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Should Cannabis (marijuana) be legalized?
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im new here and had been in the shaows for a bit, let me say my spelling is bad as i was never in school, i tougth myself to read and write thats why i havnt done this befor:D anyway i live in east london and all around me r druges u name it there taking it and ther was a time in my life when i was tempted cannabis should be legalized as then we whould at least be able to stop all these young kids and i mean young,(one of my friends son was taking it he was 10 and getting it from a mate at school)i does so much damage to ther little brains.i just keep thinking that we r all going to have to deal with a hole genarayson of metal heath probles,anyway thats what i think and it does scare me so sorry again for the spelling i hope u understand what im trying to say
ps your all so loving and warm and gave me the corage to write:)
Just do the best you can with your spelling and we'll do our best to understand what you're saying. I understood your post quite well, by the way.
If you ever want a little help with your spelling, just PM me and I'd be glad to give you a hand. I've already got a couple of fun ideas that might help so let me know.
Hi newbee,
welcome on board. Don't worry about your spelling, it's the content of your posts that's important and I agree with your observations. I don't know where the answer lies. A lot of work needed by the powers that be to engage young people and reach out to them.
I guess there will always be some who fall victim to drugs. Some people I knew went down badly after getting into drugs and they weren't deprived or from some estate, so it can get anyone.
Namaste
PS. something about it here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/the_p_word/newsid_8084000/8084968.stm
Hey Ya, TravisMago! Good to see you're joining us for discussions.
One implication of your above statement would be that legislators, judges, and governmental executives would be guilty of illegal acts every day, in that their decisions are intentional and do usually inflict harm on someone.
The problem with governmental decisions is that when the interests of one group are protected, the toes of all the others are usually stepped on. By very definition, if one wins everyone else loses.
I don't know what you mean, though, in another sense, either. Are you saying that I can take substances that cloud my judgment and yet not be called to account for that act if harm to others occurs while I am under the influence? Should I not minimally be charged with careless disregard for the safety of others? To my way of thinking, that lack of good intent is intentional in the negative sense. In other words, negligence is intentional in that it shows complete lack of right intent. I think that there is some danger here that intent might sometimes be confused with the will. Lack of proper caution and care doth not constitute lack of intent, but lack of Right Intent, IMNSHO.
A great point.
I do not believe in judging another person's intent - we are not in their shoes so we have no place saying if their intent is positive or negative. However, I believe we are right to judge if the intent to commit an action was there in the first place.
I believe in cause and effect. If the cause is intentional (taking the drug), and the effect harms another - then it should be legally wrong. But I believe in exceptions to rules, as well. I think that cases would have to be examined per each situation. It is important to understand if the effects actually resulted directly from the cause.
So to answer more directly:
If the intent is to take the drug for it's effects, and it's effects lead to the harm of another - then the act should be illegal. We must learn to be accountable for our actions. Ignorance is not an excuse.
I believe that if legality was structured this way, there would be much less ignorance - it would be a necessity. We would all become more skillful.
So you seem to be saying, over the course of your several posts, that drug use should be illegal only after its use should it cause harm to others. Or perhaps you would even make that stronger and stipulate harm to self or others. I'll really have to think about that one a bit longer.
It seems, though, that laws could be reenacted to enable judges to dismiss cases wherein only small amounts of drugs were found and no reckless acts were alleged, as was once the case.
Oh how times have changed since the war on drugs campaigns started during the Reagan administration. I remember a job I once had and I was smoking Bidi cigarettes. Most people at work just assumed I was smoking pot. No problem! (Boston, late 1970s) :winkc: :winkc: :winkc: :winkc: :winkc: :winkc:
Ah, but the 70s were a very special time, from the time of the Nixon resignation to the inauguration of the Great Hoodwinker. The 70s were a second flowering of America, a time when the nation coasted blithely ever-forward from the victories achieved in 1945 and in the sixties.
The music from that time still moves my soul.
It was truly a great time to be alive. Those born after 1980 are truly much poorer than those born in the 50s and 60s. We need the Age of Aquarius to visit us again.
Now I am an alcoholic that don't drink, a smoker that don't smoke ( hur something else I did while I was away) ......... I don't want to forbid anyone - I just want them to be free of it around me because I don't dig their stink. OK?
I've never really been tempted myself to abuse drugs. In fact, I'm allergic to pot (my throat closes up and everything). And I'm not in favor of people abusing any substance. But I think that partial tolerance can eliminate crime and also allow for better harm reduction, as in the Netherlands.
Pot is not legal in the Netherlands. The only drugs legal there technically are mushrooms and so-called "smart drugs." Pot is tolerated. You can get busted for selling pot on the streets there. But not for smoking in a shop. They've also just put a ban on smoking tobacco indoors. The model is harm reduction not moralism. And it seems to be more sane and realistic than our American "just say no" attitude.
The Dutch are very tolerant people. They also have a massive alcohol abuse problem.
Palzang
I used to be soooo sooo pro-cannabis...
I have a friend that I look up to - my age.., smokes every 6 hours. He's seriously the smartest guy I've ever had contact with, a 'savant'......amazing logician, strategist..etc..a real athlete to, a fighter a natural born leader...ETC
... I'd let him preform brain surgery on me, if he just read how in a book 5 minutes ago.
He smokes I believe to keep from getting annoyed at people and life..to keep his demons at bay. (SMOKING IS FOR HIM)
Then I have a friend that smokes his brains out and doesn't respond unless you address him twice...doesn't know where he is half the time...ETC
(SMOKING IS NOT FOR HIM) unfortunately the average person is dumb as hell, irresponsible and smoking is not for them,
so the minority say "OHH HEY I CAN SMOKE and handle it legalize it!"
...well the rest can't so "NO LEGALIZE FOR YOU!!..."
Since I've been practicing Buddhism I am now seriously considering stopping pot smoking because of the Buddha's words on intoxicants. And I totally understand why he said them. I find that while I'm high I have very little interest in meditation or studying or anything else like that. This is not good. I would find it very hard to believe that anyone who is a regular pot smoker is making much spiritual progress. If they are, they'd no doubt increase their progress exponentially if they kept a clear head.
Another problem is that my wife, who is not a Buddhist, smokes the weed even more than I do. It's not going to be easy abstaining while the smoke is permeating the air every night in our home. But I'll just have to be determined.
Another side note. My brother, who's been a paramedic for 20 years now, told me that he gets calls every night on alcohol related emergencies. But not once in his whole career has there been a pot smoking related emergency.
If the government finds a way to make lots of cash from legalizing pot, just like they have with alcohol and cigarettes, then it will probably one day be totally legal.
I absolutely agree--and I do not smoke (anything) and I don't drink.
Smoking cannabis can enhance colors, sounds, smells, and even taste. Opiates, such as heroin, numb these feelings. It suppresses your central nervous system.
As for injesting cannabis for recreational purposes? As an occasional smoker my opinion may seem biased, however I believe it is up to an individual what they put into their body as long as it causes no harm to anyone else. This choice is removed entorely from people who chose to buy it in countries where it is illegal because production and distribution lie in the hands of gangsters and terrorists. I can tell you that in Northern Ireland, buying hash means putting bullets into paramilitary hands. If it were legalised then these organisations would have a major source of income removed.
From a buddhist perspective I don't think it is wrong as much as it is unskilful. Try meditating after a few hits and see what I mean.
it is definately no more dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol
It really isn't harmful. No toxic dose has ever been discovered. Nobody has ever died of using it.
Even if it WERE harmful--and I do think its use violates the precepts--that is irrelevant to legalization. It should be legal. Period.
it is far less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol. Thousands die of lung cancer every year and thousands die of alcohol poisoning. But nobody dies of marijuana.
I know this but he/she said that it was
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(2000): "The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435,000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75,000), toxic agents (55,000), motor vehicle crashes (43,000), incidents involving firearms (29,000), sexual behaviors (20,000), and illicit use of drugs (17,000)."
(Note: According to a correction published by the Journal on Jan. 19, 2005, "On page 1240, in Table 2, '400,000 (16.6)' deaths for 'poor diet and physical inactivity' in 2000 should be '365,000 (15.2).' A dagger symbol should be added to 'alcohol consumption' in the body of the table and a dagger footnote should be added with 'in 1990 data, deaths from alcohol-related crashes are included in alcohol consumption deaths, but not in motor vehicle deaths. In 2000 data, 16,653 deaths from alcohol-related crashes are included in both alcohol consumption and motor vehicle death categories." Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, Jan. 19, 2005, Vol. 293, No. 3, p. 298.)
Source:
Mokdad, Ali H., PhD, James S. Marks, MD, MPH, Donna F. Stroup, PhD, MSc, Julie L. Gerberding, MD, MPH, "Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000," Journal of the American Medical Association, March 10, 2004, Vol.
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Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.
Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.
Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.
They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.
"This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."
Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar.
While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
Source: Dr. Jack E. Henningfield, Ph.D. for NIDA. Reported by: Philip J. Hilts, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1994 "Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use."
Image courtesy of Drug War Facts.
http://www.medicalmj.org/
Conclusions Raise Serious Doubts Regarding The Legitimacy Of U.S. Drug Policy[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] December 3, 2002 - Washington, DC, USA
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Washington, DC: Marijuana experimentation by adolescents does not lead to the use of harder drugs, according to the findings of a RAND study released Monday. The study dismisses the so-called "gateway theory," and raises doubts regarding the legitimacy of federal drug policies based upon its premise.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"While the gateway theory has enjoyed popular acceptance, scientists have always had their doubts," said lead researcher Andrew Morral, associate director of RAND's Public Safety and Justice unit. "Our study shows that these doubts are justified."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]After analyzing data from the U.S. National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (which measures patters and frequency of self-reported drug use among Americans), researchers concluded that teenagers who tried hard drugs were predisposed to do so whether or not they tried marijuana.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"The people who are predisposed to use drugs and have the opportunity to use drugs are more likely than others to use both marijuana and harder drugs," Morral said. "Marijuana typically comes first because it is more available. Once we incorporated these facts into our mathematical model of adolescent drug use, we could explain all of the drug use associations that have been cited as evidence of marijuana's gateway effect."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Morral said that the study raises serious questions about the legitimacy of basing national drug policy decisions on the false assumption that pot is a gateway drug. "For example, it suggests that policies aimed at reducing or eliminating marijuana availability are unlikely to make any dent in the hard drug problem," he said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]NORML Foundation Executive Director Allen St. Pierre praised the study's findings, noting that population estimates on drug use have consistently shown that most people who try marijuana never graduate to harder drugs. "Statistically, for every 104 Americans who have tried marijuana, there is only one regular user of cocaine, and less than one user of heroin," St. Pierre said. "For the overwhelming majority of marijuana smokers, pot is clearly a 'terminus' rather than a gateway."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]St. Pierre further speculated that among the minority of marijuana smokers who do graduate to harder substances, it's pot prohibition rather than the use of marijuana itself that often serves as a doorway to the world of hard drugs. "The more users become integrated in an environment where, apart from cannabis, hard drugs can also be obtained, the greater the chances they will experiment with harder drugs," he said.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Previous studies criticizing the gateway theory include a Canadian Senate report released this past fall, and a 1999 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. The latter study concluded that marijuana was not a "gateway drug to the extent that it is a cause or even that it is the most significant predictor of serious drug abuse." It noted that the "most consistent predictors of serious drug abuse appear to be intensity of marijuana use and co-occurring psychiatric disorders or a family history of psychopathology, including alcoholism."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]For more information, please contact either Allen St. Pierre or Paul Armentano of The NORML Foundation at (202) 483-8751. Results of the RAND study appear in the December edition of the British Journal Addiction.[/FONT]
http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5490
To rid ourselves of our delusions, we have to start by knowing every belief as it truly is. this knowing what is true is not obtained by just listening to what others have to say, but only after personal verification.
Do not believe anything to be true because legends say so. Do not believe anything to be true because scriptures say so. Do not believe anything to be true because it conforms to tradition.Do not believe anything to be true because it cause sensation and spreads far and wide. do not believe anything to be true because ...it follows logic. Do not believe anything to be true because it fits philosophical theories.
Do not believe anything to be true because it utilizes common sense to prove its self. Do not believe anything to be true because it fits your preconceived notions. do not believe anything to be true because AUTHORITY figures say so. Do not believe anything to be true immediatly because your teacher says so.
i read this once i cannot remeber where but it makes sense in this case i think
Palzang
yes sir i did
Ps i do not partake of marijuana because it is illegal
Palzang
There has recently been a case of marijuana helping a boy with autism and another article about medical marijuana being prescribed to kids with ADHD (with fairly good results). Everyone's brain chemistry is a bit different. For some a bit of weed can help with concentration while other times it can make you scatterbrain or paranoid.
Though common sense says that drugs are foolish.
I started smoking pot at age 13. My use increased through high school as it became more available to me. My transcript shows a lot of variability for grades but generally they seem to increase from Ds and Fs to Bs and Cs. So although not statistically significant, there appears to be a positive correlation to the amount of pot smoked and getting good grades.
It gets more interesting with college.
I took a year off of college and in that time became a bigtime habitual marijuana smoker. I was in the 99th percentile of marijuana smokers, that is out of a thousand marijuana smokers, only 10 smoked as much as I did. All day every day.
Now I get into college, study biology, chemistry, physics, advanced math, biochemistry, some philosophy and easy electives and graduate with a 3.5 GPA, all the while working 20-40 hours a week doing research in labs, such as studying how peptides regulate gene expression, or researching the molecular mechanisms a virus uses to evade our immune system.
After school I continued to be 'stoned' all the time, and getting paid to help manage a multi-million dollar lab and do complex experiments.
I quit smoking pot about a year ago. For about three days I felt a little weird, but it was not nearly as difficult as quitting tobacco or coffee.
Also when I started smoking pot the therapists thought I might have bipolar disorder, but within 12 years of pot smoking all symptoms of bipolar were gone.
Thank god that the extremely addictive and highly toxic drug alcohol was legal when I was in high school, otherwise I would have had cheap access to large quanitites of it like I did pot, and may have followed my father's path. What was his path? Alcoholism that landed him in the ICU half a dozen times this year.
If I could get my dad addicted to marijuana instead of alcohol, the continual destruction of his liver would end, the continual destruction of brain cells would end, his alcoholic ketoacidosis would end, his continual gastro-intestinal bleeding would end, his lowered blood cell count would go back to normal, he would no longer have anemia, he would no longer be malnourished with his body wasting away, and since alcoholic dementia is reversible, his dementia might decrease. These are all symptoms directly caused by alcoholism which are not found in pot smokers, but for some reason most people (in the US anyway) think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol.
I'm not saying smoking pot is good, just that its risks have been blown way out of proportion.
And to those of you that argue that cannabis use violates the 5th precept. I would like to point out that you are not entitled to impose a 'Buddhist Sharia' on others.