What I *do* notice is that NONE of that has even any remote connection to MJ. It's all about xanax and nothing else. Sheesh!!!!:shrug:
"When I wake up in the morning, I just can't get started until I've had that first, piping hot pot of coffee. Oh, I've tried other enemas..." - Emo Philips
Yes there is a lovely pink elephant in my mind. Now there is not. It was a matter of recognizing the thought, and switching focus away from it.
Agreed. Anyone who has practiced the basics of meditation or other equivalent regimen of self control can shed that suggestion as quickly as they read it. I would hazard that most heroin is smoked these days, as it was way back when. It was not unheard of to line a joint with that before the final roll and twist. These days (according to NPR last Saturday) Mexican black tar heroin goes for "$6 a hit" in CA. The main customers are young folks who are hooked on Oxycontin or other codeine preparations and cannot afford those in the quantity they desire/need. Cannabis has a very good track record for health issues. In the 8,500 - 11,000 years humanity has been consuming it it has never killed a single person. Best estimates now are that it would take approximately 10 pounds eaten to kill a normal male human, disregarding the difficulty involved in consuming that much vegetable fibre at one sitting. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! All of the negative side effects of cannabis consumption appear to be related to the delivery system employed (smoking), if one disregards the transient paranoia. A note on said paranoia: the delta 9 thc is responsible for generating the paranoia. If the cannabis is harvested when ripe the higher CBD levels will cap that problem. Most hospital visits concerning cannabis are due to this problem. While disconcerting, the state of paranoia on its own is not harmful to the patient, though the resulting legal problems may well be so. Again, the real harm from drugs is the venue. Law enforcement is not the correct venue for us to be dealing with drugs. Health care would be far more appropriate from an ethical perspective and vastly more cost - effective from a practical viewpoint.
Oh yeah - a note on the probability of actually "being allergic" to cannabis: the active ingredients in cannabis are very similar to the endocannabinoids that your own body produces to engage those CB1 and CB2 receptors, so much so that an allergy to same would likely be fatal when the individual was still a newborn babe, long before he/she ever encountered cannabis. If someone breaks out into sneezing and related upper respiratory discomfort after smoking cannabis, they are likely reacting to the chemical and particulate content of the smoke proper rather than the cannabinoids that remain in the smoke. I have never even heard of someone breaking out into hives or rashes or other truly systemic reactions from such. Pollen reactions are highly unlikely as well, since it is only the male that generates said pollen and that is finished quite a while before the female has fully developed her flowers. Mold reactions from cannabis that has been stowed wet in the bottom of a boat for 6 months would set off mold allergies in sensitive individuals though. Again - folks should not inhale smoke from anything if they are concerned about their health and should hesitate before consuming anything that doesn't appear to be fit for same.
And again, the hazards of smoking pot are easily matched and surpassed by alcohol and tobacco, but even over the counter medications are killing people http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30 in competitive numbers. And then there's driving.
I believe that was Doreen's point. Xanax has this huge list of really scary and dangerous reactions, all of which have been reported by more than one percent of users, but it's legal and even advertised. I would hope that people are using vaporizers rather than actually smoking it, as they are increasingly doing with other drugs. Not only is it enormously safer not to inhale smoke, but NOT setting your expensive drug on fire, and trying to capture the few molecules in the smoke that escaped destruction by fire, is a much more economical way to manage your supply of it. In my day, Southeast Asian marijuana was sold as "Thai sticks," a bud literally wrapped and tied tightly around a bamboo stick or its own stem. It was rumored that they were dipped in opium, a believable premise since in those days the region rivaled Afghanistan as the world center of poppy agriculture. However, that should have been easy to test and I never heard of any test results. My Consumer's Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, still the bible on the subject for its scrupulously unbiased research, doesn't even mention Thai sticks, and they are shrill in their criticism of creating drug combinations that have not been tested and therefore can have unpredictable interactions. Ah, sweet nostalgia for the good old days when, by transferring opium to the black market, the shit-for-brains government was only supporting cruel communist despots, rather than the Taliban. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Today the term is used for a similarly packaged bud that has been soaked in hashish oil. The Mexican drug cartels can provide a universally banned illegal drug more cheaply than the American black market can divert legal drugs for non-prescription use??? That would be amusing if it weren't for the cartels' ruthless way of doing business. One would have to place a very low dollar value on the lives of Mexican citizens to maintain the illusion of cheaper heroin. The last I heard, based upon actuarial correlation of life insurance, wrongful death jury awards, public expenditures on safety, etc., the average American valued his life at seven million dollars. This was more than ten years ago so the figure is surely much higher today. Especially considering the more than one trillion dollars we have siphoned out of the economy to prevent another 3,000 lives being taken by terrorists. That's about 300 million dollars per life saved. It's generally considered fair to include second-order effects: deaths directly attributable to the impaired or aberrant behavior of people intoxicated on a drug. There is a steady stream of documented cases of people getting stoned and causing fatal accidents. But it's an extremely small stream noteworthy for its rarity, something like less than one per year IIRC. Unlike alcohol, marijuana does not create an illusion of improved motor skills, alertness and judgment, in concert with a desire to compete and show off. All but a tiny fraction of users experience an exaggerated sense of caution bordering on paranoia, often coupled with plain old lethargy. As with the nutrients locked sturdily within the cellulose of any plant tissue, marijuana must be cooked in order to break down the cell walls, before the THC is available for digestion. This brings in the problem that cooked marijuana does not merely taste like shit, it tastes much worse. It's normally baked into something sweet at a ratio of 25:1 or greater, to mask the taste. The cell walls can also be broken down by trauma, grinding them into dust in something like a coffee mill, but this doesn't solve the flavor problem. Note my earlier remark on these newfangled vaporizer thingies which, AFAIK, were invented in Holland, one of the beneficial effects of a legal market. As noted, vaporization is also reported to reduce the quantity of the drug used by an order of magnitude, and to virtually eliminate the smell. A significant percentage--some say more than 50%--of the cost and overcrowding problems in our prisons and the rest of our "justice" system is the prosecution of consenting adults for using, buying and selling drugs. An unconstitutional abuse of government power condoned by the worthless Supreme Court. The person I was referring to had ingested the marijuana in some sort of baked goods. She had a wheat allergy which she had not bothered to disclose--or even remember. You can't fix stupid, but you can make it worse. Road accidents are one of the top five causes of death everywhere on earth. Even in Iraq, where people are shooting each other, and even in Africa, where most people can't afford a car. In the first ten years of this millennium, 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. In the same decade, more than one hundred thousand were killed by drunk drivers. It has recently been discovered--with the loudest forehead-slapping DUH! ever recorded--that the reason for the high incidence of road deaths in the Third World is: Nobody there can afford an eye exam or glasses, so they can't see where they're going! The recent invention of cheap oil-filled lenses should change that. They allow the patient to administer his own eye test and set the correction permanently once he determines it. Warren Buffett or Bill Gates could send a pair to everybody in the Third World for about fifteen bucks each. That would probably increase the world's average life expectancy by five years!
Fraggle, thank you for clarifying my point about Xanax. I did think it was obvious, but apparantly not. As far as driving...of course many need to drive, to commute for example. But people drive for all sorts of unnecessary things, even when walking, mass transport or doing something else would be cheaper, even faster on occasion. Each time they do this they risk death. Which is, of course, their right. But they are taking more chance with their health, each time, then pot smokers are over long periods of pot use.
"Thai sticks", while reputed to have been packed in layers alternating with opium, were actually not, at least in my experience. The surprising potency of Thai sticks was the fact that they were actually cannabis sativa buds rather than the cannabis indica buds that most American cannabis consumers were used to at the time. There are about 66 active ingredients in cannabis, they act like flavour notes in a stew, modifying the stone by the quantity present. The Indica high is laid back, giggly, hungry and tending towards couchlock and a nap. The sativa high, however, is very energetic and clear by comparison. Sativa is commonly used by field workers doing hard labour under the hot sun all day. Indica is more commonly used to get very stoned just for fun. Powdered heroin would be difficult to vaporize due to the nature of the device. The most common vaporizers are called "hot box" vaporizers due to their appearance - a small wooden box that contains a heating element inside a Pyrex glass tube. A good example of these is the Vapor Brothers vaporizer, which costs about $150 US. The material to be vaporized sits on a screen within another Pyrex tube that is attached to a long plastic tube with a mouthpiece. This is called the whip. The whip end is placed against the heating tube and the consumer inhales the hot air through the material, past the screen. The screen retains the bulk of the material while allowing the active ingredients to be consumed. A more expensive type is the Volcano vaporizer, which costs about $500 US. It is a truncated conic appliance that sits on a table top. The material to be vaped is placed in a removable bowl with a screen bottom that sits on top of the base. An oven bag attached to a fitting is placed over the bowl and the device is turned on. A small air compressor blows air at a very precise 400 degrees F (the vaporization temperature of the cannabinoid oils) through the bowl filling the bag with the active ingredients. The bag is removed when full and the contents inhaled. Since heroin is a powder or a tar, it would need be adhered to something else in order to be used in a vaporizer. I don't think a real junkie would even own a vape, let alone want to mess around with it. A chipper might, but the psychologic set of a person that is actively desirous of consuming heroin has little regard for health and safety and will consume same in the usual manner. The active ingredients in cannabis are to be found in the trichome gland heads. Trichome glands appear late in the flowering cycle. They look like little mushrooms covering the flowers and the cola leaves and are clearly visible under 15X magnification. The 'mushroom caps' are spheres that contain the actual cannabinoids. Earlier on in flowering they contain delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabinoid precursors. As the plant matures the trichome gland heads produce cannabidiol and cannabinol - CBD and CBN, the 2 other major players in the set beyond D 9 THC. While the THC gets the user very high, it brings on paranoia. The CBD lowers the high a bit while extending it and removing the paranoia. The CBN is the cannabinoid that engages CB2 receptors for medicinal use. It also creates the 'couch lock' sleepiness commonly associated with the cannabis stone. Generally speaking, cannabis is not 'treated' with anything for several reasons. Firstly, it is expensive to do that. The cheapest cannabis in the US is always 'Mexi brick' - cannabis raised in Mexican fields, chopped down, pressed into kilogram bricks, wrapped in Saran Wrap and shipped to the US. It is usually stale and a bit moldy with a blah taste, poor texture and a lousy high. It usually contains a fair amount of dead insects as well. This because the farmer is paid for weight, so he leaves as much of the plants in as he can, doesn't cull the male plants (that contain very little active ingredient) packs the crop wet and doesn't harvest until the plants are fully seeded so he has seeds for the next years crop. It sells on the street for about $200 an ounce. Very infrequently someone in the supply chain will add something to it to try and make it better, but that adds cost and effort while not effecting the retail price, so it doesn't happen much. The more expensive cannabis is home grown or imported from Canada. It is generally grown from strain seed bought from professional cannabis breeders and is tailored to this type of contemporary grower. It produces plants that flower heavily, produce a lot of active ingredients and are raised in tightly controlled environments to optimize production. Males are culled so there are no seeds or bugs. Strains like AK 47, California Skunk and Bubblegum develop a reputation and a following. The price goes as high as $750 an ounce and the potency is so great that these need no enhancement. Hashish is made by separating the trichome gland heads from the balance of the plant and pressing them into cakes. Cheap Moroccan hashish is made by rubbing the flowers through a screen or beating bags full of female plants and then removing the resulting powder. Hash oil is made by soaking the bud in alcohol, then evaporating the liquid off or by venting butane through a tube full of cannabis flowers. When that evaporates it leaves only the cannabis oils. The butane treatment produces the purest extract, called BHO for Butane Honey Oil.
Doreen is a classic example of why there is no "mature" study on the subject. No offense to them but they aren't exactly impartial, and the evidence they are currently pointing to isn't on the actual subject. It's all "Apples and Oranges". i.e. "Apples are healthy because Oranges are Considerably more acidic than apples." The logic is fallacious, you can't weigh the benefits or side effects against one another because they should be weighed on their own merit. e.g. Tobacco is harmful. Is it more harmful than marijuana? Well thats all dependent on the dosing and the time period that a person consumes it. A heavy "pot" smoker that smokes it for years, is obviously going to suffer a more harmful effect than a person that only tried one cigarette in their lifetime. The main hazard in anything of course is "Abuse" and a persons own in ability to know when they've had too much. (Some people are suprisingly thick when it comes to this)
