I'd like to clear something up about Cannabis, pot, weed, ganja, or whatever you like to call it.
I may come across as a die hard activist about it, but actually I don't think anyone should do drugs if they can avoid them. Meds, obviously are another issue. The concept of using medical pot for recreation has always been a bastardization of it, something our government should hang their heads in shame over the need for that to have come about. That has nothing to do with the actual need for medical pot. I'm talking only recreational use.
I just don't think people should be abused as we have, through prohibition (and alcohol in my view is as bad as cocaine and just or nearly, as dangerous). Unlike most of those against all this, I learned to have my opinion through research and experience, not just having a jaded opinion as many who are against it.
There has also been more interest by the public in drugs after our government has lied to use for so many decades about them. There are now doctors, scientists and journalists talking about drugs and the real information about them. Therefore there is also more interest in hallucinogens.
People like Michael Pollan with his book, How to Change your Mind - What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,.discusses this. At the writing of this here, I'm still waiting for the audiobook to hit retail.
I go in depth about this myself in my latest audiobook, On Psychology. It should be available any day now on Amazon, iTunes and Audible.com. See the addendum at the end of that article about the history and systems of psychology and study of synesthesia and schizophrenia. It's a fascinating article. Even if I do say so myself. And I explain in it what that is so and how I know that to be true.
I don't say this in my psychology article but I'll mention it here. I do mention drugs like LSD in the article and audiobook, however. Years ago I was in a job I couldn't quit, couldn't get away from and had it for several years. It was stressful and difficult to go back day after day until finally I had ran out my condition of employment. It allowed me to get my degree eventually in psychology from a university, so in the end, that was good. But it was a stressful few years.
I would use LSD over a weekend sometimes when I really needed to escape but couldn't. So that come that next Monday, I felt refreshed and recharged, like I had been on vacation for an entire week. I would also use it at times to kill off a bad habit, or one I wanted to change but kept failing to. I was drop (take) the acid (LSD) alone, concentrate on what I wanted through the experience and find that afterword, There is talk nowadays about microdosing LSD. Taking low doses on a daily basis. The word is out on that for now but they are beginning to research it.
And I Found that I had indeed changed that habit after a single acid trip. Now I'm not advocating this method for people, just saying that it worked for me. And I admit, I was unusual in my understanding of drugs and psychology, even before I got a degree in it. Yet, I didn't go crazy, didn't lose my job, didn't need medical attention, didn't harm anyone, not even myself, and it seemed to me to only be a benefit to me. And to be sure, in the 1950s it was actually used in therapeutic ways. But our government, out of fear and ignorance, as usual, had made it illegal because of the 1960s counterculture.
Weed in comparison to those other drugs is pretty harmless, in that it doesn't kill like the other drugs can that it's been inappropriately grouped with. Grouping pot with heroin and meth, is ridiculous and always has been. Cocaine and cannabis are not physically addictive. The issue there comes not in physical but emotional. They are not the same thing. But cocaine is vastly more dangerous that cannabis.
Yet there are dangers related to legalizing cannabis, now. And oddly enough, they have little to do with the substance itself.
The dangers come not in the substance but in big money as usual and through corporate mismanagement (also as usual), in trying to push a product on us more than is good for us. They will seek to sell us pot soda pop, pot everything, now. Anyway they can make a buck and addict us just as in tobacco.
Except, as stated above, weed isn't addictive in the same sense as heroin or alcohol.
But does that mean it should be illegal? No. We will go through a honeymoon period for a while and then slack off some as it becomes culturally normal and we acclimate to how to use and not abuse it. As we mature into it's national use as we did alcohol after prohibition, or as a human maturing into adulthood and make decisions of use or abuse.
Also, in over enhancing the weed itself to powerful medical levels, something that came from the underhanded way that decriminalizing it had to go, we have it more and more in a far more powerful than necessary form.
All because our government lied to us ever since the Nixon commission said it was safe and he as president ignored that because of his own personal bias. Just as we're seeing now with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom even the man who appointed him as said, was a bad idea. This had led since Nixon to a war on (citizens, not) drugs (as it failed in waring on drugs), where we found ourselves eventually with a very powerful form of pot that never appeared in nature.
I would suggest to anyone wanting to use pot, to seek the weaker forms, to learn they don't need to consume as much now a days to get reasonably high, to imbibe with reason as you would (or should) alcohol.
The less often you use it, the less it can become normalized in your system. Use at little as possible to enhance life, to "take the edge off" and not make it a life in and of itself. In that form, it can be very useful as an adjunct to life and not an end all, be all. Rather than use it and do nothing, use it and do something, safely, and legally.
We simply need to act like responsible adults. The ability now to eat THC (or CBD) is healthier than smoking it. Using a bong or water pipe (even better as it doesn't burn the substance just as a vape does not), is healthier. Vaping the oil or other such substance is better too than smoking it due to the heated smoke, the particulates hitting the lung's alveoli.
Let's face it, drugs aren't for kids. But if my own pre adult kids (or as adults) were to use a drug, I'd far more prefer it be cannabis, than literally any of our other of the scarier prospects out there, including alcohol. Deaths to cannabis are nearly if not completely non existent. Death due to alcohol, domestic violence, drunk driving, weapons charges on booze, etc., are astounding. The more we can get people to replace alcohol use with cannabis, the better we'll all be.
And then, there is the tax situation. Robbing drug cartels of their mainstay, removing crime from cannabis use. This isn't rocket science and states with legal cannabis are proving this to extraordinary degree. Including my own state of Washington. Where we are also leading the way on serious drugs like heroin use in needle exchanges and safe injection and use locations.
This is America and I've always been stunned at how our government continues to try to make decisions for us, that we should be making ourselves...if America is such a great and free nation.
Let us see it. Let us decide. And stop abusing us for mere political gain.
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