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KingCracker wrote:Thats what I thought when I read what he said too. Everyone HAS to eat. Compare that to how many people (even teens that lie about it to be cool) smoke pot and it would be way less then 1% you cant compare that crap. Thats like airlines saying that flying is safer then driving because they have fewer accidents. Well yea, thats because pretty much everyone has 2 cars at their houses, how many airplanes are their?

You realise that even adjusted to X in 100.000 where X is the number of people who die while travelling per 100.000 for that mode of transportation per year, fatalities in cars massively outnumber fatalities in planes? Statistically speaking, flying is far, far safer than driving.

dogma wrote:

jbunny wrote:Making it legal will not stop the flow of illegal (untaxed) pot. If anything it will be harder to control what is legal and what is illegal. Alcohol is legal, yet you can still get illegal alcohol.

But you can't get illegal alcohol in the same quantities you could during prohibition, and the vast majority of states do not have a significant issue with the production and consumption of illegal alcohol. Compare this to the time when alcohol was illegal and bootlegging served as one of the primary revenue streams for the various crime syndicates across the United States.

jbunny wrote:
Pot is also a gateway drug. It leads peple to harder drugs, like Meth, coke, crack, and others. Of course Alcohol can do the same, but rationalizing that one bad thing is legal so every bad thing should be legal is flawed at best.

The gateway drug theory is almost total nonsense. It relies on the notion that marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol are somehow causal by nature; ie. using marijuana makes one more likely to use other drugs. The theory is deeply flawed because it fails to account for variance in the relative availability of the 'gateway drugs' when compared to 'harder' substances. The result is that it becomes impossible to establish anything beyond a correlative relationship; meaning only that people who use one drug are more likely to use other drugs. Note also that raw correlation makes no reference to the frequency of use.

I am assuming you don't live in Alabama Tennessee, Kentucky, or Georgia? You can get moonshine just as easily as you can other drugs. WhileI assume as I know far more bootleggers than I know drug dealers.

Wrexasaur@ My point was that making something that is illegal legal, will not stop all illegal activities related to it, as others have suggested.
"Your right though, giving kids hard drugs is fine as long as a doctor hands it to you in pill form. The problem is that we are discussing marijuana, and your gateway drug argument doesn't do enough to drag every single 'bad' thing on the planet into this conversation."

I have no idea where you are coming from on this one. I never once mentioned giving kids anything. Nor doctors.

The gateway theory, is that once you have done one drug, be it alcohol or pot, you are more likely to do other harder drugs. Maybe it's just the people I know, but all that did harder drugs all started out on pot. The ones that quit, or are trying to quit also all said that if they had not smoked pot, then they would never of tried the harder stuff.

jbunny wrote:The gateway theory, is that once you have done one drug, be it alcohol or pot, you are more likely to do other harder drugs. Maybe it's just the people I know, but all that did harder drugs all started out on pot. The ones that quit, or are trying to quit also all said that if they had not smoked pot, then they would never of tried the harder stuff.

Here's a statistic for you: The vast majority of young violent offenders play or have played violent video-games. Clearly, playing violent video-games leads to violence in real life. Further, the vast majority of rapists have watched porn. Porn makes you a rapist. Pretty much every criminal from here on out will have used the internet. Using the internet == You will become a criminal.


Or perhaps correlation doesn't equal causation. Who knows?

I have played violent video games from when I was 8 years old. I'm now 15 and I haven't done something wrong or hurt anybody. (except crossing when the lightsare red.)

jbunny wrote:
I am assuming you don't live in Alabama Tennessee, Kentucky, or Georgia? You can get moonshine just as easily as you can other drugs. WhileI assume as I know far more bootleggers than I know drug dealers.

That's 4 states, which does not constitute a 'vast majority' of 50.

jbunny wrote:
The gateway theory, is that once you have done one drug, be it alcohol or pot, you are more likely to do other harder drugs. Maybe it's just the people I know, but all that did harder drugs all started out on pot. The ones that quit, or are trying to quit also all said that if they had not smoked pot, then they would never of tried the harder stuff.

From a statistical point of view, the division of people into drug users, and non drug users forcibly increases the probability of drug use within the using population because the segment of the population not being considered has a use probability of zero.

In other words, because people that don't use drugs are necessarily self-sequestering with respect to the sample, any incidence of harder drugs use, at all, will increase the probability of hard drug use in the using population.

Dogma, please do not put words into my mouth. I never mentioned a vast majority or all 50 states. I stated the alcohol is legal, and that you can still get illegal alcohol. And yes if you live in those states, you can get it easier than some other drugs.

I also think you are missing the point of the "samples" From a statistical stand point you would seperate the population in to two groups. People that have used drugs, and those that have not. Drugs can be defined as narrow or wide as you wish for this stage.

Your new population would only consist of those that have used drugs. So when they say X% of users have tried harder drugs, the non-drug users are not effecting the percentages.

jbunny wrote:Dogma, please do not put words into my mouth. I never mentioned a vast majority or all 50 states. I stated the alcohol is legal, and that you can still get illegal alcohol. And yes if you live in those states

And I stated that the vast majority of states do not have a significant problem with illegal alcohol, which you countered with the above. It was only natural for me to respond by indicating that 4 states does not constitute the vast majority of states.

jbunny wrote:
I also think you are missing the point of the "samples" From a statistical stand point you would seperate the population in to two groups.

People that have used drugs, and those that have not. Drugs can be defined as narrow or wide as you wish for this stage.

Your new population would only consist of those that have used drugs. So when they say X% of users have tried harder drugs, the non-drug users are not effecting the percentages.

That's exactly the reason I gave for rejecting the relevance of those sorts of statistics. By dividing the population into users, and non-users you are creating a comparative population in which the probability of use is 0. Since users are defined by their use of drugs in general, they will be, by definition, more likely to use any drug than those that don't. The variance in probability is therefore created by definition, rather than by evidence.

Now, if we are to approach this as a matter of causation in which soft drugs are said to cause the use of hard drugs, then we have an altogether different problem that statistics regarding elementary use cannot solve. Instead, we must show that there is a compelling tendency for any given individual to use hard drugs because he tried something like marijuana, it isn't enough to show that they used hard drugs after the use of something like marijuana.

Legalize it?

Yup.

Cheese Elemental wrote:

Karon wrote:

helgrenze wrote:In Canada it is medically legalized. They have state controlled growers, it is graded and taxed and only sold through licensed pharmacies, which pay a fee for the license. If you get caught with untaxed (illegal) MJ, the confiscate your stash, test and grade it, tax and resell it. You also get a citation and have to pay a fine, no jail time unless you don't pay.
Some-one tell me where Canada is losing money on this.

This is the system I want in the U.S. Seriously.

I agree. Having it available for medical purposes (and requiring a prescription) would be great.

I was more pointing at the bolded part, actually, as that would allow me to be much lesser sneakier about it than I have to now.

Karon wrote:

Cheese Elemental wrote:

Karon wrote:

helgrenze wrote:In Canada it is medically legalized. They have state controlled growers, it is graded and taxed and only sold through licensed pharmacies, which pay a fee for the license. If you get caught with untaxed (illegal) MJ, the confiscate your stash, test and grade it, tax and resell it. You also get a citation and have to pay a fine, no jail time unless you don't pay.
Some-one tell me where Canada is losing money on this.

This is the system I want in the U.S. Seriously.

I agree. Having it available for medical purposes (and requiring a prescription) would be great.

I was more pointing at the bolded part, actually, as that would allow me to be much lesser sneakier about it than I have to now.

My point still stand. Its medical uses are obvious, but we don't need more drugs on the open market. Cigarettes and alcohol are quite enough, IMO.

I say no.

After working as a doctor at a public hospital mental health unit it causes psychosis and worsens schizophrenia at a frightening rate.

Frazzled wrote:

Fateweaver wrote:If they legalize marijuana than I have nobody to bust a cap in when drug deals go down in my neighborhood since it'll be legal for the growers to sell and the buyers to buy.

Who the feth will I use for target practice?

Revenuers?

In the dark future revenue agents fight vicious street battles with marijuana tax dodgers and illegal tobacco growers. Exciting sci-fi action with an Old West twist.

I want to make a miniatures game out of what is in Fraz's head.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Waaagh_Gonads wrote:I say no.

After working as a doctor at a public hospital mental health unit it causes psychosis and worsens schizophrenia at a frightening rate.

I know something about the chemistry of it professionally, but I can't debate the health effects with you on this because I don't have that level of training. However, I'd like to ask a couple questions.

Is your observation anecdotal or evidence based? Please note I'm not criticizing the use of observation by physicians. My father was an M.D. and I realize the importance of anecdotal evidence as a vital part of a physician's professional experience. I would like to know how your observations compare with the statistics.

You say it *causes* psychosis and *worsens* schizophrenia. In both cases, is it a case of causality or association? For instance, according to public health authorities in the U.S., somewhere around 70% of schizophrenics use ( mostly smoke ) tobacco ( I don't remember the exact numbers, but you should be able to get the source information on the CDC website). No evidence that I know of suggests that tobacco *causes* or indeed worsens schizophrenia. According to NAMI there is a correlation between mental illness and substance abuse in general.

BTW, I thought you were an OBGYN, did you do that in your residency?