Marijuana - Should It Be Legal?

[Dead Mike]

IIRC in the other thread nobody put up a constructive argument against the legalisation of weed? The main response was either 'Drugs are bad mmmkay' or 'I don't like it & stoners are dull'. I watched a documentary on US Netflix the other night (a CNBC produced piece about Marijuana in the States) where they visited the states in which medicinal weed is available & also visited Portugal, where all drugs are decriminalised. The results speak for themselves.

[Chris B]

Well, everybody likes cheese and onion.

 

Nice one.

[Magnum]

Incidentally I speak as someone who smoked weed heavily for about two years during my degree, then for a further year between finishing my Masters and moving to Manchester. It has affected my own mental stability in terms of paranoia and so on, also lead me to experiment with other drugs (but never becoming a regular user of any) and also gave me chance to see some of my friends move from "almost exclusively weed, sometimes coke" to "almost always coke, occasionally pills" and by the time they were taking pills every weekend, they weren't the same people I made friends with to begin with. I had a lot of fun when I was smoking it but enormously wish I never had.

 

A very good post overall, but just highlighting this bit as I wish we could go back to a time before coke was so fucking omnipresent. That comment in bold describes 3 or 4 people I know who now think no night/afternoon out in the pub is complete without a couple of trips to the bog to shove that shit up their nose, oblivious to the fact the rest of their mates have no inclination to spend the following few hours in the company of an edgy, sniffing idiot with mad, staring eyes. All because they want to kid themselves on that they're somehow living a 'rock & roll' lifestyle on a weekend despite working in a call centre and living with their mams. Just last night, I was having a piss in my local when some pillock with a fauxhawk and his ankles and man-cleavage on display started sniffing and snorting in the cubicles. At half seven, in the local pub. Why is this considered a normal thing to do now?

[Loki]

Let's not bring coke into an argument over cannabis. The two couldn't be more different. I won't touch coke for exactly the reasons you describe, but ganja doesn't suddenly turn amazingly nice people into twats. The sort of people who are twattish potheads would be twats even without the evil weed.

[air_raid]

But weed can lead to coke. Again, I say this not because of red top hysteria over weed as a "gateway drug" but because I saw several lads who had been long term smokers begin snorting coke because they were bored with smoking weed, I assume which they started smoking in the first place as escapism i.e. bored with normal life. Blah blah blah, addictive personalities etc. I've seen enough people go through [weed >> coke >> twat] to believe legal weed and increased visibility could lead to more people ending up on harder drugs, and more twats/overdoses.

[Loki]

Of course weed can lead to coke, the same way working in advertising can lead to coke, or being a videgame producer can lead to coke. Should we make those things illegal as well?

 

The reasons, of course, that weed is a "gateway" drug is that you have to go to a dealer to buy it. And that dealer also deals coke. If you're popping into Tesco to pick up a pack of Undertoker, the guy behind the counter isn't going to offer you a snowball and a red top of crack, is he? If anything, legalising weed is going to make it LESS likely for it to lead to harder substances.

 

I know plenty of people who smoke dope who aren't shifting Bolivia up their nostrils on a Saturday nights. It comes down to people's willpower, how strong their sense of self-identity is, and generally how much of a twat they were born as.

[David]

I know plenty of people who smoke dope who aren't shifting Bolivia up their nostrils on a Saturday nights. It comes down to people's willpower, how strong their sense of self-identity is, and generally how much of a twat they were born as.

It could be said that those who partake in some weed could be lacking those qualities in the first place, couldn't it?

[Zebra Kid Mark]

Incidentally I speak as someone who smoked weed heavily for about two years during my degree, then for a further year between finishing my Masters and moving to Manchester. It has affected my own mental stability in terms of paranoia and so on, also lead me to experiment with other drugs (but never becoming a regular user of any) and also gave me chance to see some of my friends move from "almost exclusively weed, sometimes coke" to "almost always coke, occasionally pills" and by the time they were taking pills every weekend, they weren't the same people I made friends with to begin with. I had a lot of fun when I was smoking it but enormously wish I never had.

 

A very good post overall, but just highlighting this bit as I wish we could go back to a time before coke was so fucking omnipresent. That comment in bold describes 3 or 4 people I know who now think no night/afternoon out in the pub is complete without a couple of trips to the bog to shove that shit up their nose, oblivious to the fact the rest of their mates have no inclination to spend the following few hours in the company of an edgy, sniffing idiot with mad, staring eyes. All because they want to kid themselves on that they're somehow living a 'rock & roll' lifestyle on a weekend despite working in a call centre and living with their mams. Just last night, I was having a piss in my local when some pillock with a fauxhawk and his ankles and man-cleavage on display started sniffing and snorting in the cubicles. At half seven, in the local pub. Why is this considered a normal thing to do now?

Very very good post. Pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole thing.

[air_raid]

Of course weed can lead to coke, the same way working in advertising can lead to coke, or being a videgame producer can lead to coke. Should we make those things illegal as well?

 

I wouldn't know, I'm only trying to pass comment based on personal experience, and I've never worked in either industry. The people I have seen transition from one drug to another have came from a variety of vocations, from unskilled manual workers to national management in finance, and from a variety of backgrounds.

 

The reasons, of course, that weed is a "gateway" drug is that you have to go to a dealer to buy it.

 

That makes it sound overly sexed up. If most of us were asked "do you mix with drug dealers" we'd probably all say no. I never dealt with anyone I thought of as a dealer to obtain any drug. I always got it from a mate. Not a mate that I befriended only because he could get weed, a genuine mate. While the exchange of my money for drugs he put in my hand which he had acquired from elsewhere technically would make them a "dealer" - in which case I have once "dealt" myself - the buying experience only ever felt like a mate picking you up something, rather than experiencing a "drug dealer" and felt much easier than plenty of experiences with Tesco pharmacy/deli counter/self service.

 

If you're popping into Tesco to pick up a pack of Undertoker, the guy behind the counter isn't going to offer you a snowball and a red top of crack, is he?

 

This is very true mate, but I dont think the decriminalisation would reduce the number of weed smokers that move on to harder stuff, as you seem to, because making the move today around my way is as easy as moving from "my mate can get some weed" to "my mate can get me some coke" whereas in the legal weed eutopia, it would be "I can get my weed from Tesco" but "my mate can get me some coke." In fact, now that I think about it, with legal weed likely meaning more users, I think the likelihood of someone in your "weed circle" being able to get you some harder drugs would increase relative to the bigger circle.

 

It could be said that those who partake in some weed could be lacking those qualities in the first place, couldn't it?

 

But a guy as intelligent as you wouldnt tar every smoker with the same brush, surely? Otherwise we could do the same to everyone who starts drinking, given the amount of twats we breed in this country through blokes going out and getting smashed on Stella every weekend and the inherent links to violence, burglaries, sex crimes, broken homes, ASBO kids etc, and a hell of a lot of the normal "non twats" in all our lives like at least an occasional half a shandy or creme de menthe.

 

Yes, I'm not too dim to not realize that this may contradict my previous argument, that "weed smokers are more likely to use harder drugs than anyone else" may be as spurious as "all stoners are born twats", but as I said, I can only deal with personal experiences, and I suppose it may very well be that my anti-decriminalisation stance is purely based on not wishing a potential increased opportunity for what happened to my friends, to happen to other impressionable young adults.

 

Or it might just be that I dont want the Trafford Centre to reek of weed next time I get dragged there.

[Kiffy]

I don't get the argument that you should avoid weed due it being a gateway drug.

Working backwards, most people will have got drunk before they smoked weed, will have smoked fags before they smoked weed, and will have had a coffee before they did any of those things.

Why do people focus on the weed as being the important part of that chain? It's just natural to start small and work your way up, with anything. The only difference with weed being a gateway drug is that it's illegal, and legalisation removes that part of it.

[David]

But a guy as intelligent as you wouldnt tar every smoker with the same brush, surely?

Given the widely known effects that smoking can have on your body, I would I'm afraid. Anyone who takes up smoking in this day & age is a fucking idiot of the highest order.

[Kiffy]

But a guy as intelligent as you wouldnt tar every smoker with the same brush, surely?

Given the widely known effects that smoking can have on your body, I would I'm afraid. Anyone who takes up smoking in this day & age is a fucking idiot of the highest order.

 

The odd spliff isn't going to do you any massive harm, daily smoking of cigarettes or weed will obviously fuck you up but it's quite possible to have a few spliffs now and again in the same way it's possible to have a few beers now and again.

Alternatively, you could always use a vaporizer, giving you all of the high with none of the cancer and bronchitis.

[Halitosis Romantic]

The coke in pubs shit drives me fucking mental - me and another feller kicked a door in at The Good Mixer, and dragged out some twat that was snorting a couple of lines off the bog seat. I don't care if you want to do your drugs off the same bog that Justine Frischmann did, take it somewhere that has more than one bog.

[Dead Mike]

FYI - Nodoby's ever contracted lung cancer from smoking just weed.

[David]

FYI - Nodoby's ever contracted lung cancer from smoking just weed.

Is that a fact then, yeah? A definitive fact?

 

I'll say it again, smoking, in any form, is a stupid fucking thing to do.

 

I watched a documentary on US Netflix the other night (a CNBC produced piece about Marijuana in the States) where they visited the states in which medicinal weed is available & also visited Portugal, where all drugs are decriminalised. The results speak for themselves.

That's all well & good, but alcohol is also legal in Portugal, yet we don't see the streets in that country awash with native drunken scumbags every weekend, do we? The UK as a culture won't react the same to a legalised drug trade as the likes of Portugal do. It would be fucking bedlam.