People tell me that weed isnt addictive or even that bad for you. They say its natural and its the time of your life. I have been brought up to believe that all drugs are bad(except for the ones used in hospitals, ect...). If weed grows naturally isnt it also a herbal remedy? Lol. i seem stupid but im just curious.. First time experiences or knowledge is appricated. Thanks guys :m: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Weed isnt addictive, but the nicotine in the tobacco that people smoke it with is. Not alot of side effects from smoking weed, but there is paranoia and the dreaded munchies, and something about it effecting the way alpha waves in your brain Poppies grow naturally as well, does that make opium a herbal remedy?... yes i know that it once was... "Drugs are bad mmmkay?"
Generally speaking, marijuana is not addictive. At least, not physically so, but most anything can be psychologically addictive - gambling, sex, etc. Bad for you? Well, let's just say that it has none of the things that make tobacco so bad for you, but inhaling smoke of any kind should probably be considered bad for you. Herbal remedy... the Rastafarian faith interprets those biblical passages that refer to "herb" as marijuana, which is why ganja is a big part of that religion to many Rastas. If you've been brought up to believe that all drugs are bad, then you need to question your upbringing. Drugs that cure diseases are clearly not bad, right? And I would hope that Morphine would be considered bad when given to (for example) a burn victim. From there, it's not much of a stretch to the glaucoma victim whose only relief comes from marijuana, so marijuana can not and should not be considered bad. But what about when drugs are not used in response to medical conditions? What does your upbringing say about beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages? Alcohol is certainly a drug - AND it's legal for recreational use (provided age restrictions are met.) But UNLIKE marijuana, I've never known anyone to become violent and beat the shit out of his wife and kids after a few bong hits. The day SHOULD come when marijuana is no longer legal. It's detriments pale in comparison to alcohol, and it's benefits are many.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Are you suggesting that people mix tobacco with pot when they smoke it?! Paranoia? I don't think so. I suppose it might heighten such tendencies if they preexist, but I've known MANY habitual pot smokers, and few (if any) of them were paranoid. This is just lingering hype from the "Reefer Madness" smear campaign.
Mary Jane, Wacky Tobacky, Left-handed cigarette... Weed's not necessarily addictive, it can be habit forming. But so is scratching your nuts. It affects people differently. Some people do become addicted in that when they don't have it, all they can think of is getting some, and they're assholes until they do. On the health effects, I say it's better than tobacco because there's no additives, but inhaling burning smoke is sure to be bad for you. Also, you don't smoke as much as cigarettes. The main reason people say pot is bad is the "gateway drug" theory. Which is a load of crap. If you look at it one way, beer or cigarettes is the first drug people take so why aren't they blamed for leading to heroin or whatever? Legality? That's the crux of the issue. When you smoke pot, you're breaking the law. You start to identify yourself with criminals and a criminal mentality. If you can go to prison for smoking a joint, why not try a line, or shoot up some meth? If marijuana were not classified as a "drug" like these others are then the gateway effect would be lessened greatly. I like pot, but I'm not completely sold on it's "healthful" side effects. It does have effect on glaucoma (reducing pressure inside the eye) and nausea and pain from chronic illness, but the medical marijuana activists would have us believe that it cures everything from leprosy to the common cold. I don't think so. And I personally don't care to smoke pot all day every day. I know people who light joint after joint, bowl after bowl. What's the point? You'll smoke yourself sober at one point. You're wasting weed and your time. I generally just like to take a few hits and catch a good rush and then wait til later. Of course, I come from a land of killer stinky green. It's not as good as used to be thanks to the Canadian crap we're inundated with. Why can't you canucks grow decent pot? Actually I've heard they keep the best for themselves. Sometimes they'll shake the crystals off to make hash and sell the worthless scag left over. And also have a theory that they breed it specifically to smell like hay to pass border checkpoints. What's with all the drug threads? That's three so far. I think the main drugs have been covered. I guess the only one left really is hallucinagenics. And of course pharmaceuticals.
You're from Europe aren't you. Sick bastards. That's just nasty. I've heard that they do it because they overfertilize their shit and the tobacco mellows it out. In the states, we have the hip hop culture pushing "blunts" on the idiotic youth. Stupid idea. Takes forever to roll and is not worth the effort in any way.
Marijuana itself is not addictive, however the effects it has on the mind can be. But, as with anything, any addiction is purely psychological. Marijuana is not as bad as most substances. Yes, it does have some harmful effects, but not to the degree of cocaine, meth, or even alcohol in many instances. I completely support the campaigne to legalize marijuana granted that age restrictions are placed and enforced.
I'm not sure anyone mentioned it... but there's another thing marijuana affects... what was it again? oh, right... short term memory Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You can suffer losses in the memory department. So wait, someone enlighten me here; in America (and other places outside Europe) you DON'T put tobacco in joints?? Weeird.
Is there any proof that marijuana affects short term memory? For that matter, is there any proof that it kills brain cells? If anyone has found any I would appreciate see it.
No. And when we catch a bartender watering down our drinks, we wait 'til his shift ends, catch him out back and kick the crap out of him! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
People say a lot of things. Sometimes it's from their own experience, but often it's because of what other people have told them. You seem pretty young. I'd advise you to get a perspective from some older people who have had more time to judge and who have the maturity to interpret their experiences. If you are young, say under 18 but certainly under 16, I would say that there's a very good chance that weed will be bad for you. Personally I think it's one of those things where the age of 21 is a pretty good delimiter, even though these days nobody takes that kind of advice seriously. It can really change your mood and your attitude. Temporarily of course, but young people don't have the time sense that older people are supposed to have. (And admittedly not all of them do.) It can make things that really are important (like homework, relationships, ambition) seem unimportant. When you're older you usually develop enough discipline to be able to "see through" a high and understand that, for example, you still have to let the dog out before you pass out even though it feels so nice to turn into a mushroom on the sofa. If you're older than I think you are, then people are right, it's very unlikely that it will have any bad effect on you. In my studied opinion after living through 60 years, I'd say pot is less harmful to people than caffeine -- much less alcohol or tobacco. I'd rather share the freeway with a pot smoker who is going 35 in the slow lane watching out for cops, than a finger-waving, white-knuckled Starbucks junkie who wants to get to work five minutes sooner than me. But the people who are telling you it's not addictive are basically right. Anything can be habit-forming if you enjoy it enough, but that's not the same thing. The withdrawal symptoms of giving it up cold turkey even after being a spliff burner of Rastafarian magnitude are by all accounts very mild, no worse than a bad day at school or work. As for health, well duh, as you kids say, smoking anything is really bad for you. There are lots of other ways to get it in your body. Most people are too lazy or too impatient to grind it into dust and then bake it into brownies or soak it in 180 proof rum for a couple of weeks. And apparently eating it just doesn't give you a rush, it comes on quite slowly and you have to take quite a bit to get high at all and then you'd better be prepared to be loaded for four to six hours. There are some new devices that vaporize it without making smoke. I don't know how easy they are to get, but inhaling it seems to me to be the way to get high fast and not stay high all night, if you can just avoid the carcinogens in smoke. I have seen exactly one person have an absolutely horrible reaction to marijuana the first and only time she tried it. So it does happen, don't think it's impossible. She spent two days in the psych ward before they let her go home. There are lots of people who tried it, even tried hard because they really wanted the experience that their friends were having, and it just didn't work on them. No bad trip, just a mild buzz that felt like being slightly drunk when they didn't want to be. So it isn't for everyone. And there are just plenty of people, especially of my generation who came of age during the 1960s, who did it and then stopped. Not because anyone made them, but just because they don't feel like doing it any more. I suggest you take that as a positive sign, it means that not only is it not addictive, but that most of the people who use it eventually stop of their own accord. But it also means that most people seem to reach a point where it doesn't give them what they want anymore. If you come to rely on it, it can betray you. Anyway, quite a few of the responsible adults you see holding down good jobs, raising families, paying the mortgage, going to church, keeping their relationships together and mowing the lawn, used to be pot smokers. So don't believe the bullshit you hear in the D.A.R.E. lectures about "gateway drugs". But the difference between them and the former pot smokers who are still working at McDonald's, in my own opinion and observation, is that the people who waited until they were older before they started didn't get into trouble. A lot of kids got high in high school and that's all they got. They graduated because anybody can graduate these days, but they didn't learn anything, and they developed a really warped sense of priorities from spending too much time in their heads instead of in reality. I guess what I'm saying is that there will be plenty of bad times you want to escape from when you're a grownup with a job. If you start escaping now, it's a bad habit to get into. When really hard times hit, what you gonna do then? You need to learn to face adversity while you're still young and your brain and emotions are developing, so that when you're older you won't cave in the first time something crappy happens to you. Sorry for the bummer talk, but hey, that's what us "elders" are around for. I've been through plenty of crap but my life is still really great. And I didn't have any drugs available when I was a kid. You decide whether the correlation is significant. There are no absolutes in life -- including this one of course. That's just an absurd statement and you should regard it as a lesson that not all your elders have their heads on straight. Only the Mormons, who don't even drink cola, come close to living an "all drugs are bad" lifestyle. You've probably been drinking caffeine for years, and as I said, I honestly believe it's more harmful than pot. I personally have to avoid it like the plague, I'm extremely sensitive to it. It has been used as an herbal remedy by many pre-modern societies. The Yaqui Indians used it as a spiritual thing, to get them in touch with a part of themselves that was elusive. They didn't make it a habit, just smoked it a few times until they found the route into that special part of their souls, and from then on they could do it without help. Other peoples have used it as an analgesic or anasthetic. A lot of people find that it's a great reliever of withdrawal symptoms from other drugs. If more alcoholics would reach for a reefer instead of a bottle when they wake up with a headache, a lot of them could break the habit. Maybe they'd be potheads but that's a whole lot better for them and us than being drunks. It's a lot easier to "cure" somebody of liking grass too much than it is to get them off the sauce. No, you don't seem stupid. You're just the victim of a lot of really stupid propaganda that has been thrown at you since you were probably in the second grade. Consider this: The only thing potheads want to spend money on is food and CDs. If everybody in America got high, the malls would go out of business. That's the real reason they don't want people discovering marijuana. I got all this from my friend Zeke. I don't have any actual experience myself.
I think people with "addictive personalities" become addicted to weed. Frankly, I think it is a heel of a lot better than smoking cigarettes. It at least has a purpose- to make you high. You can grow differrent kinds of weed to get different types of highs and different tastes. http://www.everyonedoesit.com/ has differnt seeds and filatration techniques. Really, when I take weed, I usually eat it. It cuts out all the smoke that will cloud my lungs. Weed kills less braincells than alcohol. The forst time I took weed, I was drunk, so I don't remember. It is dangerous to take other druge when you are drunk because that is where the dealers hit you with super-powerful addictive drugs. The same happened to me. I overcame it, some can't. You are not stupid for wondering. I never really found out all the stuff about drugs and alcohol until I was addicted. You seem younger, so I don't suggenst taking drugs at all. when you are younger, you usually have a short supply of money and you always have to "hide stuff". wait until you have completed school and are in a career. Then you can afford to lose a few brain cells. I find that the schools and information programs make the young people "scared" of drugs. When we became older, we felt that we could conquer any fear. Then we tooks drugs. Really, weed isn't all it's cracked up to be (excuse the pun). It is costly, and for most people, it doesn't give much more of a high than a load of tylenol and sleeping pills and caffeine at once. Wait until you are older, grow your own. If you do it, do it right. Eat it. Weed isn't great, it is just glorified be rockstars and older "cooler" people. Words of advice: Don't smoke, if you are going to smoke, eat weed instead, weed has a purpose, amoking is just purposeless and stupid.
yeah, it's the smoking it part thats really bad. It's really hard to find good data on the effects of it beyond that though. I suspect it'd be pretty hard to get funding for a good study on that in today's political climate.
So amne people smoke weed. Professionals, most teens I know, my teachers, co-workers, co-athletes. We like our little THC. Really, smoking is bad. Just eat it, as I said before. I ts a good drug because it is hard to overdose on it. I have never heard of anyone going to the hospital because of a weed overdose. If you eat it, it can be considered a "safe" drug. The effects wil stay, no matter how often you take it. You can build a slight tolerance, but you can still get high. THat is not what happens for most other drugs.
Why not just call a pulmonologist at your local hospital and ask them what the effects of long term pot smoking is. I'm certain they won't say it is harmles to your lungs. True, tobbaco is many times worse but anything that you inhale deeply and hold deep inside your lungs just isn't any good. Again please reference a pulmonologist to clarify exactly the problems pot smoking develops.
I think we've established that smoking it is detrimental to your health. Then again a 5 year old could guess that, it's the effects of it beyond smoking that is still largely unknown.
Um, I'm not sure those two statements are compatible. Yes it is nigh onto impossible to overdose on smoked marijuana. The effect goes to your head quickly, almost before you can take the next toke. The most common effect of smoking too much weed is falling asleep. That automatically makes you stop smoking so it's a built-in overdose preventive. You don't get that if you're eating it. In fact, you need to calibrate your dose very carefully for a few times before you get it right. (Again, this is information my friend Zeke kindly provided after years of selfless experimentation for the good of humanity.) It takes anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes before you start feeling anything, and then it keeps building for another hour or more until you peak. If you didn't eat enough you just won't feel as high as you wanted to. Bummer, but it's OK because at least you've done no harm. But if you ate too much, you feel it coming on and it keeps getting stronger until you say oh crap I did too much and there's nothing I can do about it now. If it's a moderate overdose you'll just fall asleep within a half hour or so. But if you really blew it, you can get a really bad trip, in fact this is just about the only way anybody I ever heard of got a really bad trip on ganja. Your blood sugar doesn't drop fast enough so you don't fall asleep, but you feel really disoriented, out of touch with your body, perhaps even unable to get up and walk around. No, I never heard of anyone going to the hospital because of these symptoms, but then there are a lot of potheads I didn't know personally. I can't vouch for all their experiences. Be forewarned that when you eat dope it's a slow, gradual high, and if you ate too much you won't know until an hour or two later when it's too late. If I were there when it happened I'd probably tell you to start eating, especially sweets. It's an easy urge to get when you're stoned, although you might need to have your food handed to you if you can't stand up. The effect on your blood sugar should calm your brain down to match your body's immobility and you'll feel less stressed out and probably sleepy. I said "probably" because I'm no doctor and I ain't promising you this will work. As I mentioned, I saw someone go to the looney bin the first time they tried it. And it was indeed eating, not smoking. If they'd smoked, they probably would have felt it coming on and stopped before it got so bad. It's hard to say what's an overdose on someone's first try. Some people get high off one toke, others can smoke half a jay by themselves. Yes, no lung or throat cancer, no coughing. But the possibility of overdosing on an ingested dose must not be overlooked. Be very careful the first time you try pot, take it among people who are experienced with it and have dealt with other first-timers, and I would urge you to just smoke it the first time. You won't get lung cancer from smoking it once, and it will minimize the chance of an O.D. because you happen to be especially sensitive to it. Or allergic to something in it, these things do happen, trust me I've seen it. Yes, that is one of the things people like about it. You don't find yourself needing a bigger dose every time until you're spending your entire paycheck on it. Another advantage over other drugs, at least the way most people report it, is that there's a limit to how high you can get for how long. When you start to come down, it's very difficult to get back up again. And if you manage to do it, there's no way you'll make it a third time. So it's damn near impossible to just stay high, the way people can stay drunk or stay coked or stay zoned out on hard drugs. If you get loaded when you get up in the morning, long before dinner time you will be sober and you simply won't be able to get high again until the next day. That's very helpful for several reasons, including the fact that you are finally both able and willing to take care of all the business you were putting off all morning. Yeah, some people (mostly in Jamaica) have found ways to stay zonked for longer periods, but it seems to involve setting a whole ounce of herb on fire and breathing the smoke until it goes out. I'm just so unutterably happy for them, but If that's the path to meeting Jah, I'm just as glad I'm an atheist.
Sometimes people experience anxiety attacks from pot. By anxiety attack, I don't mean getting paranoid and thinking everyone is out to get you or anything. An anxiety attack is basically like a major head rush. White spots dancing in front of your eyes, passing out and doing the fish. It's happened to me twice when I was young (not actually doing the fish, but I've seen that in others). Strangely enough, both times were with my older brother. I embarrassed the hell out of him and he said he'd never get me high again. Of course, he didn't stick to that promise. I don't know what caused it. Lack of oxygen to the brain would be my guess. For years, I didn't connect it to anxiety attacks, I didn't know what they were. Then I worked with a guy that suffered anxiety attacks and was on medication for them. I saw him fall prey to them a couple of times and heard his description of what they felt like. They sounded exactly like my experiences. Marijuana is also known to increase heart rate, which can be good or bad depending on circumstances. You made a good point about age Fraggle. I don't think that children should be getting high. I started at 16, that seems like a goodly age to me, but it might have been better to wait a few years. Nowadays, kids are starting at 12 or even younger. Their brains aren't even close to being fully developed and I feel their stunting their mental growth. An interesting concept on pot and the couch potato syndrome. I've worked with several Mexicans who smoke pot and it makes them work harder. In fact, they smoke pot specifically to let them work harder than if they weren't high. It's a cultural thing. I've also noticed that if you work outside in the elements, a good bowl is just the thing to take the edge off of being pissed on all day by mother nature.
The only real bad thing you have to look out for in regards to marijuana is due to all the crap they lace it with these days. You'll have some crack in there and other bad shit. :\ - N
