Drunks vs Stoners

It's pretty difficult for most people to stay high on pot continuously. Four hours by ingesting it, maybe six hours by smoking it if you have several more hits every time you start to come down... for the average person that's just about it. If they doggedly keep trying beyond that they just get lethargic or even sleepy rather than being able to refresh the intoxication. It must have something to do with the need to regenerate endorphins, which is a common issue with some other drugs too.

Most adults can get a good high on grass about once a day and then they have to wait until tomorrow. Children--who knows? Their bodies work differently from ours and so do their minds, which, again, is the reason drugs should be a "rite of passage" like voting and driving and screwing and deciding whether to skip a class.

Yeah, we've all met the fellow who seems to be able to be high all the time--if only because he's so visible. Pick any quality and there are bound to be some one-percenters out there who are way beyond the bell curve.

But I think some of those people just get used to the mood and the attitude and the behavior and have learned how to do it even when they're not stoned. That's hardly remarkable. People discover musical nuances, artistic techniques, ways to have fun with their pets, philosophical insights, sexual tricks, even game strategies, when they're stoned, and they remember how to follow through with them later. So hanging onto behavior that's just plain goofy can't be much of a challenge.

Be careful about generalizing from one class of drugs to another. For a trivial example, would you say the same thing about caffeine? It's a highly psychoactive drug that tens of millions of people take every day and it does indeed change the behavior of a large percentage of them. (And turns me into a maniac.) Has the world gone to hell since Europe discovered coffee, tea and chocolate during its colonial era? Au contraire, it's been hypothesized that the introduction of coffee to Europe was one of the key changes that led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

It's certainly been argued that the widespread use of marijuana played a great role in the slow drift of American (and European) culture away from its previous stereotype of being ready to jump into every war it could reach. Notwithstanding Iraq (and Bush was more of a drunk than a stoner

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), foreigners are now complaining that we didn't send troops into Burma, the Congo, Tibet, Georgia, Darfur, etc.

But to get back to your tirade about the opiates, people this old geezer talked to a few decades ago who remembered when they were legal say you're wrong. A hundred years ago doctors and lawyers took morphine or even heroin regularly and then went out and did their jobs like everybody else. Cocaine was available in drugstores; my grandfather was a pharmacist and he sold it along with clean needles (people didn't snort in those days), clean and carefully measured doses, and instructions, and many professionals shot coke. (Or drank it in their Coca-cola.)

As I have noted elsewhere, based on the observations of people who were first-hand witnesses in earlier eras (including Prohibition, which "got women going to bars"), most of the problems we attribute to drugs are the second-order effects of their illegality and the predictable phenomena that accrue to a black market and a counterculture.

 

No. Assuming the mode is ingestion, the high comes on slowly and in order to avoid giving too much you'd start them with a small quantity. If it's too small you might just wait for the next time and adjust it instead of taking all night to get it right since it takes 30-60 minutes to get into the blood and in about 4 hours it starts to dissipate. Newbies can be hard to deal with even with the last-generation method of smoking or the new smokeless vaporizers. They might be nervous or paranoid, blocking the high, or they might have trouble loosening up enough to notice it.

And these are the anecdotes that everybody remembers. The other sixty million people who had no disasters or other ill effects are forgotten, while this one-percenter has a police record so our national drug policy is crafted for him.

I wish they'd keep a formal log of the dangerous and anti-social things people do while jacked up on caffeine. I'd rather share the commute with ten stoners than one tailgating lane-jumping horn-blasting finger-thrusting Starbucks junkie.

 

Many people have that experience--with many drugs. I knew a bunch of people who couldn't figure out what the big deal was about pot, as well as several who never once got off on LSD or mushrooms and thought cocaine was very mild and not worth the trouble. Drugs like alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and opium that affect nearly the entire population and have nearly the identical effect on all of them are small in number.

Marijuana induces a very healthy sense of paranoia, the reason the users cause so few road accidents.

As I mentioned earlier, anecdotal evidence consistently indicates that marijuana shaves off ten or more IQ points. That's why it's so popular among attorneys and engineers who can function that way and discover their artistic side when their logical side isn't ruling their lives. People who don't have ten IQ points to spare should not try pot except under the most controlled circumstances, and even then you have to ask why.

In a free market, if there's something people want, somebody will find a way to provide it. All you accomplish by pushing a popular commodity onto the black market is... well just look at the reports of life under Prohibition. Booze full of poisonous wood alcohol, prepared clandestinely by people willing to take the risk. Cops and DAs on the take. Prices through the roof. (With hard drugs the prices go so high that addicts can't afford them on their salaries so they turn to crime.) Gangsters making more money than honest businessmen, serving as alluring role models for children... who are recruited as runners because they're less likely to be prosecuted.

You can buy drugs in prison. You could by drugs in the Soviet Union. Clearly making sales illegal doesn't work, and the second-order effects of prohibition are ruinous.