I'm not, so I don't.

But a bunch of dumbasses standing in a cloud around a bong on a sidewalk in Denver or Seattle at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday are not doing themselves or their society any favors. There is no celebration of liberty inherent in getting fucked up just because you can.

Liberty is making it work. Not checking out.

Tmj: me too. I enjoy the taste of good foods and I used to like good quality beers. I am one of those folks that "one drink is too many and a hundred not enough". I envy people that can pour a glass of wine and savor it and make it last an hour (my wife is like that). I actually know some folks that can smoke some reefer and go out in a canoe or play on the beach and have a goofy old time of it and, get this, not smoke anymore for six months. I call people like these "normal".

I stopped being normal before I hit twenty years old. So, OK, I don't do drugs and I don't drink booze (and I still can act goofy and have a laughing good time). I don't expect others to do like me, I do expect people that use substances to alter their reality to be responsible.

The Libertarians with their "Do What Thou Wilt is the Whole of the Law" Aleister Crowley horseshit are not responsible at all. I can imagine doing what we wilt when we do away with stop signs or the lines in parking lots. (here's where the Libertarians sing don't fence me in). We'd soon see what doing what thou wilt produces. And kids, most can't make rational decisions when they're twenty fer God's sake, let alone ten or fifteen. sheesh.

My, my -- what a bunch of dyspeptic blather.

I never said that misbehavior which does not inflict physical or economic harm on another person should be not be discouraged through informal means. I only pointed out that using state power to suppress and punish such misbehavior doesn't work very well and never has.

Let me quote C.S. Lewis at you:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

If I'm going to be lumped in with the likes of Aleister Crowley, then maybe some of you might find the company of the great tyrants of history quite congenial.

Don't like the comparison? Hey, turnabout is fair play, dudes. DO NOT tread on me.

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's Democratic Republic of Maryland

I, for one, don't lump you with Crowley. That's for damn sure.

I would also draw your attention to a post further up the page: "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society".

".....The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism."

Not only of this Administration, but of far too many administrations since 1900. They imagine that if we're left to our own devices, we'll somehow manage to kill ourselves accidentally if we don't kill our neighbors accidentally first.

Doesn't anybody here get tired of being "classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals"?

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's Democratic Republic of Maryland

Gerard,

Thanks. With hot-button topics like this one, it's hard to keep cool.

Hale

Hale: yeah, you nailed it — hot-buttons. both sides of this discussion jump to unsupported conclusions regarding the other. if you are in favor of xxx than you must believe all of yyy as well. if I am against abc then I must also be against jkl.

Without going to either extreme let me offer up an example: people that own and drive automobiles are required to have a driver's license (although down along the border here it just ain't so) and to have insurance. the State oversees these conditions. I would not consider this to be an all-powerful State nannying us. Some oversight is necessary for the good of the public, to protect us from poor and irresponsible drivers. Pilots, doctors, so forth have to meet certain standards of competence before they can do things that affect the public. The feds or the states oversee these requirements and enforce adherence. I believe there should be some regulation as in the mentioned examples. Call it quality control. I also believe there should be some regulation and control of substance use such as alcohol and pot. I am within reason to expect this. Drunk drivers and stoned drivers threaten my safety. That is unacceptable.

Gestapo-like enforcement of myriad and trivial rules or free-range flat-out-and-fuck-it do whatever you want, neither extreme is desirable. All of us should strive to meet on middle ground. Compromise is neither victory or defeat. It is putting together something that serves all parties.

Dyspeptic, uh? I'll have to remember that one.

The presumption here is that without the overbearing hand of the mostly irresponsible state all of us would instantly turn into buffoons harming and killing each other relentlessly, as if no one knows right and wrong.

What in the world causes people to think this way?
What causes such contempt for others?
Are people's lives so devoid that they simply must inflict themselves into the lives of others, like they have no control over themselves?

If they can't control themselves then they can't control others except through force, which of course should be countered with overwhelming counter force.

In many ways man is still a very primitive animal.

ghost: That's exactly what I'm trying to say.

"Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse."

W. S. Burroughs — The Place of Dead Roads.

This whole situation is a case where the cure is worse than the disease, and has been since first pot laws in what, the 1920's or 1930's?

People probably started getting into pot back then because they couldn't get alcohol easily.

The govt doesn't appear to have learned anything from prohibition.

It's going to be fascinating indeed to see where this leads.

Ive never had them but I understand those brownies taste horrible. Why would kits want to eat them?

And Chasmatic is right. People on this topic jump to ridiculous extremes and presume the worst about each other without even bothering to read or listen. It happens far too much these days on almost every topic.

Actually, the brownies usually taste very good. It is possible to make them with crappy stinkweed and fail to blend but the current ones are pretty much like ordinary brownies with little or no weed taste at all.