61–70 of 145 posts
After this, I hope that legalizing home distilling is next on the docket. I know it'd still be illegal federally, but you're much less likely to have the ATF bust down your door if the state law enforcement isn't interested in it.
I hope they don't. It's much easier to kill yourself and others by home distilling than by taking shrooms.
I mean I was pretty happy out here in the Midwest but you guys might pull me in with this one
As a Wisconsin transplant, how are you happy when you must shovel, and shovel, and shovel. If I had stayed for one more winter I would have gone on a shovel-armed homicidal spree.
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As a Wisconsin transplant, how are you happy when you must shovel, and shovel, and shovel. If I had stayed for one more winter I would have gone on a shovel-armed homicidal spree.
So pay someone else to do it, it's not at all expensive. The going rate here is $10-$30 a storm for a city sized driveway/sidewalk or shoveling a car out.
While they're at it I really wish they would fix the laws around cacti. Federal law bans Lophophora williamsii specifically for obvious reasons, but California bans the entire genus as well. This is dumb because the other member of the genus (diffusa) won't get you high, and is a very pretty cactus, which is legal to own elsewhere in the US.
Both are vey slow growing. It can take 25+ years for a plant to be large enough to produce flowers. This has led impatient jerks go out and (illegally) field collect them to the point where both species are considered threatened. For that reason, I think their possession should be regulated everywhere.
You should look at the history of Chestnut blight in the US. Due to the blight the US government directed people to chop down chestnut trees by the millions. If instead, they had allowed the blighted trees to continue to live, we may have discovered some genetic mutations that would have allowed the species to survive. Proactive regulation is not always the best move.
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I get that this is a joke, but the mushrooms that distort your sense of size are Amanita Muscaria, which are already legal in every state except Louisiana.
I was not aware that any species of hallucinogenic mushrooms can selectively distort your sense of size (ie. apart from the general distortion of all senses and perceptions with any hallucinogenic drug)
I think this is going to lead to a lot of unforeseen problems. Brick structures will be much more vulnerable once literally anyone can take one of these and become twice as large. And once you've had a mushroom, if you get the right kind of flower in your system you'd be an unstoppable fire-throwing menace. Then it doesn't matter what kind of gun control is on the books. I just don't know what they're thinking.
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"While We're gaining some rights back (LGBT, prohibition), but losing others (privacy, free speech)." I am hopeful that if the decriminalization and legalization of psychedelics continues, and if they ever become anywhere near as popular as they were in the 60's, they will usher in a renaissance of artistic creativity and positive social and political transformation. It likely won't be a replay of the 60's, but it co…
>> a renaissance of artistic creativity and positive social and political transformation. For all the art that occurred, there were some huge downsides. Getting high and communing with nature is all well and good, until a certain percentage start climbing the trees. We remember the pop songs can came from those times. We forget the broken bones and twisted ankles.
Yes, there certainly were many negative consequences of drug abuse during that era. They still continue, and I don't want to minimize that at all. It's critically important that we help people to use these substances constructively and knowledgeably, rather than ignorantly, irresponsibly, and destructively.
I do have some hope that it'll turn out better this time because the means of communication and distributing useful information is so much more effective these days than it was in the 60's and 70's. We now have the internet and resources like erowid to help, not to mention NGO's like Dance Safe that do drug testing at concerts. Much more could and should still be done, though, to make drug use safer and more constructive.
On the other hand, we shouldn't let the negative, destructive aspects of drug abuse blind us to the positive potential of constructive drug use. Many of the cultural, social, and political things we value today came from or were greatly influenced by psychedelics.
You talk about communing with nature -- yes, there's that, but that's not the empty, navel-gazing activity that many offhandedly discard it as. From communing with nature comes a higher regard and value of nature, the desire to be free from pollution, for eating healthy food, a greater concern with one's environment and a greater care for plants and animals. These are all positive things that we desperately need more of to counteract the forces within our society which are destroying the environment, polluting our food and water, and destroying bidiversity.
Such concern with the environment, which is relatively mainstream today, was considered kooky and weird in the 70's when it took root, and it was influenced by just such a "communing with nature" that psychedelics opened people up to.
That's just one, political example, where psychedelics had a positive effect on the world. Odds are that most of the music we listen to was greatly influenced by psychedelics and other drugs, as were many of the books we read and movies we watch. The internet and technology was influenced by psychedelics.
If we expand this to non-psychedelic drugs, the influence is even greater, as much of the history of the world is the history of humanity's encounter with plants and other substances which we would consider drugs. It's such a huge part of who we are, and the abject failure of prohibition shows that it's nearly impossible to deny access to these substances without massively negative social consequences -- ones I would argue that greatly outweigh the negative consequences of drug abuse itself.
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I hope they don't. It's much easier to kill yourself and others by home distilling than by taking shrooms.
The government shouldn't be in the business of protecting people from themselves.
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I was not aware that any species of hallucinogenic mushrooms can selectively distort your sense of size (ie. apart from the general distortion of all senses and perceptions with any hallucinogenic drug)
eating any kind of mushroom makes you larger, but only very slightly
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Wouldn't making it a protected class just be a roundabout way of making drug tests illegal? Are there any other side effects of doing this? Other than not being able to fire people for talking about how lit they got the night before, I suppose.
Talking about the night before is already protected in CA. You cannot take any action against an employee in CA for off duty conduct.