211–220 of 290 posts
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Presumably OP means deaths linked to the production, distribution, and sale of illegal drugs. Think Mexican drug cartels, gang wars over drug selling operations, etc.
Ok that accounts for maybe 150,000. Staggeringly high. But I still call Hyperbole on 'millions'
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Really? Everyone who drinks alcohol and coffee and smokes tobacco? I find that extremely hard to believe. Conversely, all of the drug users I know are employed and earn between 1x and 3x the national average household income. At jobs where they're highly respected for their contributions. Again, maybe that's just anecdote. But the "anecdote" criticism cuts both ways. The only real difference is that I'm not justifyin…
Anecdotes aren't good for determining truth, but if you vote based on personal anecdotes you get a large statistical sample of the population when they count the votes up.
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Really? Everyone who drinks alcohol and coffee and smokes tobacco? I find that extremely hard to believe. Conversely, all of the drug users I know are employed and earn between 1x and 3x the national average household income. At jobs where they're highly respected for their contributions. Again, maybe that's just anecdote. But the "anecdote" criticism cuts both ways. The only real difference is that I'm not justifyin…
Anecdotes aren't good for determining truth, but if you vote based on personal anecdotes you get a large statistical sample of the population when they count the votes up.
You're saying that by sampling opinions that are formed in small neighborhoods around voters, we can get a picture of ground truth -- even if reality is distorted in various ways around those small neighborhoods.
This can work, but not in the case where there's something masking a portion of the data set such that personal anecdote isn't indicative of underlying reality, even locally.
In that case, anecdotes aren't even locally accurate, and that effect amortizes over the voting population to result in a globally inaccurate picture of reality.
Which is the case here. Criminalizing and stigmatizing drugs means that grandma doesn't necessarily know successful son-in-law smokes pot on the weekend, for example.
Wow. The title is click-baity, but the article does make me empathize with the mother's position. I remember being a young kid in school and seeing the few students that just seemed so mentally imbalanced that they couldn't even exist comfortably, let alone study. My school became a center for "emotionally disturbed" children for the county. For the half-dozen of these students, they had 3 (very strong) teachers. Whe…
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> if someone took the time to isolate and synthesize the active ingredients in weed and made those available in prescription form What is the advantage of this over raw plant material?
> What is the advantage of this over raw plant material? Consistency.
However, if consistent effect is the goal, I want to suggest that oral administration is not ideal in the first place, and that oral administration of isolated chemicals even less so.
Achieving the latter is more accessible via slow, careful titration via vaporization or smoking of high-quality plant matter.
This is the case at least for me and people I know, including several patients with otherwise debilitating illnesses.
Additionally, I think that the ability to garden and grow medicines (not just cannabis, but plant medicines generally) is a great way for patients to gain some control (or at least the sense of control) over their illness. It also is often more economically viable as well.
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> I'm sure your raging 9-year-old kid would chill out on a strong dose of heroin, too Read what you've said again; do you realize how completely ridiculous this sounds? A "strong dose" of heroin, to a 9-year-old who is opiate naive, will obviously not cause them to "chill out." It will cause them to horribly itch, turn green in the face, violently vomit, alternate between pouring sweat and feeling freezing cold, moan…
> Cannabis, even at a very "strong dose," will cause none of this. It's ridiculous to compare cannabis to heroin, but it's still worth pointing out that giving a strong dose to someone who is 9 is a very bad idea that would probably be very unpleasant for the kid. There can be a tendency for people to overcompensate to "reefer madness" propaganda and tell people there are no issues with marijuana. It's probably a lot…
Absolutely - I hope my comment didn't read otherwise.
I'm just pointing out that the effects of a strong dose of heroin are nothing less than an urgent medical emergency and possibly a life-or-death situation.
The effects of a strong dose of cannabis are, as you say, likely to be quite unpleasant, but for other, less dramatic reasons.
Additionally, it is much, much easier to find a therapeutically effective dose of cannabis that is not unpleasant (or even otherwise noticeable) than with heroin or, for that matter, most other medical treatments. This is the killer feature of cannabis.
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Ok that accounts for maybe 150,000. Staggeringly high. But I still call Hyperbole on 'millions'
Brazil alone must have had more than 150,000 deaths attributed to drug trafficking in the last 30 years.
The premise is thus: every nation in North and South America must perfectly legalize all illegal drugs across the board for use, production and distribution (any imperfect law structures could cause illegal behavior), else the nations that do not establish perfect systems are responsible for all ills related to said non-perfect legalization no matter where they occur in the hemisphere. That's what is being proposed in concept if you extrapolate it.
I support the complete legalization of all drugs. However, trying to pin all ills on the US, is nothing more than a political convenience. It occurs with practically every bad thing on the planet. The US does not control the world; take China as one example when it comes to drugs, or broader Asia (most of which frequently shares China's general sentiment on drugs) - the US didn't impose those policies on China. The US doesn't control Latin America any more than it controls China or Asia. The same mentality that has existed in the US regarding the war on drugs, is in fact very common throughout the rest of the planet, including in Latin America.
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> Terrorists are an existential threat Give me a break. I've never heard a more hyperbolic statement even from diehard warmongers. There is no conceivable way that terrorists threaten our national existence/security. Even several orders of magnitude more attacks a year would be barely a blip in terms of actual casualties.
I understand your point but as a New Yorker, an order of magnitude greater would be 20 buildings or a nigh-complete distruction of downtown. Sorry if my comment is emotion driven but the above comment seems very cold. Edit: just reread your comment and several orders is 200 buildings?
Realistically, as cold as this sounds, a terrorist attack which managed to level downtown would not even pose an existential threat to the US.
On short term memory: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article...
On dopamine levels: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcolleg...
and the development of brains in adolescents: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyt.2013.00...
So the real question is whether it's worth the potential side effects? Perhaps in this case, since it seems the parents have researched their options and hopefully continue to research future options.
A cure should be counterbalanced with its negative side effects. That seems obvious to say, but often I hear the misguided statement or see the attitude that marijuana is not associated with any problems. Sure, it's not lethal and shouldn't be Schedule I, but it's not something that should be taken lightly as a long term treatment.