More states legalize Pot 8) when for Oz?

[K]

[Skids]

Ok... you've drifted off topic on to ciggys and vapes.....

Please.... if these filthy things are; legal, taxed and sold freely, why shouldn't cannabis be?

Cigarettes, along with alcohol; kill more people, are responsible for more car accidents and the reason for more calls than ANY other reason (yes, alcohol mainly, tobacco only kills the user) to police.

Regulate it and tax it!

[Mugwump]

[think positive]

thats a bloody good point!!

[David]

[K]

[David]

Basically a friend in high school doing bongs five, six times a day, to the extent that he was spending more time high or trying to get high than doing anything meaningful or productive. He also couldn’t get off it – while marijuana isn’t addictive the way nicotine is, it’s easy for people with other issues to become psychologically dependent on it.

This, incidentally, is one thing missing from the discussion: we talk about legalising, banning, decriminalising and regulating almost under the presumption that such policies (and associated phenomena like availability and medical referrals) will be the main factor in how many people become addicted. I’ve increasingly come to believe (and there are many who share this view, in the mental health community and beyond) that addiction more often than not isn’t really about drugs. You can become psychologically dependent, in the way my friend was, on practically anything: the internet, pornography, video games, food, bodybuilding, hoarding possessions ... the link, I think, is really the state of unhappiness or lack of fulfillment that leads to people craving short-term satisfaction and a dopamine rush of any kind. The link there seems to have little to do with the crutch of choice and everything to do with the dysfunctional psychological state. That doesn’t explain all drug use, and one might well argue that having lots of extremely pleasurable substances at hand isn’t helping prople in such a situation, but it does point to why trying to ban substances at best treats the symptom rather than the malady, and at worst misses the point entirely.

So what’s the problem, exactly? Probably some combination of loneliness, the way our work/home lives are oriented, our disconnection from extended family networks and communities, a lack of structure, a general lack of real support. This discussion started with people laughing at the crazy Greens and their radical proposals, but the fact is that they’re the only ones trying to address those fundamental social problems, through ideas like Universal Basic Income, reducing the work week and so on. The Liberals, basically, sell a policy of driving yourself into the ground with overtime work, earning as much money as possible and chucking the losers to the kerb. Labor offer the same but with better workplace rights and a pay rise for people at the bottom. You know they aren’t crazy because they’re not proposing anything new. Just more of the same – if you like the way our society is now, you’re probably going to love what the next few governments have planned, because it sure isn’t going to be anything radical*!

The irony here is that it’s not really the legal status of marijuana that’s going to cause problems of addiction, or do much to alleviate them, for that matter. My suspicion is that it’s actually this way of ordering the world that is making so many people sick, and dependent on whatever they find lying around or can buy in plastic bags. No party or policy can really fix that huge underlying problem, certainly not in one go (and even if they tried really hard, it would take generations to undo). But I’ll happily put some money on this equation proving true: if you want less drug addiction, you need a happier and more emotionally fulfilled society. Anyone have any ideas on how that might be achieved?

*Correction: I shouldn’t dismiss the Liberals’ capacity to come up with radically bad ideas. Thankfully, they never seem to get very far with them, at least not lately.

[Mugwump]

^ two interesting posts, David. It would probably take an essay to answer both, and this is not the place for that. In brief, however :

Marijuana use is high because it has long been de-facto decriminalized. Possession laws are rarely enforced, and when they are enforced, it is usually with a caution. When was the last time someone incurred a criminal record for possession ? I know lots of people who freely admit to smoking dope and have zero fear of the law about it, but patchy enforcement of law clearly does not make law invalid. It makes politicians and police invalid.

I have lived in The Hague, where dope is quasi-legal (but the Dutch government is now tightening this very significantly as it wrestles with the social consequences). I have also lived in many places where dope is illegal. Because of the feeble, pea-hearted enforcement, there may be little difference in availability for dedicated dopeheads with the right networks, but my 18 yo children cannot walk down the street in an average town and buy it over the counter whenever they want to. That is a big difference.

Moreover, you assume that the debate is between status-quo and legalization. I would like to see the law enforced properly. Then the “it happens anyway” argument would fall flat. The drug legalisers’ argument is often like saying that Police are inactive about DV, so it happens regularly, so we might as well regulate it. It’s strange that we bitterly enforce .05 laws and then openly connive at dope use. Why do we imagine that some laws are to be obeyed and others not ?

Portugal is an essay in itself, but the summary is that it was already one of the most drug infested countries in the world (ca 1% of the population we’re addicted to opium in 2001). It’s data is also patchy and usage is now apparently rising. High bases do not father rapid escalations. Colorado will reap the wormwood of its policy in due course, I suspect.

I think the fallacy in dope use is libertarian : that there is such a thing as a victimless crime, if the perpetrator is the only one who suffers. This once seemed to me self-evident, but it is far from the case. Firstly, you do not commit a moral act when you give a drunkard alcohol. You do not do right when you let a child walk alone through a busy city. Many adults reason little better than children about possible harms. Secondly, no man is an island - damaged families, psychosis, social medical costs, and the sheer waste of human productive potential carries social costs for all. Then there is the fact that drugs are a gateway for vulnerable individuals, with all that entails.

On your second post, I recall someone asking David Bowie, a few years before he died, why he was still making records, what he still wanted to say. He replied “I don’t have anything to say. I make records so as not to die of boredom”. A society built on hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure is always on the edge of boredom. I think that has much to do with it. When we abandoned powerful, connective ideals like family, tradition, faith and patriotism - ie when we really had “ community” rather than prating about it - and substituted them with the pleasure-seeking, consuming individual, we created the poor infinitely addictable creature you rightly identify. It is a great irony to me that the Left has so gullibly destroyed community on behalf of capitalism.

A final word - addiction is a concept that has proved as elastic as granny’s old knickers. It’s really just a code word for how much will I have to exercise in order to avoid harms. Once you think about it that way, it’s hard to use the word as blithely as we do today.

[HAL]

When? Yes I think about it that way things seem different often.

[think positive]

Really interesting discussion. Certainly I lean more towards Mugwumps argument (left or right Jezza!). Also like the addiction comment, it’s become an excuse for bad behaviour.

If dope becomes legal, what’s next? That is my worry.

[Skids]

[Mugwump]

[HAL]

How do you like [b]That?

[K]

Is it legal in Oz even for medicinal purposes right now? I assume not. Would it not be better to permit medicinal use first? On the risk-benefit spectrum, this would seem more justifiable (at least when one does not delve into the arguments about how much laws affect actual behaviour).

[Mugwump]

The use of morphine under active medical supervision is legal now. There could not be any conceivable reason why ThC could not be.

However, this is really a ruse and strategy by the legalisers, who resort to any kind of insincerity to achieve their ruinous purpose. They do not envisage ThC being administered under controlled conditions in a hospital, but instead they want it available on prescription for a range of pain-killing applications, after which is can be used freely wherever and whenever the user likes. Doctors will usually prescribe what a patient asks for, as it is not in their interests to defy their patients. The medical cannabis thing is just a wedge strategy.

The question that really must be asked is why it is so important, to a group of people, that we as a society should license the loss of mind as a recreation ? There is one big giveaway here : note that when they talk about legalizing it, they always talk about “regulating” it too - they know it is intrinsically bad. Yet they want to make it more easily available. Can anyone think of any other case where there is a massive lobby to increase the availability of a product that people want to regulate in use !??

Their position makes no logical sense at a fundamental level, and this shows it. But people no longer know how to think. They have been told *what* to think by the educators and the rock stars and the comics and the advertisers, and it is far more self-satisfying to be licentiously cool with the crowd than it is to be a killjoy who thinks for himself.