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Should Cannabis (marijuana) be legalized?
We all know why pot smokers want the devil's cabbage legalized... But what about nonsmokers? Even my parents who are uptight conservatives are starting to recognize and accept that marijuana may in fact be a legitimate source of tax revenue.
Thoughts?
I personally feel that the excuse "Legalizing marijuana and/or all drugs will send kids the message that drugs are okay to use" is a scapegoat and a poor excuse for uninvolved parents. If you think that your kid would suddenly go out and buy heroin if it were legal, then that reflects on your parenting techniques! You should be instilling these morals in your children, regardless of whether or not drugs are legal or illegal.
Thoughts?
I personally feel that the excuse "Legalizing marijuana and/or all drugs will send kids the message that drugs are okay to use" is a scapegoat and a poor excuse for uninvolved parents. If you think that your kid would suddenly go out and buy heroin if it were legal, then that reflects on your parenting techniques! You should be instilling these morals in your children, regardless of whether or not drugs are legal or illegal.
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
The problem is what properties the plant holds, and its different effects on different people.
It's a controlled substance because it's an hallucinogenic.
It's what people do with the plant that is crazy, not Mother Nature.
Although I think it should be made freely and legally available to people like MS sufferers, for example.
Let me tell you my views as an ex- cannabis smoker and as an experienced schoolteacher. In this country 'skunk' smoking (an extremely strong hybrid of 'grass') is everywhere amongst the young and lighter varieties or resin with the old. Actually kids do go out and buy heroin whether its legal or not - and in today's society in the west most of them do the opposite of what their parents advise, they follow their peer group.I know this from teenagers I've counselled on a one-to -one basis regarding various problems and also from talking to the children of friends who are good,caring parents.
Smoking cannabis,taking drugs, drinking alcohol are unnecessary and potentially harmful pursuits (and not recommended by Buddha)
The fact that cannabis is a plant is irrelevent, there are also various plants which contain lethal poisons which we wouldn't want to grow around our children either.
Relaxing the cannabis laws in this country (as well as the creation of all-night drinking laws) has meant that here in the city young kids are reeling about smashed out of their heads on skunk and cheap alcohol on a daily basis and many young people at weekends are often rowdy and vomiting on the streets and buses regularly because of the extended drinking laws.
No I'm not a right-wing prude, far from it, I'm speaking from my own experience and I'm just being realistic.
If cannabis is useful for MS in controlled dosages then it could be made availabe as tincture on prescription from a doctor.
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Does Amsterdam have a drug addiction problem? Does Europe have alcohol addiction problems? Their drinking age is significantly lower than ours.
I will direct you to an article entitled "Don't Believe The Hype! Potent Pot, So What?" Link: http://blog.norml.org/2009/05/14/dont-believe-the-hype-potent-pot-so-what/
On one hand it could increase governmental tax revenues, help those with medical problems, and ease stress in some lol.
If the government legalized it, it would be controlled and wouldn't be the crazy stuff it is now (harkening back to what Dazzle was mentioning).
On the other hand, it can be a detrimental substance to some, and is also against the vows some have taken. Depends on your view really (lol isn't perception everywhere). If it clouds your mind then that could be impeding the Dharma.
If it's legal, and talked about and there is more of an understanding of how to be responsible with it - understanding it's pros and cons - then no I don't think it's going to cause kids to grow up to be junkies.
However if we continue to treat it as such a taboo, then kids, as kids do so well, naturally want to rebel and do exactly what their parents are telling them not to. I know I did
There is no awareness of how it could be used resposibly.
Only some places can sell the Cannabis and you must be over 18 and smoke it in the place that sell it. thats the only way to do it.
If someone grows the plant at home, partakes of it personally, or sells it to someone for a profit, I couldn't care less. They're your Cheese Puffs, so go nuts.
Driving on public roads in any meaningful state of intoxication, however, regardless of one's choice of intoxicant, is arguably a different matter.
Excuse me... I was replying to your question regarding alcohol addiction. And I don't need the news to tell me that alcohol consumption in this country, amongst the young especially, is causing major problems.
Psychologically, it is more dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.
For me, my former experiences with marijuana were quite positive (although I stopped using it when I was 21 years old due to discovering sexual morals).
However, for many, marijuana becomes very debilitating, resulting in strong loss of motivation, psychological dependency and eventually depression.
Marijuana is more harmful than many regard it to be.
Until then though, I believe it's utterly wrong to purchase pot through the means that people do now-a-days. That money funds violent cartels who murder, kidnap, and behead people. All that drug money comes from the same self-absorbed teens who want to "make love, not war" and at the same time buy pot from thugs like those in Mexico.
My problems with anti marijuana laws have to do with the roots of such laws being greed and racism. Seriously, the two biggest lobby groups for the criminalization of marijuana were dupont, who wanted a navy contract for nylon rope (wasn't going to happen so long as cheap hemp was so readily available), and a confedration of southern/southwestern states in the US who wanted a legal way to target blacks and mexicans, the predominant user groups in their areas, and remove their right to vote.
Where I work, most people drink alot of alcohol. It is all relatively mainstream, including their everday lives.
But where I live (in a small community), many people smoke marijuana. Their lifestyles are a merry-go-round of disfunctional relationships. Many of these people are in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's, still habitually puffing away, with the prematurely aged facial features.
When we were young, we were the marijuana smokers. We had many good times and today all remain good friends.
However, only two of that core group of seven 'hash brothers' still smoke. They are the two who are permanently addicted and damaged.
Marijuana is insidious. It creeps up on people.
That is why most smokers in their youth give up marijuana in their adulthood.
Ansterdam is known for its sex and drugs. People mostly go there for those reasons....to see and partake of the 'Red Light' district with its prostitutes and sex shops, and to watch live sex shows,.. and to smoke cannabis in the cafe's and buy other drugs and more cannabis from the dealers....and yes there are lots of drug addicts there.
I totally agree with what DD said in the previous post. I too have one or two old friends who still smoke cannabis. They suffer from depression and paranoia. One of them who was once an incredibly bright and talented musician now lives in a filthy flat, claiming benefits, still blasted out of his head all the time, clearly very damaged mentally.
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Just because something is common doesn't mean that it's safe. Alcohol is very prevalent in today's culture, but it still causes a great deal of medical problems (i.e. failing liver) and easily kills more people than marijuana from drunk driving, alcohol poisoning, etc. In 2001, an estimated 75,766 alcohol-attributed deaths and 2.3 million years of potential lives lost were attributable to the harmful effects of excessive alcohol use. Personally, I would take the legalization of marijuana over alcohol any day! I've never lost a friend to marijuana, but I have lost several to alcoholism.
A 2003 study showed that out of almost 70,000 people, not one death had resulted from use of marijuana. You have no greater chance of dying from smoking a marijuana joint than you do from eating a Big Mac. Chances are, and speaking from experience as a mental health services professional and drug abuse counselor, most of the time when a person has an adverse reaction to smoking cannabis, the drug has been laced with something like PCP or other drug to enhance the effect. This is what tends to kill people, not the marijuana itself.
I'm interested in learning more about your views on marijuana, but I would like to see some references where it's more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco.
~nomad
In the event that the Europe or the US legalised marijuana, it would be grown far more successfully and cheaply in rural areas of South Africa than in sunnier states of the US or anywhere in rainy Europe and that would increase demand from South African producers. Cheap labour would obviously play a role here, as it always does.
Monocropping of marijuana would replace the growing of food crops -- and cash cropping is already a major problem in much of Africa as GM agriculture increases. As soon as marijuana from Asia or Latin America became cheaper for the West to import or a better quality product appeared, the South African market would slump, leaving people with unsaleable fields of hemp and not enough maize or other food crops.
One of the reasons for Zimbabwe's food crisis was its reliance on cashcropping, mostly from Turkish burley tobacco which in the 1960s made tobacco farmers in then-Rhodesia very wealthy. This kind of agriculture destroys the self-sufficiency of developing countries of the Third World.
The debate really isn't just about how addictive dope might be for affluent white pot smokers in the First World. There are much broader ethical parameters than that. A Theravada friend of mine says his understanding of Right Relationships is drawn from his study of political economics.
Mary
Mary
I just find many of the arguments here limited to certain perspectives, as if there would be no global repercussions. I wanted to present another perspective.
Mary
I have been reading a book on depression by a psychologist name Bruce E. Levine who believes that an extremist consumerist society fills our children's minds with uncompromising imperatives ("Do well in school; go to a good college; make lots of money" -- "Be attractive/beautiful" -- "Be a doctor/lawyer/engineer" -- "Buy a nice car" -- "Live in a penthouse" -- etc.) that many children cannot live up to (the sad fact is that not every child has what it takes to land one of these high-paying specialized jobs, and our society cannot sustain itself on doctors/lawyers/etc. anyway). When some of these kids inevitably cannot fit into these predestined boxes, they turn inward (depression) or outward (drug abuse or other reckless behaviors). This is a largely middle-class phenomenon. On the the other front, in our lower-class urban communities, young people must contend with the realities of gang violence, crumbling family infrastructure, etc. Is it any wonder that so many of them turn to drugs? I hope this makes sense, because I'm trying to summarize several chapters of an eloquent, well-researched book into one paragraph.
My point is, I think we are going after the wrong animal by blaming the plant itself for a problem whose genesis is in ourselves, and the way we raise our children, and the social constructs and imperatives we have created. This ties in quite well with Buddhism. To paraphrase Ajahn Chah, you cannot find happiness by changing what it "out there" in the world. Only within your own mind complex can you find the answer.
Thank you for a different perspective, Mary. I think we might be able to make much more headway in persuading people to stop using cannabis if they understood the global effects: I have great trust in the idealism of the young - just look at the Fair Trade movement.
Legalisation or decriminalisation are not the answer, because the real question is not about law but about the need so many express by mood/state-altering chemicals - a need that seems to arise from psycho-emotional hunger or woundedness. As a society, we need to find the ways to feed this hunger and bind up the wounds. Penal laws can never do that.
You remind us that the effects of so much need spread far beyond our frontiers. The relics of colonialism are still with us and I am grateful to you for being a witness to us.
Marijuana is one case in point. It is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that tobacco is far more addictive and far more lethal than marijuana, but it remains legal (though much more controlled than it used to be, thank goodness). Why is that? It's purely economics. Tobacco rakes in billions of dollars a year to the tobacco companies. So why then is marijuana illegal? It could also make big profits one would think. Is it a moral issue? The reason marijuana is illegal has nothing to do with drugs or morality. Marijuana comes from hemp plants, and in the 19th century, the third leading energy supply (after coal and oil) was hemp oil. Well, those fat-cat oil and coal tycoons didn't like the competition, so they manipulated Congress into declaring marijuana illegal, using completely made up "facts" and horror stories about the dangers of marijuana to drum up public support. In other words, they just wanted to get rid of a rival.
The only way to effectively combat drugs (or any other type of addiction) is to provide a healthy alternative that provides at least as much satisfaction as the addiction. That's a basic psychological tenet that is completely ignored by the idiots in Congress who only are interested in money and power. If you were to, let's say, somehow convince people to renounce desire because it is the root of all suffering, how much of a drug problem do you think there would be? Wouldn't the billions and trillions governments spend on counterdrug efforts (which only serve to enrich the contractors who carry them out) be better spent on such a global effort?
I know, I'm just a silly dreamer...
Palzang
We could call it Soma!
But jokes aside, while I agree that tobacco is more likely to actually kill you, my smoking of cigars and pipes has no affect whatsoever on my mind. Marijuana does. I know plenty of otherwise decent kids who became sedentary losers once they took up pot smoking. They do nothing, they waste all their money on it, they become mental screwballs, and they just generally are not interested in much else besides their high. So even though I'm guilty of corrupting many of my peers into the joining the world of cigar chewers, none of us have suffered financially, mentally, or emotionally as a result. Even physically, it will have little to no affect since I smoke them only rarely.
You're right, but that could be said about any substance. I’ve worked with people from both worlds to include addicts who can function in society without difficulty and those who cannot. There’s a lot more than simple drug use that goes into its effects on people’s psychosocial conditioning. Each person's biological systems react differently, and each person has a different mental capability which allows them to deal with situations better than others. Personally, I would love to see marijuana legalized because I think that it creates (as Palzang mentioned) a generation of unnecessary criminals. I’ve seen too many good people who use the drug recreationally and function without difficulty locked away with violent criminals. However, I don’t see this happening anytime soon because I think that drugs like marijuana face unfortunate preexisting biases on both sides of the argument. It’s hard for true research to be done on the effects of the drug’s long term use because each side has something to gain and tend to skew the results in their favor.
~nomad :cool:
I’m sure there’s someone out there who would want it outlawed. Me, no. I enjoy my caffeine fix!
~nomad
What planet do you live on?
Read this from the American Heart Association:
"Nicotine is an addictive drug. It causes changes in the brain that make people want to use it more and more. In addition, addictive drugs cause unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. The good feelings that result when an addictive drug is present — and the bad feelings when it's absent — make breaking any addiction very difficult. Nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Palzang
Not true. Very few people are aware that you don't actually inhale pipe tobacco or cigars. (It's very unpleasant if you do) They are not used out of addiction, but for the enjoyment of the taste.
During college, I would smoke quite a bit on a weekend and then go maybe a month without smoking my pipe. No withdrawals, no cravings. Nothing. That's why so many pipe smokers are regarded as being calm and introspective. To them, smoking is a hobby rather than an addiction.
I am about as addicted to pipe tobacco and cigars as I am tuna sandwiches; which is to say that I enjoy both but can live without either.
I was just expressing my opinion. I was focusing on the psychological aspects of health rather than the physical.
I know people who do inhale pipe and cigar smoke - although admittely, you are correct, it's not conventional to do so.
However, there is a high incidence of oral cancer, and by virtue of the fact that the saliva absorbs nicotine quite strongly, it enters the system via other channels, none of which lead to anything particularly beneficial.
I think the point is also worth making at this juncture that, whether cannabis is legalised or not - Buddhism still advises against its use.
Lgalisation, therefore, is largely academic. Legally available or not - we're still discouraged by the Precepts from using it......
Dream on, brother.
Palzang
I’ll give you that. Still, alcohol has significant psychological impact on its users just like marijuana does. The only difference is that alcohol’s effects are socially acceptable.
~nomad :cool:
I hate to see wanton drunkedness in the streets, and there's only one thing that is less dignified and more distasteful than a completely rat-arsed bloke, and that is a completely rat-arsed woman.....
I cannot in all honesty fnd anything about that, that is socially acceptable.
However, I am in no doubt that it was not that level of drinking you had been thinking of......;)
grackle
You’re right that I wasn’t talking about the flat-on-their-ass drunks. I was speaking more about the prevalence and acceptance of alcohol as a legal substance, and not necessarily acceptance of people who drink themselves into oblivion.
Just my $0.02
~nomad
I agree with you! I don’t see the logic behind banning a substance that can have significant healing effects for the ill! Even if marijuana isn’t completely legalized, I think that it should be opened up for medicinal use. As for some people being effected by drugs: everyone’s bodies react differently to certain stimuli. Some people have natural abilities to resist the psychoactive effects of certain drugs while others are extremely susceptible to them. I remember that I used to work in a recording studio and marijuana seemed to be everywhere. One engineer could smoke and hallucinate while another would smoke and seem to be completely unaffected. I’ve seen the same thing throughout the years with alcohol in that people develop or have some sort of tolerance (normal or reversed) to its effects. Crazy thing, we humans are!
~nomad
Well neither of us will convince each other. I can't speak for many people, but I am personally not addicted. I can go weeks or even months without smoking and feel no different. It's just a hobby.
And if I should die from it? Well, you've got to die of something, and you don't get a medal for living longer, so I might as well enjoy what I die of.
Smoking weed once a month is recreation. Smoking weed every day is addiction.
Going out for drinks on the weekend is recreation. Drinking a six-pack every night is alcoholism.
Smoking a cigar on poker night or at your friend's graduation is celebration. Smoking a cigar every night could give you cancer.
Something about the middle path comes to mind.
I say make 'em pay. You wanna go on a vacation? Pay for it. Go into some compound, behind walls and do your thing, or stay out in the country away from the folks. It should only be done in a controllable, supportive environment conducive to free expression and not one subject to incursions of just about any stripe. Or do it in a worship setting and keep the folks there till the high no longer clouds judgment. Just don't let my cwazy nephew carry it home with him with his beer, I entreat thee.
Just don't go altering your mind and drive around town whenever you want, putting everyone at risk. If the stuff is not pure or the mind not pure real mischief can come to the surface and be acted upon. The normal mind, not "anointed" with these higher psychic "powers'" would most always have access to some kind of sound judgment that would curtail reckless reactions and such.
Also, people should not drive or wield weapons under the influence of anger, either. That's another powerful "drug" that makes us throw away all our normal judgment. But that's another subject which I bring out here just to put this issue in a different perspective. When you're high, at least you know your intentions and what you love. When you allow yourself to get angry you don't know anything at all for a while. That's when we're most dangerous. Can make drugs look like milk.
Crazy! Let me flee from that evil.